"How long should I hold?" is one of the questions I am asked most often, and whoever asks it usually expects a number. Research does not give one. Measured aims last a few seconds: in the largest sample, sixteen young recurve archers timed over 576 arrows at 70 metres, the average was 3.32 seconds, with some arrows leaving after little more than half a second and others after ten. Whether a long hold costs points is another matter, and the studies do not agree: some find the worst arrows after the longest aims, others find the opposite, and in elite archers the link changes direction from one person to the next.
On other points the data at least lean the same way, even if they rest on few studies. In the last seconds before the release the aim tightens, and it is at its smallest in the final one; the two 2007 world champions had an aim that the round of the tournament neither lengthened nor shortened, even though he aimed for three or four seconds and she for one; and the time allowed in competition, in the only study that looked at it, was enough for every experienced archer. That leads to a working rule more useful than any ideal window: know your own duration and try to repeat it, rather than chasing someone else's.
How long the aim lasts, when measured
Aiming time usually means the interval between anchor and release, but each study cuts it in its own way: some start from anchor, some from full draw, some count only the time the sight spends on the target. Durations therefore compare well within a study and poorly from one study to another. All the measurements, though, are in the order of seconds. In the sixteen young recurve archers at 70 metres the aim was the longest phase of the shot, 3.32 seconds on average in a cycle of just over ten, and in four elite Turkish women archers the sight stayed on the target for 3.6 or 3.7 seconds, whatever the arrow went on to score. The split you often hear, a second to draw and one or two to aim, is borne out by a single archer, while studies with more archers find longer aims, which is why the claim that the phases of the shot last only a few seconds, about one to draw and one or two to aim is contested. The full breakdown, phase by phase, is in the article on how long a shot lasts.
The most telling comparison comes from the 2007 World Championships, where every match of the two individual recurve winners was timed, from the round of 64 to the final, together with those of their opponents. The men's champion aimed for between 2.65 and 4.37 seconds on average, depending on the match; the women's champion for between 0.61 and 1.24, less than each of her opponents in every match. His match average never dropped below 2.65 seconds and hers never went above 1.24, so this study yields no aiming time shared by winners.
When you hold the aim longer
The idea of an optimal window rests on this: beyond a certain point the bow arm gives way, tremor grows and the shot deteriorates. Studies of archers, from the first in 1971, point in opposite directions. In favour there are twelve Italian archers in whom those who aimed longer had the lower FITA score, and eight Brazilian national-level archers whose worst arrow followed an aim of 3.55 seconds against 2.07 for their best. There is also the only experiment with figures, a British master's dissertation: eight elite archers shot at 70 metres with their usual hold, then at double and triple it, and at triple the mean score per arrow fell from 8.60 to 7.75. The conditions always came in the same order, however, so the fatigue that built up cannot be separated from the length of the aim.
On the other side sits the largest sample. Among the sixteen young recurve archers at 70 metres the better eight aimed longer than the rest, 3.38 seconds against 2.72, and arrow by arrow the length of the aim said nothing about the score, across all 576 arrows. In eight elite French archers the aim did not separate good arrows from bad ones across the group, while within individuals the link ran in opposite directions: one archer shot tens with longer holds, 3.7 seconds against 2.0 on arrows scoring eight or less, and another held longer on the arrows scoring eight or less than on the nines. That result explains the others, because a group average adds up contrary behaviours and cancels them out. A systematic review concluded in 2022 that there is no agreement on this link, and the claim that holding aim for too long makes the shot worse remains contested. The same goes for the time of the whole shot: the claim that the time spent on the phases of the shot does not predict an arrow's score is contested, because in the largest sample neither the total length nor the aim is linked to score, while the draw and the final phase, release and follow-through, show small links in some studies.
Fatigue plays a part, but on a different scale from a single aim. In seven university archers held in the shooting position until exhaustion, muscle tremor showed up in the oscillation of the limb, and in twelve Italian archers a protocol of sixty twenty-second holds at full draw increased lateral bow sway in every one of them, by 20% on average. That is why it is reported that muscle fatigue increases bow sway while aiming, on two small studies. These protocols take the arm to its limit, though, not the extra couple of seconds of a long aim, and in the studies that read a competition's scores half by half, almost all of them simulated, it is reported that the second half does not fall, even when the archer feels more tired.
Coaches also worry that a habit of holding longer than necessary opens the way to freezing, the form of target panic in which the sight will not move into the centre or the shot will not go. In interviews with archers who have it, the need to control every shot, and the aim above all, ends up blocking it, and some cannot get through the clicker or aim off centre. These are accounts from fifteen people in all: what the registry draws from them is that archers with target panic describe tremors, panic attacks and excessive attention to their own body, not that a long aim causes it.
What happens in the last seconds
If duration says little, the way the aim settles says more. The best measurement comes from seven international-level juniors, all competing at the Youth World Championships, who shot 66 arrows each at 30 metres indoors with an optical system fixed to the riser that tracks where the bow points on the target. For each second the authors calculated the area within which the aim moved, and that area shrinks second by second: between 0.85 and 1.79 square score points from three to two seconds before the shot, between 0.47 and 0.77 in the next second, and between 0.30 and 0.59 in the last. In all seven the final second was the steadiest, and within each archer it was steadier still on arrows scoring ten than on those scoring eight or less. The claim that while aiming, the bow moves less and less as the release gets closer is reported, on this one study and at a single distance.
Two details from the same study are useful on the shooting line. Between archers, the average size of the area did not tell who shot better, so a sight that moves more than a teammate's does not, on its own, mean poorer shooting, whereas within the same archer a steadier final second went with the better arrow. And the path by which each archer came into the centre was personal and recognisable, one always starting from the bottom left, for example, while in the last two seconds the traces followed no pattern at all, not even within the same archer. A study of two university archers at 70 metres, with an accelerometer on each arm, sees the same settling from the body's side: at anchor the bow arm drops and the string arm rises markedly, and only afterwards do both settle.
Gaze, brain activity and heart rate change over the same interval, but measurements of them are few. There is only one measurement of gaze during the shot, and it comes from kyudo: in four expert students wearing an eye tracker the gaze was on the target before the draw and then dropped down and to the right at the moment the body takes up the load of the bow, while in the beginner it stayed on the target to the end. It is a two-page conference communication without figures, and on that alone the registry reports that in expert kyudo archers the gaze does not stay fixed on the target during the draw; the authors suggest aiming handed over to peripheral vision and call it a conjecture themselves. In recurve the only comparison between Korean national squad archers and university archers was made while they watched a film of the shot, not while shooting, and during the draw both groups looked at the target and the sight.
On the brain there is a single study, of eleven adults who had never shot and who loosed a hundred arrows a day for three days at eight metres, wearing a sixty-four-channel EEG. As early as 1.2 to 0.7 seconds before the arrow reached the target, electrical activity differed from rest, with lower theta and beta and higher alpha, so it is reported that a second before the arrow reaches the target, the brain's electrical activity already differs from its resting state. The comparison is with the bow lowered, though, so the difference also contains the effort of holding it at full draw, and no window in the study reaches back beyond 1.2 seconds, so nobody knows when that state begins.
On heart rate the data divide. In four elite archers the cardiac cycle lengthened from at least six beats before the release of good arrows, while in twenty-eight elite archers the heart sped up over the last 3 to 4 seconds, from 100.7 to 104.2 beats per minute. The most recent measurements, from a single Indian group, do see a fall, but in thirty-two archers the lowest point comes two or three seconds after the release, with the arrow already gone, where it may be the end of the effort of drawing rather than a preparation of attention. The claim that an archer's heart slows down in the seconds before the release remains contested.
The clicker and the moment of release
In recurve the clicker ties the end of the aim to draw length: it snaps when the arrow point passes the blade and, the way it is normally used, gives the signal to release. Archers are taught that the release is a response to the click, yet in nine archers from the German national squads the interval between the snap and the release was shorter than their reaction time to a sound, as if the movement were already under way when the click arrived. That is why it is reported that in expert archers the release is not a reaction to the clicker going off, on this one study and with a clear result only in the reaction task most similar to shooting.
How long that interval lasts matters little among archers who are already good. In thirty-nine elite archers measured at a World Cup a quicker reaction to the clicker went with higher scores, but between the quickest and the slowest the gap was worth half a point. Keeping it the same seems to count for more: in seven archers from the German national squads those with the more consistent release time scored higher, with the caveat that in seven people even a strong relationship can arise by chance. And one result runs against the usual reading: in the only study of archers to compare the two, with nine elite women archers at 8 metres, the aim at the moment of release was tighter without the clicker, when they released whenever they chose. That is why it is reported that releasing when you decide for yourself groups better than releasing on an external signal, although precision was calculated from the orientation of the bow rather than from the impacts on the target.
Consistency of aiming time
If no duration emerges as right for everyone, consistency remains, and in the registry it has slightly more support than duration. In the study of the 2007 World Championships the men's champion held a steadier aiming time than his opponent in six matches out of seven, and in two university archers the length of the aim was almost the same on medium and high-scoring arrows, with only its variation from arrow to arrow changing. The same World Championships study also shows the opposite, though, because the women's champion had a less consistent aim than her opponents in all seven matches. What the two gold medallists had in common is that the aim was the only phase of the shot the round did not move, while the wait before raising the bow and the draw stretched and shrank from one match to the next. The claim that champions hold more consistent aiming times than their opponents is reported, and rests almost entirely on that piece of work.
How I work on it in training
The first step is to measure. Have someone film a few ends and time the interval between anchor and release: in my experience it almost always turns out more variable than the archer thinks. There is no target value to bring it to, given that of the two world champions one aimed for over three seconds and the other for around one; the number tells you what your own is and how much it shifts from one arrow to the next.
Then the work is on consistency, and the tool is a pre-shot routine built so that the sequence, and with it the rhythm, is the same on every arrow. If the aim gets longer because the bow arm tires towards the end of the ends, the conversation moves to specific strength and draw weight, because the reported link is between fatigue and bow sway, while the link between duration and score is contested. A shot that goes the moment the sight touches the centre deserves the same reasoning: in a study of the 2013 World Championships the authors described exactly this release in the elite compound archers who reached the final rounds in strong wind, so it is not a fault in itself, and it becomes one when it goes before the sequence is complete.
The rule I use is simple: if the shot does not come within the time you know as yours, let down and start again. Not because a long aim costs everyone points, which the data do not show, but because a forced release breaks the very sequence you are trying to repeat.
The time limit in competition
Archers who hold for a long time often wonder whether they will make it within the time allowed in competition. There is only one direct measurement. In Japan thirty-six experienced archers, secondary school pupils, university students and adults, shot six-arrow trials at 50 metres with forty seconds per arrow, the time the Japanese federation's rules then allowed for each shot, and twelve more university archers repeated the test: all forty-eight completed every shot within the limit, and some had time to spare. The whole cycle, in the sixteen young recurve archers at 70 metres, lasted just over ten seconds on average against the roughly forty allowed. The claim that the time allowed for each shot does not trouble experienced archers is reported, with one limit that matters: the study measured short trials at a training ground, not the archer who struggles to get through the clicker or who slows down under pressure.