Of all the work an archer does away from the shooting line, balance and core exercises are the most widespread: wobble boards, planks, Pilates, standing on one leg with the eyes closed. Studies of archers have put them to the test often enough to give a nuanced answer, and that answer separates two things that are usually assumed to go together. What these exercises change, in several studies, is the body: trunk endurance, sway on the force plate, balance in movement. On the score, however, the studies disagree, and in the tidiest randomised trial, on national-level archers, six weeks of balance work alone did not lift the score away from that of archers who added nothing.
It also matters which balance and which core are being measured. Standing still on one leg, the most common test, shows no link with score in most samples of archers, while dynamic balance shows a partial one. Plank hold time says little about the arrow, whereas the side plank is the only one of three clinical tests tried in one study that goes together with activation of the deep back muscles. And shoulder position sense, often invoked to explain how an archer finds the same setup on every arrow, shows almost nothing but an absence of any link in the studies that have set it against score. I start with what the body does during the shot, because that is what tells you what is worth training.
Legs and hips during the shot
Nobody has set out to measure how much the legs and hips move during the shot, but two studies from 2025 show it in passing. In 37 pre-elite recurve and compound archers, with inertial sensors on the ankle, the lower back and both wrists, in the half second before the release the ankle rotates at under 2 degrees per second and the lower back at 3.4 to 4.1; a tenth of a second after the release the ankle stays under 4 degrees per second, the lower back rises to 19.8 to 29.3 and the drawing wrist reaches 215 to 271. Movement grows the further you go from the ground, so much so that a study recognising the phases of the shot from video, on 20 recurve and barebow archers, left the knees out of its model because they did not move.
Almost still, however, does not mean still, nor does it mean idle. Under the feet the centre of pressure keeps shifting by a few millimetres while aiming and by 15 to 20 at the release, as the body absorbs the recoil, and in five high-level Russian archers a hip muscle, tensor fasciae latae, works harder on the drawing side than on the bow side. Weight distribution between the legs, often taught as resting on the front leg, does not fall on the same side in every study, and the most recent one suggests why: in eleven young Russian archers, in their usual stance with the toes slightly open, the load leans towards the front leg, but turning the front foot towards the target moves it onto the back leg. None of these studies links weight distribution to score.
That this small amount of movement matters for the arrow has some support in the studies, within clear limits. Studies that measure the body on a force plate nearly all point the same way: the less the centre of pressure moves, the better the arrow tends to be, and comparing each archer's best and worst arrow, on the worst the centre of pressure travels more than twice as far. Speed and timing count too, though: while aiming, elite archers show smaller but faster sway than intermediates, and in the largest sample, 39 elite archers measured at a World Cup, the sway that predicts score is the one after the release, not the one in the second before. I go into this at length in the article on posture and stability. Finally, archers stand more still than people who do not shoot in two comparisons, but these are cross-sectional studies: they cannot say whether archery makes people steady or whether the steadiest people stay with archery.
Which part of the trunk works in experienced archers
Moving up from the legs to the trunk, the question changes: what matters is less how much it moves than which muscles hold it. Two cross-sectional studies find that in more experienced archers the transversus abdominis carries more weight. In twenty-eight Indian archers of three levels, the transversus works at 22.9% of maximal contraction at anchor and 32.9% at release in the elite group, against 7.5 and 12.2% in the beginners, and level weighs far more on the transversus than on the multifidus. In kyudo, in nine practitioners, the group of muscles working in the second half of the shot relies on the internal oblique and transversus in the experts and on the external oblique in the less experienced.
The picture becomes more complicated when the comparison shifts from the archer's level to the score of a single arrow. In eight French elite archers, over 549 arrows at 70 metres, the drawing-side multifidus is more active while aiming on the tens than on the other arrows, but in the follow-through of arrows scoring 8 or less it is the transversus that is more active, not less, than on the 9s and 10s. These are comparisons between groups or between arrows at a single point in time: they say which muscles work harder in those who shoot better, not that training them raises the score. One further finding tempers the idea of archery as trunk training: in a magnetic resonance study of Japanese national and international athletes, adult archers have smaller trunk muscles than wrestlers for the same height, and the gap is already complete at 16 to 18.
Which balance goes with the score
The balance test most often used with archers is also the one that says least. Nine samples of archers have put single-leg balance next to the score, and seven found nothing, from twelve young Malaysian recurve archers to forty-five adult traditional archers and thirty professional compound archers. The most striking result in favour, a correlation of 0.906 in thirty-one youngsters, explains itself within the same study: balance, strength and endurance correlate with each other between 0.83 and 0.91, and as soon as they enter the model together balance stops counting. The other is weak, 0.262 in sixty children aged 12 to 13, under 7% of the variation in score.
Dynamic balance fares better, but only in part. In eighteen recurve archers from a Turkish club, those who reach further with the leg on the Y-Balance Test score more at 50 metres, with correlations of 0.59 on the right and 0.67 on the left, while in the same sample the single-leg test is not linked to score. Adjusted for leg length the link holds on the left, 0.54, and on the right it drops to 0.40 and does not hold, so part of the raw link is stature. The second study, on the thirty compound archers, finds that those who improve their left-leg dynamic balance most over twelve weeks also gain the most points, but at the start, comparing the archers with one another, dynamic balance did not separate the more accurate ones. These are associations on small samples; the suspicion they leave, which a review from the same period puts in writing, is that standing still on one leg measures an ability that shooting does not ask for.
Balance training: what changes and what does not
That balance responds to training is the least disputed point. A review of twenty controlled studies of athletes from many sports finds that four to eight weeks of strength work on unstable surfaces improve static and dynamic balance, although several tests do not separate the groups and the quality of the studies is modest. The archer's question is a different one, namely whether that gain reaches the target, and on this the studies of archers point in opposite directions.
The strongest result against comes from high-level archers. In thirty Indian national-level archers, randomly assigned to three groups, six weeks of balance work alone, twenty minutes three times a week, first on the floor and then on foam, take the score over twelve arrows from 108.5 to 111.4, while the group that adds nothing goes from 107.6 to 106.2: the difference does not hold. Only the group combining Pilates and balance work pulls away from the control group, from 96.1 to 103.3, but it started a dozen points below the other two, so part of the gain may be regression towards the mean, and against balance work alone it is no different.
At lower levels the picture is more favourable, but more fragile. In twenty-two Ukrainian beginners assigned at random, adding wobble-board work and a spirit level on the sight to their shooting takes the score from 252 to 340 out of 600, against 247 to 298 in the control group; the two exercises come together, though, so the advantage cannot be credited to balance alone. In twenty-five middle-school beginners, by contrast, perturbation exercises at full draw give no different score from band pulls and drawing the bow without shooting. In before-and-after studies of club youngsters without a control group the score always rises, in one case by sixty-six points in eighteen sessions on the Bosu; within that same study, however, those who gained the most balance were not those who gained the most points (r = 0.18), and at that age progress of that kind can come simply from carrying on shooting. That balance matters more for those starting out is therefore possible, but no study has compared different levels on the same programme.
Pilates adds a useful distinction. In twenty Korean high-school archers, twelve weeks of mat Pilates, three one-hour sessions a week, take the dynamic balance score from 38.6 to 47.5, while those who carry on with shooting alone go from 38.3 to 39.2; static balance, measured as the split of weight between the feet, does not move. Several values in the table cannot come out of the statistical test used, and the control group did no extra work, so the comparison is also between training more and training as before. The direction, all the same, matches the comparisons between archers above: where something moves, it is dynamic balance more than standing balance.
Core training: the trunk responds, the score is another question
With the core, the gap between the body and the target is wider still. Trunk endurance can rise a long way: in thirty-eight competitive archers assigned at random, twelve weeks of a general conditioning circuit take the plank from 78.5 to 102.3 seconds, 30% more, against 1.6% in the control group. Score per arrow rises in the same study too, but the circuit was not core work alone and included stations where the archers shot, so that group also shot more arrows than the control group. What targeted trunk work changes in the body, though, depends on who is training and which test is chosen. In thirty Iranian amateur archers, six weeks of bodyweight exercises raise the strength of the shoulder's internal rotators by about 2.4 kg compared with the control group; in fifteen sedentary adults on their first traditional archery course, adding seven weeks of stabilisation work changes no measure compared with the course alone, neither the plank nor balance; and in the randomised trial of thirty Indian archers the Pilates group pulls away from the control group on only one of four lumbopelvic stability tests. The effect on balance is split as well, since two studies of archers find it, with figures that do not fully add up, and the one on complete beginners does not.
The score is the weakest part. Four studies have trained the trunk and then counted the points, and none of them does it cleanly: two have no control group, one claims an effect on score without publishing a single value for it, and the last is the Indian randomised trial, where the group that pulls away trains the core together with balance and started lower. Associations between archers are scattered: in fifty young Malaysian archers, sit-ups in one minute are among the few fitness tests linked to score, while in eighteen young Indonesian recurve archers none of the three core tests is. There is evidence in favour, but it is thin and fragile; for strength work more generally, see the article on specific strength.
Plank and side plank: what they measure
If you track the core with a test, the choice of test matters. The front plank hold, the most common, has a weak link with score: in twenty-three university club archers it explains about 7% of the variation at 18 metres, and in the same study almost all of the effect of fitness and aerobic capacity on score runs directly rather than through the core. In the eighteen young Indonesian recurve archers the plank is not linked to score at all.
The side plank tells a different story. In a single study, of fifteen young elite Israeli archers assessed with ultrasound before the season, side plank hold on the non-dominant side goes together with how much the deep back muscles thicken from rest to contraction at the level of the fifth lumbar vertebra, with correlations of 0.66 and 0.75. The dominant-side plank and trunk extension are linked to nothing, and none of the three tests says anything about the deep abdominals. The result needs care, because of twenty-four correlations calculated without correction only two are significant, both on the same test, and nobody has checked whether training the side plank changes activation or aiming. Of the three tests tried, it remains the only one with a measured link to what the deep muscles do.
Shoulder position sense
Proprioception is the sense that tells you where your joints are without looking at them, and in archery it is invoked to explain how an archer finds the same shoulder setup and the same anchor arrow after arrow. Measurements on archers are few, and they show that, with their eyes closed, archers reproduce a shoulder angle with errors of a few degrees. Thirty Iranian women club archers, lying down and blindfolded, reproduced 60 degrees of external rotation by stopping on average almost six degrees short, with individual errors of up to eighteen; in the thirty professional compound archers, the error in finding the bow shoulder raised to 125 degrees starts at about 4.5 degrees and falls to 4.0 after twelve weeks on the Bosu, in a group with no control.
The link with score is the weak part. Two studies have looked for it, and almost all they find is an absence of any link. In seventeen youngsters at the end of a beginners' course, shoulder position sense at 60 and 90 degrees bears no relation to six arrows shot at 10 metres. In the thirty compound archers, at the start, position sense does not separate the more accurate archers; over the twelve weeks, those who most reduce their error at 125 degrees improve their score most, but at the other five angles measured there is no link. A result that appears at one angle out of six, with no control group, remains a lead to be checked.
Breathing, visualisation and yoga
Balance, in one study at least, also shifts with work that has nothing physical about it. Thirty-six Turkish novice archers aged 14 to 18 trained twice a week for eight weeks, and two of the three groups added fifteen minutes of alternate-nostril breathing or of visualising the shot. The balance score, measured with an app on a 0 to 100 scale, rises by 13.7 points with breathing and by 15.1 with visualisation, more than in the control group, which also improves, and there is no difference between the two techniques. The groups, however, were allocated in sequence rather than at random, and the balance measured is that of someone standing still with eyes closed, not that of an archer at full draw in front of the target. The score rises in the same groups, by 2.3 points over nine arrows with breathing and by 4.9 with visualisation, but the study does not check whether those who gained most balance also gained most points.
On yoga the data are thinner still. In thirteen adult elite Indian archers, six sessions over two weeks lengthen single-leg balance by 11 to 12%; in twenty-five young female archers, eight weeks of asanas and pranayama move the balance score from 32.11 to 32.84, in a journal with questionable editorial standards. Both are before-and-after studies with no control group, neither measures the score, and the first uses the single-leg test itself, the one least linked to the arrow in archers. Because of where it was published, the registry reports the study of the girls without using it for the status, and whether yoga improves coordination and balance in young female archers remains an unstudied question.
How I bring it into training
From these studies I draw criteria rather than a programme, and the first concerns expectations: the programmes tested on archers run from six to twelve weeks, with two or three sessions a week, and over that time the body changes: endurance, sway, dynamic balance. A gain on the force plate or in the plank, however, is not yet a gain on the target, and it has to be checked on the target: when I add a block of this kind, I count the arrows before and after under the same conditions rather than relying on a feeling of stability.
The second criterion concerns tests. If you need a number to track balance, dynamic reach on the Y-Balance has a link with score that the single-leg test lacks; if you need a number for the trunk, the side plank says something about the deep back muscles, whereas front plank hold time says little about shooting. Neither has been tested as a predictor of score, though, and I read them as indicators of the body.
That leaves how much room to give it in the week. The tidiest result available, on national-level archers, shows that twenty minutes of balance work three times a week for six weeks added no points for archers who already shot well, so the time this work takes from shooting needs weighing. For those starting out the picture is more favourable, with the caution already noted: nobody has compared different levels on the same programme.