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In expert kyudo archers breathing follows a fixed pattern even when they only imagine or watch the shot, in less experienced ones it does not

1 study · 15 archers measured

ForContextAgainst1970198019902000201020201964, for, n = 151964, context, n = 15
Each circle is a study: its position gives the year, its row whether it is for, against or context, its size how many participants it measured. Light circles are studies on other populations or without archers.

There is a single study, Japanese, from 1964, and it concerns kyudo. Fifteen students from the Nagoya University club, four graded archers and eleven with less experience, imagined their own shot with eyes closed and then watched a film of a master, with breathing recorded by a tube resting on the chest. In the graded archers the imagined shot ended with a slow exhalation of four or five seconds; watching the master, one of them stopped breathing in from just before the draw until zanshin, with a 14-second exhalation that was identical on all four shots in the film, and the authors extend the finding to the other graded archers in a single sentence. In the less experienced the breathing changed, markedly in seven of the eleven, but with no fixed timing or shape. The limitation lies in the conditions: nobody was actually shooting, there were four graded archers, the traces were compared by eye with no statistics, and the question has never been measured in recurve or compound.

Also phrased as: "breathing in archery"; "the same breath on every arrow"; "breathing routine"; "breathing in kyudo"; "exhaling through the draw"

In practice

Archers are taught to tie their breathing to the phases of the shot and to do it the same way every time: breathe in during the set-up, let part of the air go during the draw and hold until the release, because a breath that changes from one arrow to the next drags the shot along with it.

Evidence

Status history

  1. 1964 Reported The first and so far only data come from kyudo. Fifteen students from a Japanese university club imagine their own shot and then watch a master shoot four times, while a tube on the chest records their breathing. In the four graded archers the imagined shot ends with a slow exhalation of four or five seconds, and in one of them, watching the master, inhalation disappears from just before the draw until zanshin, with a 14-second exhalation that is the same on all four shots. In the eleven less experienced the breathing changes with no fixed timing or shape. It counts as evidence on archers, because kyudo practitioners count as such, but it rests on fifteen people, with no statistics, no shot actually performed and only in kyudo: reported is as far as it can go.

Related

Related articles

Research lines

Cite
APA

Campagna, M. (2026). In expert kyudo archers breathing follows a fixed pattern even when they only imagine or watch the shot, in less experienced ones it does not (Version 2). In Evidence Registry. Retrieved 16 October 2026, from https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/technique/expert-archers-fixed-breathing-pattern

BibTeX
@misc{campagna2026_respirazioneschemafissoesperti,
  author = {Campagna, Matteo},
  title = {In expert kyudo archers breathing follows a fixed pattern even when they only imagine or watch the shot, in less experienced ones it does not},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {Evidence Registry, matteocampagna.com},
  url = {https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/technique/expert-archers-fixed-breathing-pattern},
  note = {Version 2; accessed 2026-10-16}
}

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