Archery is a sport with a low risk of injury

The summary today

The answer depends on how risk is measured, and it always has. The earliest study in the bibliography, from 1971, points the other way: in the thirty kyudo practitioners examined in depth there is overuse damage at the elbow and shoulder, and the authors also explain why the count stays low elsewhere, given that only a quarter of the sample had seen a doctor and those complaints do not interfere with daily life. In 2016 almost half of two hundred and thirty-nine Florida archers report at least one injury caused by shooting, and in 2017, among a hundred and fifty-six Indian competitors whose shoulders were examined, more than half are in pain on the day of the survey and more than four in five have had shoulder pain at some point. From 2018 the results on archers split: among sixty-two European competitors the injuries are mild and the acute ones almost always come from a piece of equipment breaking, yet more than half have had at least one overuse injury in their career, and the rate per hour of shooting that study calculates rests on a total of hours that does not square with the volumes reported. Among two hundred elite youth archers, half report training-related pain lasting more than three months. The two measures do not meet: severity is low, how often complaints appear is high. The figures that spread the idea of a safe sport, the 2021 ranking across sports and the 2023 emergency department data, do not measure risk: the first repeats the rate from the 2018 study, the second counts hospital visits rather than hours shot.

Also phrased as: "is archery a safe sport"; "archery injury risk"; "do archers get injured"; "archery injury rate"

Evidence

• 1971
  Against Kyudo archers Published later

  An orthopaedic survey of 122 kyudo practitioners, with clinical and radiographic examination of the 30 most marked cases: elbow symptoms in about half of those 30 and shoulder symptoms in a third, elbow osteochondromatosis in 4 cases on the radiographs, supraspinatus calcification, a callus on the left thumb in almost all of them, low back pain from erector overload in 10 cases and radicular signs in 5. The data are from 1971, the sample is older on average and there is no comparison group, but this is documented overuse damage.

  An orthopaedical analysis of the kyudo athlete · Masanobu Tomizawa, Hitoshi Furuya, Sadayoshi Toriyama, Tadahiko ONO

• 1971
  Context Kyudo archers Published later

  In the same sample only 25% of the 122 practitioners had consulted a specialist, and the same share did a warm-up and complementary exercises; the authors explain the low demand for care by the fact that such repeated micro-trauma rarely interferes with everyday activities. This is the line that explains why counts based on medical care understate the problem.

  An orthopaedical analysis of the kyudo athlete · Masanobu Tomizawa, Hitoshi Furuya, Sadayoshi Toriyama, Tadahiko ONO

• 2013
  Context Archers Published later

  A clinical case report: a 28-year-old elite archer with weakness, a dull ache in the shoulder, reduced grip strength and reduced sensation in the ulnar nerve territory at full draw, where angiography shows the cross-section of the subclavian artery reduced to 40%. After first rib resection with a clavicle osteotomy he was back shooting at four months and competing at eight, and three and a half years on he was working as a coach with no complaints. It is a single case: it says that the full-draw position can compress the structures of the thoracic outlet, not how often that happens.

  Case Report: Thoracic Outlet Syndrome in an Elite Archer in Full-draw Position · Jin Young Park, Kyung Soo Oh, Hyun Yul Yoo, Jun Gyu Lee

• 2016
  Against Archers Published later

  239 archers from north-central Florida, competition and club level, mean age 31.7: 43.5% report at least one injury caused by shooting, 57.6% among the women and 35.3% among the men. The data are self-reported, from one geographical area, and this is a conference abstract, so without the methodological detail of a full paper.

  Prevalence And Characteristics Of Archery-related Injuries In Archers · Bryan Prine, Amanda Prine, Trevor Leavitt, Joseph Wasser, Heather K. Vincent

• 2017
  Against Archers Published later

  156 Indian competitive archers (91 men and 65 women, mean age 20.3, 4.3 years in the sport) at the 2013 inter-university tournament, with an interview and a clinical examination of both shoulders: 54.4% have shoulder pain at the time of the survey, 82.69% have had it at some point and for 64.74% it is pain that keeps coming back. Among the 85 in pain, for one in five it does not clear between sessions and gets in the way of shooting. The authors state explicitly that the finding runs against the idea of a safe sport; it is a cross-sectional survey and counts complaints, not hours of practice.

  Prevalence of Shoulder Pain in Competitive Archery · Jasleen Kaur Grover, Akhoury Gourang Kumar Sinha

• 2018
  For Archers Published later

  62 competitive archers, retrospective questionnaire: 58 injuries over their careers, none of them severe according to the authors (although 30% of the overuse injuries were rated moderately severe), and 59% reported at least one overuse injury. The rate per hour of shooting, which the authors place among the lowest ever measured, rests on a stated exposure of 10,818,080 hours, more than 170,000 hours per archer: an implausible figure, so that rate is not reliable.

  Acute and Overuse Injuries in Elite Archers · Claudia K. Niestroj, Volker Schöffl, Thomas Küpper

• 2021
  Context Review Published later

  A scoping review of thirty-three Olympic sports, 1,022 titles screened and 162 read in full: among the twelve disciplines with data per thousand hours, archery has the lowest rate (0.00536, against 65.0 for the marathon), but the figure comes from a single study, Niestroj 2018, and inherits its implausible exposure. The same review notes that at the 2016 Rio Games archery was among the sports with the lowest share of injured athletes, between zero and three per cent against eight per cent overall and thirty-eight per cent for BMX; that the ranking across sports changes with the metric, since the three measures used cover twelve, thirteen and four disciplines and archery is lowest only in the one per thousand hours; and that for ten sports out of thirty-three no published incidence data exist at all.

  Epidemiology of Musculoskeletal Injuries in Adult Athletes: A Scoping Review · Francesca Gimigliano, Giuseppina Resmini, Antimo Moretti, Milena Aulicino, Fiorinda Gargiulo, Alessandra Gimigliano, et al.

• 2022
  Context Review Published later

  Narrative review in Serbian that sets the low rate reported by Niestroj alongside a lifetime prevalence of shoulder pain of 82.69% in 156 Indian archers (Grover and Sinha 2017).

  Specifičnosti povreda u streličarstvu · Đorđe Redža

• 2023
  Context Archers Published later

  US emergency departments from 2013 to 2022: about 43,000 archery-related visits, mostly finger cuts (12.7% were fractures in men), all treated and discharged according to the authors; with no data on hours of practice, no rate can be calculated.

  Archery-Related Musculoskeletal Injuries: An Epidemiological Study Revealing Injury Sites, Risk Factors, and Implications for Prevention · Meghana Konda, Rohan Mangal, Anjali Daniel, Thor S. Stead, Latha Ganti

• 2023
  For General population Published later

  The United States emergency department surveillance database from 2013 to 2022, weighted national estimates: 43,083 archery-related injuries over ten years, an average of about 4,308 a year, that is about one sports injury in seven hundred and forty among the 3.2 million treated each year (the article writes one in six hundred and seventy, which does not follow from its own two numbers). Small numbers in absolute terms, but without hours of practice they do not become a rate, and the population includes recreational and hunting use.

  Archery-Related Musculoskeletal Injuries: An Epidemiological Study Revealing Injury Sites, Risk Factors, and Implications for Prevention · Meghana Konda, Rohan Mangal, Anjali Daniel, Thor S. Stead, Latha Ganti

• 2024
  Against Archers Published later

  200 archers aged 13 to 20 at the European Youth Championships: 50.5% reported persistent training-related pain, 52.3% had used physiotherapy and 31.8% had had to stop training.

  Injuries and Persistent Pain in Elite Adolescent Archery Athletes: A Cross-Sectional Epidemiological Study · Nikolaos Vasilis, Athanasios Kyriakides, George Vasilopoulos, Maria Chatzitimotheou, Grigorios Gonidakis, Athanasios Kotsakis, et al.

• 2025
  Context Archers Published later

  A series of six patients with arrow wounds to the head and neck in Bhutanese traditional archery, treated at a national referral hospital and serious enough to need specialist surgery. It is a conference abstract: no incidence data, no account of how the wounds happened, and no distinction between those shooting and those standing by.

  International Session 29 AI · Chair: Seiichi Yoshimoto, Tetsuji Sanuki

• 2025
  For General population Published later

  Ten years of paediatric eye trauma at two Indianapolis hospitals, 147 sport-related cases out of 1,290 eye injuries: baseball 57 cases (38.8%), basketball 25 (17.0%), football 22 (15.0%), while archery falls into the residual category of other sports, twelve cases in all (7.5%), with two cases in which visual acuity is recorded. In the comparison across sports archery sits far behind, but the denominator of how many children practise each one is missing.

  An Analysis of Ocular Trauma Resulting From Pediatric Sports Injuries · Aysha Chaudhary, Evan Carr, Frank Bogan, Jeffrey Liu, Amir Hajrasouliha

• 2025
  Context General population Published later

  In the two archery cases with recorded visual acuity the initial loss was serious, 20/63 on average, and had recovered to 20/15 at follow-up; one of the two had a posterior pole lesion. Two cases say nothing about frequency, but they are a reminder that when the eye is struck the possible damage is not mild.

  An Analysis of Ocular Trauma Resulting From Pediatric Sports Injuries · Aysha Chaudhary, Evan Carr, Frank Bogan, Jeffrey Liu, Amir Hajrasouliha

Status history

1. 1971 Contradicted The earliest evidence in the bibliography points the other way: in the thirty kyudo practitioners examined in depth there are overuse lesions at the elbow and shoulder, with elbow osteochondromatosis on the radiographs and low back pain with radicular signs. The same study explains why the count stays low elsewhere, given that such complaints rarely take anyone to a doctor and do not interfere with daily life. With the picture available that year there is no study of archers in favour and one against, so the sentence about a low-risk sport does not hold up. This is the weakest form of that status, because the sample is small, it is kyudo only and nobody measures risk per hour of practice.
2. 2013 Contradicted The first documented case of serious harm tied to the shooting position itself arrives: a twenty-eight-year-old elite archer whose shoulder vessels and nerves were compressed at full draw, who had surgery and was back in competition eight months later. It is a single case and measures no risk, so it moves nothing: the only study on archers that counts is still the 1971 one, which goes against the claim, and the status stays contradicted.
3. 2016 Contradicted The second sample, two hundred and thirty-nine Florida archers from competition and club level, finds that almost half report at least one injury caused by shooting. There are now two studies on archers against the claim and none in favour, but they are not enough to rule it out: one is a 1971 survey with no comparison group, the other a conference abstract with self-reported data, and neither measures risk per hour of practice. They count how often complaints appear, not the risk carried by an arrow shot, so the status stays contradicted.
4. 2017 Contradicted A third sample points the same way as the first two, and combines questions with a clinical examination of the shoulders: among a hundred and fifty-six Indian competitive archers more than half are in shoulder pain on the day of the survey, more than four in five have had it at some point, and for one in five of those in pain it persists between sessions and gets in the way of shooting. The authors write that the finding runs against the idea of a safe sport. It is the strongest of the three, but it is still a cross-sectional survey, with no other sport for comparison and no hours of practice: three studies against and none in favour show that complaints are common, not that the risk is high, and the status stays contradicted.
5. 2018 Contested Here the first result in favour arrives: among sixty-two European competitors the injuries are mild and the acute ones almost always come from a piece of equipment breaking. The same study reports, though, that 59% have had at least one overuse injury in their career, and the rate per hour of shooting it calculates rests on a total of hours that does not square with the volumes reported. From now on the studies on archers point in opposite directions, because the three earlier samples said the opposite: the status moves to contested, and this is the first year in which the claim has anything in its favour.
6. 2021 Contested A review across thirty-three Olympic sports repeats the 2018 rate and places archery last among the twelve disciplines measured per thousand hours, against the sixty-five injuries of the marathon, and adds that at the 2016 Rio Games archery was among the sports with the lowest share of injured athletes, between zero and three per cent against eight per cent overall. The same authors warn, though, that the ranking changes with the metric chosen. Behind the figure sits the same 2018 sample, so no new evidence arrives and the status stays contested.
7. 2023 Contested The first measurement on large numbers arrives: ten years of United States emergency department data, about forty-three thousand archery-related visits, a little over four thousand a year, about one in every seven hundred and forty visits for sports injuries, all treated and discharged according to the authors. It points the same way as the claim, but the denominator is missing, the hours or the arrows, so no rate can be derived and the split between severity and frequency remains: the status holds.
8. 2024 Contested Two hundred elite youth archers at the European Youth Championships widen the split: half report training-related pain lasting more than three months, more than half have used physiotherapy and almost a third have had to stop training. This measure looks at how often complaints appear, where the 2018 study looked at severity, and the two still do not meet: the status stays contested.
9. 2025 Contested Two clinical records add the rare and severe side without moving the status: in Bhutanese traditional archery, arrow wounds to the head and neck are treated surgically at a national referral centre, and among ten years of paediatric eye trauma at two United States hospitals archery falls into the residual category, far behind baseball, basketball and football. Neither has a denominator, so they stay as context and the split between severity and frequency does not close.

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Research lines

• 25 studiesArchery injuries: what research has measured since 1971
• 28 studiesThe archer's shoulder: pain, injury and recovery

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