Anyone starting a gym programme usually has a simple question in mind: if I get stronger, will I score more? The question hides two separate steps. The first is that strength work away from the range makes the archer stronger; the second is that the extra strength reaches the target, as a higher score, a steadier aim or quicker reactions. The registry keeps the two apart because the studies support them very differently, and treating them as one risks lending the second step the solidity of the first.
The first step has pointed the same way for almost ten years: after six to twelve weeks of work, measured strength goes up, while in control groups that only shoot it stays put. For the second there is no shortage of positive results, but nearly all come from designs that cannot separate strength from the extra arrows shot or from familiarity with the test; and when stronger and weaker archers are compared, the studies contradict each other.
The first step: the programme raises strength
In archers this step has been measured by studies with a comparison group, and that is the place to start. In twenty young Turkish archers aged 15 to 17, eight weeks of strength work at three sessions a week raised grip strength by about two kilograms per hand, from 35.3 to 37.7 kg on the right, while in the group that did no exercises it stayed where it was. In fourteen university recurve archers, twelve weeks of work centred on the lower trapezius took the strength of that muscle from 8 to 9 kgf. In twenty elite wheelchair Paralympic archers, grip strength in the string hand went from 37.4 to 45.5 kg, while with their usual training it did not rise. Two studies also randomised their participants, thirty university archers with a medicine ball and twenty-four traditional archers with resistance bands, and in both the trained groups improved while the control group did not change significantly.
This is why the claim that a strength programme away from the range increases an archer's measured strength is reported. It goes no higher because the samples are small, the journals nearly all regional, the two randomised studies do not report a clean direct comparison between groups, and nobody has measured how much of the gain survives a few months without that work. The direction, though, is the same in every study.
The same holds for holding at full draw, which of all the strength measures is the closest to shooting. In five Indonesian studies, all small, the time an archer can hold the bow at full draw lengthens after six to eight weeks of extra work, for example from 21.9 to 27.9 seconds in twelve club archers using dumbbells and bands. The claim that strength work lengthens the time an archer can hold the bow at full draw is also reported, with a limit that matters: none of those studies has a group that shoots the same arrows without the extra work.
The second step: from strength to points
Here the picture changes, and not for lack of positive results. Since 2017 a dozen studies on archers, using gym strength, plyometrics, circuits, bands or weights, have reported a higher score after the programme, and none has reported a fall; a systematic review in 2026 counts fifteen intervention studies, all with positive results. The weakness is the design, because most are before-and-after comparisons on a single group, and an archer who trains for eight weeks improves even without a gym.
An experiment on traditional Turkish archers shows this. In its control group twelve archers did nothing but their usual shooting practice, three days a week for eight weeks, and the score went up in all twelve. Without a group like that, the gain from a strength programme is mixed up with the gain from the arrows shot over the same period.
The study closest to the question comes from India. Sixty national-level archers, recurve and compound, were split into four groups of fifteen for twelve weeks: one did gym strength work, one bow-specific strength work, one alternated the two and one trained as usual. The score was taken over 72 arrows, at 70 m for recurve and 50 m for compound, before and after the programme.
Over twelve weeks the control group went from 531.2 to 537.3 points, a change that is not significant: without extra work, archers at that level stay where they are. All three trained groups rose, and gym work alone brought an advantage of 36.5 points over the control group once the starting point is accounted for. It is the strongest result behind the claim that physical conditioning improves shooting accuracy, which remains reported. The groups were not randomised and each trained at a different academy, so coach and venue changed along with the programme; the score also puts recurve and compound into the same average without saying how many archers from each division were in each group.
The same study also supports the claim that combining gym strength with bow-specific strength improves scores more than either on its own, which is reported too: the group that alternated the two reached an adjusted mean of 590.7 points, against 569.1 for gym work alone and 557.4 for bow work alone. The combined group, however, trained six times a week, more than any other, so the effect of the combination cannot be told apart from the effect of a heavier load, and it is the only study to have compared the three routes.
The only randomised experiment with a control group, on thirty-eight Indonesian competitive archers, points the same way and has an instructive limit. Twelve weeks of circuit training took the score per arrow from 7.1 to 8.6, with the spread of scores falling by a quarter, while the control group did not move; but the circuit included stations where the archers shot, so the group that improved was also the group that shot more, and the direct comparison between the two groups is not reported. Where that comparison does exist, it does not always back the claim: in twelve district archers the trained group rose by almost nine points and the control group stayed flat, but the difference between them was not significant, with six archers per group and a journal with questionable editorial standards.
Tests rise more than the score
A second sign that the step from strength to points is not automatic shows up inside the same studies. In a circuit programme for thirty Indonesian children aged 10 to 13, balance improved by 7.4%, concentration by 16.6% and holding at full draw by 8.5%, while the score over 36 arrows rose by six points, or 2.5%. In twelve club archers using dumbbells and bands, holding time grew by 27% and the score at 30 m by 3.8%. In a circuit for children, on the other hand, the boys' score kept rising in the second half of the programme when their fitness was no longer changing significantly.
These studies have no control group, so none of the numbers should be taken at face value, but the pattern repeats: physical qualities and score do not move together, and the former usually grow more.
Arm strength and score
Another way into the question is to ask whether, across different archers, the stronger ones score more. Here the registry has no answer in a single direction: the claim that arm strength is linked to shooting accuracy is contested, and has been since 2014, when the first positive results joined the earlier null ones.
The picture becomes a little clearer once the measures are separated. Grip strength, measured with a hand dynamometer, does not go with score in a series of samples: over a hundred American archers in the 1980s, fifty young Malaysian archers, forty-five Turkish traditional archers. Other samples, such as sixty Indonesian children aged 12 to 13, do find a moderate link. The most telling result comes from thirty professional compound archers followed for twelve weeks, because it looks at changes within the same people rather than comparing different people: grip stayed almost unchanged, from 44.9 to 46.0 kg on average, and its changes bore no relation to progress in score. Draw force, measured with a bow scale or a dynamometer, does go with score in the samples that measured it, but those samples are small and mix different levels; arm endurance measured with push-ups sits in between, linked to score in forty-five juniors and not in three other samples.
The highest correlations, between 0.89 and 0.95, are too large for a phenomenon of this kind, and they all come from groups of thirteen to thirty-one archers, two of them published in journals with questionable editorial standards. When a group mixes beginners and experienced archers, any physical measure ends up separating one from the other, because those who have shot for longer are also better trained. In the larger samples the correlations fall, and in the largest of all grip is not related to score.
Steady aiming and reaction times
The explanation heard most often is that a stronger archer holds the aim steadier. It is a reasonable idea, but nobody has tested it on trained archers with a bow in their hands. The only experiment that measured aiming stability after strength work was carried out on twenty university students who had never shot: four weeks of side planks with the trunk inclined at forty degrees, five days a week, and the tremor of the bow while aiming, with a 20 lb bow, fell in the trained group and not in the control group. In forty-five national-level Indian archers, randomised, four weeks of band work for the shoulder and arm together with breathing exercises made the arm steadier in a seated test, holding a stylus inside a four-millimetre hole, which is not aiming with a bow. Finally, in twenty-seven compound archers draw force bore no relation to the stability of the bow arm.
This is why the claim that strength training improves aiming stability is transferred: it rests on an experiment outside archers. Whether a steadier aim goes with better scores is a separate question, which the registry treats on its own.
On reaction times there is a single study, on the same twenty young Turkish archers as the grip result. After eight weeks of strength work, simple reactions to a light and to a sound became 40 to 55 milliseconds shorter, for instance the right hand's visual reaction from 0.407 to 0.352 seconds, while in the group without exercises no measure changed significantly. The claim that strength training shortens an archer's reaction times is therefore reported, with two caveats: the comparisons are made within each group rather than between groups, and a reaction to a light is not the response to the clicker. Nor does the study explain how strength would shorten a simple reaction.
Who gains the most
That leaves the part of the question that depends on who is asking. It is widely believed that those who start lower gain more from a programme, and it is plausible, but the claim that archers who start lower gain more points from training is contested. No study on archers was designed to answer it, and the answers have to be read from the tables of small programmes without a control group. The clearest of them, because it publishes every archer's score, points in the direction of the idea: in twelve club youngsters, after eighteen sessions of Bosu circuit training, the archer who started on 204 points gained 77 and the one who started on 226 gained 41. In two other programmes, by contrast, the archers improved but the gaps between them stayed as they were, or widened. And none of them removed regression to the mean, so an archer who shoots very badly on the day of the first test tends to shoot better next time even without training.
There is also a result that runs against expectations. The study with the clearest gains over its control group, the Indian one, involved not beginners but national-level archers, with starting means of around 533 points out of 720, so the studies do not allow anyone to say that physical work helps only those who are starting out.
One last result concerns draw weight. In a 1967 study of forty-nine beginner students, after twenty-four lessons both maximal draw force and the draw weight judged comfortable went up, but those who gained the most strength were not those who raised their comfortable load the most: the correlation between the two increases was 0.05 in women and -0.16 in men. It is a single study on beginners, and the claim that when an archer gains strength, the draw weight that feels comfortable does not change accordingly is reported; it is enough, though, as a reminder that the load an archer finds comfortable does not closely follow the strength they have gained.
Where the studies stop
Taken together, the studies leave some precise questions open. Nobody has followed two randomised groups shooting the same arrows, one with the gym and one without, over a whole season and compared their competition scores, and that is the comparison that would separate strength from the extra arrows. Nobody has measured aiming stability before and after a strength programme in trained archers. Nor has anyone measured how much of the strength gained remains after a few months without that work. On these questions the studies say neither yes nor no.
What I take to the range
These studies do not offer a promise of points, but they do offer a few pointers on how to read your own work. The first is that the gym does what you expect of it: if the aim is to get stronger, the studies on archers all point the same way, and a programme followed regularly gets there in a few weeks. For choosing exercises and organising the week I refer you to the article on specific strength for archers; what matters here is the next step.
The second is that the score has to be measured separately, with the same yardstick as before. Since shooting alone raises scores, the cleanest comparison an archer can make alone is to keep the number of arrows per week the same while adding the gym, and to shoot the same round, at the same distance, before and after a few weeks. The Did I really improve? tool does the sum for the two rounds and tells you whether the difference is larger than the normal variation from one round to the next; and you should expect the fitness tests to rise more than the score.
The third concerns what to measure. Grip strength is the easiest number to collect and also, among the strength measures, the one for which studies on archers most often report no link with score. Draw force measured with the bow is closer to the shot, even though the high correlations attached to it come from small, mixed samples; holding at full draw is just as close to the shot, but no study has set the seconds gained beside the score. If I had to pick one indicator to follow, I would watch holding at full draw rather than grip on the dynamometer, knowing that even there the link with points has not been tested.
The last concerns expectations. In the Indian study, the most favourable one, the gym-only group gained about 35 points out of 720 in twelve weeks, roughly half a point per arrow, under conditions that do not allow all of it to be credited to the gym. It is an order of magnitude worth keeping in mind, not a forecast: how much strength is worth to a given archer depends on where they start, how much they shoot and what is holding them back today, and on that the studies give no individual answer.