One idea has been doing the rounds among archers for decades: good archers loose the arrow between one heartbeat and the next, when the heart pauses and the body pauses with it. At full draw, with the clicker close, the heartbeat thumps in the chest and seems to move the sight, and the idea usually comes with two companions: during the aim the expert archer's heart slows down, and a lower heart rate at the moment of the shot is worth a few extra points.
These are three different claims, measured with electrocardiograms, heart rate monitors read second by second, one experiment with the heartbeat in headphones and another with a drug, and the answer is not the same for all three: the slowing before release is contested, so is the link between a lower heart rate and score, and the advantage of diastole rests on a single study, from 2009.
Why the heart should matter to the shot
The reasoning behind the rule is mechanical. With each contraction the heart pushes blood into the arteries and the pulse wave travels all the way to the arms; if the archer holds the aim still for a few seconds, each beat would be a small jolt, and releasing in the gap between two jolts should give tighter groups. The cardiac cycle has two phases: systole, when the ventricle contracts and pumps, and diastole, when it relaxes and fills. The pause archers talk about is diastole.
Alongside this sits a second reading, which studies on archers borrow from psychophysiology: in that field, when people prepare for a precise movement or wait for a signal, the heart slows in the moments before, and the slowing is taken as a sign of attention narrowing. Neither reading says how much the heartbeat weighs on where the arrow lands. To find out, you have to measure the heart at the moment of the shot, and that is where the measurements go in different directions.
The heartbeat in the seconds before release
The first study to set the electrocardiogram beside the release was Australian, from 1990: four elite archers, 240 arrows over two sessions, each graded as good, average or poor. Before good arrows the interval between beats lengthened in all four, from at least six beats before release, meaning the heart slowed; with some average or poor arrows the opposite happened, and the interval shortened as release approached, for example from 678 to 558 milliseconds. The same study found no difference in average heart rate during the aim: what separated the arrows was the pattern of the last few beats, not their level.
In the same year another group recorded heart rate and electroencephalogram in twenty-eight elite archers, sixteen shots each at 45 m, and found the opposite. In the 3-4 seconds before release the heart did not slow but sped up, from 100.7 to 104.2 beats per minute, and the average while shooting was the same as when the archers simply held the bow at full draw without shooting, 104.4 against 103.0. The authors read this as the effect of holding 14-22 kg at full draw, which in their view masked the slowing linked to attention; that is an interpretation, and the study does not test it.
In 2015 eight experienced Croatian archers, four compound and four recurve, shot fifteen arrows each at 18 m with a heart rate monitor synchronised with video of the release. In the compound archers the heart rate climbed steadily, from 107.6 beats per minute two seconds before release to 112.9 one second after; in the recurve archers it fell by a third of a beat between two seconds and one second before, from 101.1 to 100.8, and then rose again to 104.7. The study is small, does not test the trend over time and appeared in a regional journal, but in the two seconds that matter there is no fall to be seen.
The measurements in favour come from an Indian group. In 2020 seven elite archers, four compound and three recurve, shot 210 arrows at 18 m with heart rate recorded every second from five seconds before to five seconds after release: the fall up to one second after release was clear and statistically significant, the lowest point came two seconds after, and the rise that followed did not reach significance. In 2025 the same group measured thirty-two archers, fifteen elite and seventeen not, over two sessions of thirty arrows: the heart rate fell in both, but the strongest slowing came two or three seconds after release, in the follow-through, once the arrow had already gone.
Taken together, these studies do not show that the archer's heart slows before release. They show that around release the heart rate tends to fall in a good number of measurements, that the lowest point often comes after the shot, and that in the largest study of elite archers the heart rate rose during the last seconds of the aim. A low point that arrives once the arrow has gone could simply be the end of the effort of the draw rather than a preparation of attention, and the two recent studies in favour come from the same laboratory, so they do not confirm each other. This is why the claim that the archer's heart slows in the seconds before release is contested.
Does a lower heart rate score more points?
On this question the research splits in two, and the line runs between studies that observe archers as they are and studies that change their heart rate to see what happens.
Among the observations, several point the way the rule suggests. In 2025, in forty-five traditional Turkish archers, those with the lower average heart rate while shooting five arrows scored higher, with a strong correlation in the women and a moderate one in the men; in the same year, in thirty-two Indian archers, heart rate while aiming, at release and in the follow-through was related to score in the same direction. These are comparisons between different people, though, and in the Indian study the comparison within the same archers points elsewhere: in the second session the average heart rate was lower and the score stayed practically identical, 279.4 and 279.5 out of 300.
Where arrows were compared one by one, the relationship is not a straight line either. In the seven elite Indian archers of 2020, the 8s were shot with a heart rate about eight beats per minute higher than the 9s, but between the 9s and the 10s heart rate told nothing apart, and even went less than one beat the other way; the 8s were seven arrows out of 210. In the compound archers of the Croatian study the 10s were shot with the highest heart rate of all, 118.5 beats per minute at release against 110.1 for the 9s and 101.3 for the 8s, a result the authors themselves had not expected; there the arrows of the four archers were analysed together, so the comparison mixes arrows and people.
The experiments are few, and they all point the other way. Thirteen international-level elite archers shot at 18 m after a run had pushed their heart rate to around 166-168 beats per minute, and their score did not change compared with shooting at rest. In fifteen archers from the Turkish national squads, in a randomised double-blind design with a placebo, two beta-blockers lowered the heart rate while shooting by 12.8% and 8.6%, and neither the score, nor the movement of the aiming point in the last tenths of a second before release, nor the sway of the body improved. These drugs are banned for archers, and the common belief is that they are banned because they slow the heart and steady the aim; on this evidence, the only controlled trial on archers, the claim that beta-blockers improve accuracy in archery is contradicted.
So the observations say yes and the experiments say no, and the claim that a lower heart rate at the moment of the shot improves the score is contested. The most cautious way to hold the two together is that a falling heart rate goes with a good shot without causing it: a more experienced archer, or simply one more at ease in that session, can have a slower heart and better arrows at the same time, without one producing the other. None of these studies, however, puts that explanation to the test.
Releasing in diastole
That leaves the rule we started from, the most specific of the three. The Australian study of 1990 had already looked at where in the cardiac cycle the first movement of the fingers at release fell. On good arrows it did not fall at random but clustered at two points: the stretch of the electrocardiogram that corresponds to the strongest contraction, in systole, or the middle of the cycle, in diastole; on average and poor arrows it was scattered. The result speaks to consistency, because good arrows left at a recurring point in the heartbeat, but it does not put diastole ahead of systole, since one of the two points lay in exactly the phase the rule tells you to avoid.
The direct comparison came in 2009, from a Japanese group. Thirty-six experienced archers aged 16 to 24 shot six arrows at 50 m under two conditions, in balanced order: one as normal and one with their own heartbeat in headphones. With no signal, release fell almost at random relative to the heart, 102 arrows in diastole and 114 in systole out of 216, so the archers did not time the release to the heartbeat on their own. Arrows released in diastole scored more, however: 7.3 points per arrow against 6.8 without headphones, 7.6 against 6.9 with them, and the difference between the two phases held up in the statistical analysis. A second group in the same paper, twelve university students, found the phase effect again.
The difference is about half a point per arrow, and it rests on a single study, with six arrows per condition, published in a regional journal. This is why the claim that arrows released in diastole score higher is reported: there is a result in favour, and nobody has replicated it yet.
The heartbeat in your headphones
The same experiment looked at what happens when archers hear their own heart while they shoot. With the heartbeat in the headphones, arrows released in diastole went from 102 to 139 out of 216, the total for six arrows rose from 42.3 to 44.4 out of 60, and shot time varied less from one arrow to the next, with the coefficient of variation falling from 16.7% to 12.5% while the average time stayed the same. With a metronome at 90 beats per minute in place of the heartbeat, tested on the twelve university students, nothing changed: not the score, not the shot time, not the number of arrows in diastole.
The study cannot separate the causes of this gain. The advantage of diastole was similar with and without headphones, so the gain comes from the number of arrows released in diastole, not from diastole becoming worth more; at the same time, though, shot timing became more regular, which is another route to points, and the study does not say which of the two brings the gain. The claim that listening to your own heartbeat while shooting raises the score is reported for the same reasons as the previous one: a single study, two trials of six arrows, no replication. Six archers out of thirty-six also found the heartbeat in their headphones irritating, while twelve found it pleasant.
Heart rate variability during the aim
Alongside heart rate there is variability, meaning how much the interval between one beat and the next changes, which is usually read as a marker of parasympathetic activity. The first to ask the question was a Taiwanese conference abstract from 2008: in sixteen pre-elite archers, comparing each archer's three best and three worst arrows in a simulated competition, the component associated with the parasympathetic system was higher on the best ones. The abstract, however, does not report a single value or test.
The full study that came later, on seventeen adolescent archers in an indoor competition at 18 m, with variability calculated over the twenty seconds before each release, found the opposite: the arrow's score rose slightly with the component usually read as sympathetic, and in the experienced archers the rise in the parasympathetic component from the first to the second arrow of the end went with a fall in score. The effects were small, and the model, which also included the time taken to shoot, explained 11.8% of the variation in score. In 2019, in thirty Turkish beginners, those with the higher ratio between the two components were also more accurate, but that comparison was between archers and over the whole session, not between arrows.
The measurement itself makes the question harder. The high-frequency component depends on how you breathe, and while aiming the archer controls the breath; the ratio between the two components, moreover, does not measure the balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic activity as was long believed. The advice to use other indices comes from psychophysiology and is rated transferred in the registry, because nobody has compared the indices against each other in archers. For now the claim that parasympathetic activity during the aim is higher on the best arrows is contested. Variability as a tool for tracking recovery and training load has an article of its own.
Where the measurements stop
What we know about the moment of the shot comes from small samples: four, eight and seven archers in the studies that compare heart rate between arrows of different value, thirty-six in the only study that compares diastole with systole. Almost all the measurements were taken in training or simulated competitions, often indoors at 18 m, and the two recent studies that see the heart rate fall come from the same laboratory. Even the mechanical premise of the rule, that the heartbeat moves the sight, has only been tested indirectly: when the heart rate was lowered with a drug, the movement of the aiming point in the last tenths of a second before release stayed the same as with the placebo.
Some questions, moreover, nobody has put to the test yet. Nobody has trained a group of archers to release in diastole for a few weeks and compared them with a group that did not, and nobody has repeated the heartbeat-in-headphones experiment with more arrows, in competition or at Olympic distances.
What I take from it on the shooting line
I take three cautious pointers from these studies, because none comes from an experiment that changed something in the archer and measured the score over many arrows.
The first concerns trying to feel the heartbeat and wait for the pause. Without an external signal the Japanese archers released in diastole roughly one time in two, no more often than chance would give, and the share only rose when they had the heartbeat in their headphones. Listening for the gap between two beats during the aim seems to me an extra task for attention at exactly the moment it should be on the target and the shot, and as far as we know the gain is about half a point per arrow, measured in a single study. I would not chase it.
The second concerns a high heart rate. That the heart beats faster in competition than at rest is reported in every study that has measured it, and the data do not say that this costs points in itself: thirteen international archers with their hearts at 166-168 scored the same as at rest, and lowering the heart rate with a drug added nothing. Work on staying calm has its reasons, in the pre-shot routine as in breathing, but I would judge it by what happens to the arrows, not by the number on the heart rate monitor.
The third concerns regularity. In the heartbeat-in-headphones experiment the consistency of shot timing improved along with the score, and in the Australian study what marked out the good arrows was a recurring point in the cycle, whichever it was. This is the theme of repeatability of the shot, and if anyone wants to try the heartbeat in headphones in training, I would watch the score and the time of each shot together, over many ends rather than six arrows, bearing in mind that the only evidence we have comes from one group of thirty-six Japanese archers.