Anyone who has been shooting for a few years asks it sooner or later, usually after an end in which the last arrows stayed on the string longer than usual: how many seconds should I be able to hold the bow at full draw, and is my draw weight too much for me? On the range the answers come with confidence. Archers are told they must be able to hold at full draw for a long time without giving way, that whoever holds longer shoots better and that timed holds with the bow or a band are therefore part of training; they are also told that the right draw weight is the one that feels comfortable.
The measurements give a more piecemeal answer. Only one study has measured what holding costs relative to maximal strength; the ratio between bow and strength in experienced archers has been measured twice; holding time goes with score in one sample and not in another. And the 40% threshold that gets passed around as a rule comes from a trend that did not reach significance.
How long the hold lasts within a shot
The question about seconds is really two questions, and it makes sense to start with the shot itself. Within a single arrow the hold is short: in four archers from the Turkish women's national team, followed over 108 arrows at 18 m with a draw weight of about 17 kg, time at full draw was 2.3-2.6 seconds and time on the target 3.6-3.7, with no significant difference between arrows scoring 8, 9 and 10. The total drawing time, on the other hand, was slightly shorter on the better arrows, 4.8 seconds against 5.6. In sixteen young Malaysian recurve archers, over 576 arrows at 70 m, the aiming phase lasted 3.3 seconds on average, and arrow by arrow its length said nothing about the score.
Whether holding the aim for a long time harms the shot is one of the questions on which studies agree least. Between different archers, shorter aiming goes with better scores in some samples and the reverse holds in others. The only experiment that lengthened the aim on command, with eight British elite archers taken to double and triple their usual time, saw the mean score per arrow fall from 8.60 at their usual time to 7.75 at three times as long, but the conditions always came in the same order and fatigue cannot be separated from duration. That is why the claim that holding the aim too long makes the shot worse is contested in the registry. What the numbers say without ambiguity is simpler: in a shot, the hold is counted in a few seconds, not in tens of seconds.
What holding the position costs
The seconds of a shot are one thing and the reserve behind them is another, and that reserve was measured by a French study in the early 1990s. Seven university archers held the shooting position with a bow until exhaustion, with electrodes on the posterior deltoid of the drawing arm. The effort, the authors write, corresponded to about 40-50% of their maximal push-pull strength, measured separately on an ergometer that reproduces the movement; the hold lasted 52 seconds on average, and in all seven the frequency of the muscle's electrical signal slid steadily downwards, the classic sign of fatigue.
In the registry the claim that holding the shooting position demands between forty and fifty per cent of maximal force, and at that level the muscle fails in under a minute is reported: a single sample of seven people, with no draw weight given, and how the share was worked out is not described in detail. It should also be read for what it does not say: a hold until failure is many times longer than a shot, so the minute or less measures the reserve, not what happens on every arrow; and the share changes if you look at electrical activity rather than force, because in the same four Turkish archers the posterior deltoid reaches 84-87% of its maximal signal in the second before the clicker.
The reserve matters because it runs down. In the same study the muscle's tremor, between 8 and 12 hertz, showed up again in the oscillation of the limb, and a year later an Italian group had twelve federation archers of intermediate and high level perform six sets of ten 20-second holds at full draw: afterwards the sideways sway of the bow while aiming had grown in all twelve, by between 6% and 39%, 20% on average, while the centre of pressure under the feet did not move. These are two small studies with no control group, and the claim that muscle fatigue increases bow sway while aiming is reported.
Draw weight as a fraction of maximal strength
If holding costs a share of maximal strength, the question about draw weight becomes a question about the ratio between the bow and the arm. Two studies have measured it in experienced archers. In a Copenhagen laboratory, fifteen recurve archers ranging from sub-elite to elite had a maximal pulling strength, measured in the aiming position, of 532 newtons on average, and their bows demanded 196 newtons, around 37%. In eight archers with experience of FITA competition, measured with a dynamometer in the position of the drawing arm, the arm produced between 255 and 795 newtons and the bows demanded between 178 and 215: archer by archer the bow came to between 27% and 81% of strength, 44% on the group means, and only one went above two thirds.
The claim that elite archers shoot a draw weight far below their maximal drawing strength is therefore reported: the direction is clear, the exact figure is not, because the two instruments differ and one of the two pieces of work is a conference abstract. One further detail puts the figure in proportion. The forty-nine university beginners on a 1960s course were also shooting bows at between 41% and 53% of their maximal pull, so a low fraction is not a choice that sets the elite apart.
This is where the 40% threshold comes from. In the Copenhagen study, when the bow exceeded 40% of maximal strength the mean score over 150 arrows at 18 m tended to fall, with 43% of the variance explained but a p value of 0.054, just above the statistical threshold. The authors call it a trend, and the two-page abstract neither explains how the threshold was chosen nor reports an analysis that estimates it; with fifteen people of very different levels, part of the relationship may also reflect the gap between levels rather than draw weight. For that reason the registry keeps the finding as context, and the claim that above 40% of maximal pulling strength a heavier draw weight goes with lower scores stands as not studied: there is a trend observed once, not a rule.
Holding time as a fitness test
The other half of the question is about the stopwatch. Three studies have timed how long archers can hold the string at full draw and set it beside their scores, and they do not point the same way. The clearest, on eighteen Indonesian recurve archers aged 13 to 14, finds the highest correlations in a battery of nine fitness tests: 0.748 drawing the string with the right hand and 0.632 with the left, against the score over 72 arrows at 70 m. Holding in the normal shooting position stops at 0.445, short of significance, and no other test gets there. A second Indonesian sample points the same way by an indirect route, because it compares the hold with the total of a test battery that includes it. In eleven Ukrainian beginners aged 18 to 20, on the other hand, string hold time does not follow the score, with correlations of 0.14 and 0.26.
With one result on each side, the claim that finger hold time at full draw is linked to the score is contested. The link shows up in young archers who already train and not in those who have just started, on samples so small that none of the results stands on its own, and none of the three studies accounted for draw weight, which could explain part of it: a heavier bow is likely to be held for less time.
That holding time can be lengthened with strength work is easier to say. Five studies of archers, all small and all Indonesian, find it longer after six to eight weeks of extra work: in twelve club archers dumbbells and elastic bands take it from 21.9 to 27.9 seconds; in twenty boys aged 12 to 15 free weights lengthen it from 15.3 to 17.7 seconds and machines from 15.1 to 16.4; a game-based circuit takes thirty children aged 10 to 13 from 14.5 to 15.8; in twelve archers aged 13 to 17 bands take it from 31.8 to 41.2 seconds and the plank from 32.2 to 45.7. The direction is unanimous, and the claim that strength work lengthens the time an archer can hold the bow at full draw is reported. It goes no further because none of these studies has a group shooting the same arrows without the extra work, so nobody knows how much of the gain comes from the programme and how much from shooting itself or from getting used to the test.
The figure also shows a limitation of the test: some groups start at about 15 seconds and others at over 30, probably because draw weight and the point at which the stopwatch is stopped differ, so a figure taken from one study cannot be compared with your own.
Holding capacity or maximal strength
You often hear that an archer needs endurance more than strength. Nobody has measured an isometric hold at full draw and a maximal lift in the same archers, and the two pieces of work that come closest both point the other way. In thirty-one Malaysian archers aged 13 to 18, upper-body endurance, measured with press-ups, goes with score at a correlation of 0.896, but maximal drawing strength taken on a bow scale goes with it even more closely, 0.945, and carries more weight in the same regression. In sixty national-level Indian archers, twelve weeks of general gym strength work raised the score more than twelve weeks of specific work with holds at full draw, bands and a strap, 569.1 against 557.4 points over 72 arrows in the adjusted means, and those who did both gained the most; the groups, however, were not randomised and arrow volume was not held constant.
The claim that for archers, isometric endurance matters more than maximal strength is therefore contradicted: the evidence there is runs against it, but it is thin and not enough to settle the question. In the little there is, both qualities count.
Steadiness of force while aiming
The Copenhagen study had a second finding, more solid than the threshold. The archers had to hold a force equal to their own draw weight in the aiming position, watching their force curve on a screen, and the authors measured how much it fluctuated around the mean. The more the force fluctuated, the lower the mean score per arrow, and that single measure accounted for 45% of the differences between the fifteen archers. It is an association measured once, on fifteen people, and published as a conference abstract, so the claim that holding the force steadier over time gives better scores is reported, with a limitation the claim page states plainly: nobody has tried training steadiness to see whether scores rise, so which way the link runs is unknown.
The authors connect their two findings with reasoning the study did not test: if shoulder steadiness declines as the load rises relative to maximal strength, raising maximal strength should make it easier to hold the same force steady, and this should be taken into account when choosing draw weight. It remains the authors' hypothesis.
A comparison carried out in Turkey suggests that archers are steadier than people who do not shoot. Sixty-five traditional archers and sixty-five sports science students held half of their maximal elbow flexion strength for thirty seconds. Maximal strength was the same in the two groups, 71.2 against 71.5 kg, but the archers fluctuated less, with a coefficient of variation of 6.17% against 7.20%, and stayed close to the target value for 80% of the time against 74%. The difference was clear in the men and not significant in the women. It is a single cross-sectional study, measured on the biceps rather than at full draw, and the claim that at the same maximal strength, archers hold a steadier force than non-archers is reported; the comparison cannot say whether steadiness comes from shooting or leads people to it.
The draw weight that feels comfortable
That leaves the criterion most used on the range, the feel of the bow. The only study that has measured it dates from the 1960s: forty-nine beginner university students, before and after a 24-lesson course, with a bow attached to a tensiometer. On average both measures rose, maximal pull by 5.7 pounds in the women and 5.1 in the men, and the pull judged comfortable by 7.9 and 6.2 pounds, but the two increases did not go together: the correlation between how much strength grew and how much the comfortable pull grew was 0.05 in the women and -0.16 in the men. The beginners also accepted the bow they were given as comfortable.
The claim that when an archer gains strength, the draw weight that feels comfortable does not change accordingly is reported, with major limitations: these are beginners on a university course, with no control group, and the feeling itself is unstable, because in the women the comfortable pull of the first test correlated at just 0.42 with that of the second.
Where the research stops
Taken together, these studies answer the question about seconds better than the one about draw weight, and on the right draw weight they stop early: nobody has changed the ratio between draw weight and strength in the same archer to see what happens to the score, nobody has trained steadiness of force and measured the score before and after alongside a control group, and the programmes that lengthen holding time have not linked the seconds gained to points on the target. That is why every figure on this page should be taken for what it is: a measurement on a few archers, not a threshold to respect.
What I take from it for the shooting line
My answer to the question about seconds is that there is no number to reach in the shot. The hold on one arrow lasts a few seconds, and the score data do not give a limit that applies to everyone, although an aim that runs well beyond your usual time is still a signal worth watching. Holding time as a fitness test is for comparing yourself with yourself, not with others: measure it with the same bow, the same rule for stopping the stopwatch and at the same point in the session, because from one study to the next the same test gives values that can differ by a factor of two.
On draw weight I answer more cautiously. If you have a way of measuring your maximal pulling strength in the aiming position, experienced archers offer a reference point: in the two samples measured the bow averaged between 37% and 44%. It is a reference and not a limit, because the 40% threshold did not reach significance in the only study that looked at it, and because beginners sat at similar fractions too. I put more trust in what shows up on the last arrows of an end: if the bow sways more there while you aim, that is the same sign that went with fatigue in the studies, and the question to ask is whether the draw weight will hold up for a whole competition.
Finally, I would use the feeling of comfort as a starting point rather than as a measuring instrument. In the only study that followed it, how much stronger people became did not predict how much their comfortable pull rose, and beginners grew used to whatever bow they had in their hands. After a block of physical preparation, then, I would not assume that the draw weight that "feels" right has changed as much as strength has: I would rather measure strength again and review draw weight with a coach, watching the steadiness of the hold more than the seconds. How to train strength is covered in the article on specific strength for archers, and the criteria for changing bow are in the one on choosing draw weight.