How many arrows a week it takes to improve is a question that comes up sooner or later, and it usually gets a round, confident number in reply. Research does not offer a number like that. What it does offer is a fairly clear picture of how much archers shoot at different levels, a few measurements of what happens to the muscles over a long session, and some data on volume and injury that point in different directions.
In short, the picture is this: elite archers shoot a lot, often more than fifteen hours and several hundred arrows a week, while some club archers compete on fewer than two sessions a week. The best archers train more, but the studies that set hours against score did not find that more hours bring more points, and nobody has followed the same archer while their volume changed. The right number, then, has to be worked out from your own week, and the data help you see what to watch while you do it.
How much competitive archers shoot
The most direct comparison comes from a study of 62 high-level recurve archers: 40 at the 2012 German National Indoor Championship and 22 at the European Outdoor Championship the same year. The Germans averaged 108 arrows per session over 2.8 sessions a week, roughly 274 arrows a week; the archers at the Europeans did 5.1 sessions of 160 arrows, close to 700 arrows a week, two and a half times as many. The study reports the three averages separately, which is why multiplying arrows per session by sessions does not give the weekly total.
That higher-level archers train more than the rest is what every study comparing different levels has found, and in the registry the claim is reported. Ten British national team archers of Olympic level report 34.5 hours a week against 4.4 for ten archers from a university club; eight French archers in the national top twenty about 21 hours against 6 for seven archers on the regional circuit. The gap narrows when the levels are close, though, and every one of these comparisons sets different groups side by side, measured once.
At elite level the hours fall into much the same band. It is reported that an elite archer spends more than fifteen hours a week training: eighteen hours over nine sessions for a squad at a Malaysian national sports school, about twenty-one for the eight French archers, thirty hours of shooting plus six in the gym for the Turkish national team recurve archers. The threshold alone does not separate levels, because a group of Iranian provincial-level archers already reports fourteen hours. That high-level archers train between three and six hours a day is reported as well, with a limit that matters: in the only study that made volume one of its questions, 51 elite archers from 22 countries report an average of 4.27 hours of shooting a day on five days a week, but only 56.8% of them fall within the band. One in five trains for two hours, one in five for seven or more.
The youth figure comes from the European Youth Championships: two hundred archers aged 13 to 20, 16.9 on average, report about 163 arrows per session, around five sessions a week and almost fifteen hours of training and competition, with a spread so wide, a standard deviation of nearly eight hours, that many sit below that average.
Look beyond the elite and the distance between one group and another reaches an order of magnitude, which is why the registry reports that competitive archers' training volume varies enormously from one setting to another. Seventy-five German target, 3D and field competitors report 2.4 sessions and 4.3 hours a week, while fifteen national-level university compound archers in Taiwan report 36. Twenty traditional archers from a Polish club shoot an average of 111 arrows per session, but on 1.6 sessions a week, and within that same club some shoot 86 arrows a session and others 157. Even within a single country the range is wide: among 58 Korean competitive archers, squad training lasts 122 minutes on average at middle school and 66 at high school.
All of these figures describe habits. They are nearly always reported by the archers themselves and written into the sample description of studies about something else, and they rarely say whether the hours are spent shooting or simply at the range: they should be read as a picture of how people train, not as thresholds to reach.
Training hours and score
If the best archers train more, it seems natural to assume that the hours produce the score. The studies that set hours against score did not find that, and the registry reports that weekly training hours do not go with higher scores. Among 115 American recurve archers of mixed ability in the mid-1980s, the weekly hours they reported for shooting had no link with their average score for the year (r = 0.05), and the same held for hours of physical preparation and mental training. Twenty years earlier, on a university course for beginners, groups that reached the tests with up to six sessions' difference did not score differently. A 2026 French thesis points the other way: eight elite archers on about 21 hours a week score 654 out of 720, seven regional archers on about 6 hours score 523. These are two groups chosen by level, though, which also differ in age and body mass, and the thesis does not analyse the hours.
Years of practice do not settle the question either. The claim that years of practice tell how good an archer is stands as contested in the registry: in the Chinese national team the official technical grades follow the years, whereas in the study of the 2012 championships years did not clearly separate the two groups (15.7 against 11.8, p = 0.061) and weekly arrows did (p = 0.001). In the other direction there is a single study of what happens when training drops: nine young sub-elite Indonesian archers, measured before and during the pandemic restrictions, went from 302.4 to 280.7 points over 36 arrows. That a spell of reduced training makes the score drop is therefore reported, but on nine archers, with no group that carried on training as before and with the reduction itself never measured.
What these comparisons share is that they set different people side by side, measured once. Nobody has followed the same archer while their hours changed, so it is not known whether volume builds level or level, with everything that comes with it, makes the volume possible.
How the arrows are spent in training
Counting arrows says little about how they are shot. The only direct measurement comes from a Malaysian national sports school, where three sessions of ten national-level archers, some of them international, were filmed and timed in the period leading up to competitions. Repeated technical practice took 83.3% of the time, physical preparation about 1% and breaks and transitions 17%, and not a single minute went on competition-like practice. The registry reports that in that squad almost all the time goes into repeating technique and none into competition-like practice, with one qualification from the coach: on some days the squad shot scored sessions, and none of the three filmed sessions was one of them.
The same study observed five other sports, and archery had the least transition time: 17% of sessions lasting 129 minutes on average, against 43% for hurdles. That archery practice spends less time on breaks than other sports is also reported, but the ranking does not survive the statistics (p = 0.09 across the three individual sports), and three sessions of a single squad describe how one group and its coach work more than how a sport works. For anyone wondering how many arrows to shoot, it is still a useful reminder: two archers with the same weekly count can be doing two very different kinds of training.
What happens to the muscles after 100 arrows
On 100 arrows per session the most direct measurement is a 2024 Polish study that used electromyography on the shoulder muscles of the string arm in twenty traditional club archers, at rest, after 50 and after 100 arrows in the same session. Up to 50 arrows the signal amplitude rises in most of the muscles measured. After 100 the picture splits: the middle and posterior deltoid and the upper trapezius keep raising their activation, while the infraspinatus and lower trapezius, which had risen at 50 arrows, drop off. In the infraspinatus, between 50 and 100 arrows, both the mean amplitude, from 162.0 to 113.2 µV, and the median frequency, from 60.7 to 49.3 Hz, fall, which is the sign usually read as fatigue. It looks more like a shift of work between muscles than a breakdown, with some compensating for the drop in others.
Even in that study, though, not everything points towards fatigue: the three parts of the trapezius and the middle deltoid show no change in frequency, and the posterior deltoid's frequency goes up. In 2026 the same group of archers was measured again with a myotonometer, which reads a muscle's tone, stiffness and elasticity, and after 100 arrows none of the six muscles measured had changed; for these archers, after all, a hundred arrows is a normal session rather than an exceptional load. That is why, in the registry, the claim that beyond 100 arrows in a session the shoulder muscles fatigue is contested: the same sample gives results in two directions, and neither study counted the score.
The other half of the 2024 study concerns habitual volume. The archers had been split between those who said they usually shot up to 100 arrows a session, 86 on average, and those who shot more, 157 on average, and the muscle trends did not differ between the two groups. Within the groups, however, those who shot less showed more change from one measurement to the next and those who shot more a steadier picture. Being used to high volume might matter, then, but with thirteen archers in one group and seven in the other the study cannot say.
Archers themselves say that something gives way by the end of a session. Of 59 university kyudo practitioners, 58% say that at the end of training they could still shoot, but not with good form, and the registry reports that at the end of a training session archers can still shoot, but not with good form. That is an impression, not a measurement. In the laboratory, after sixty 20-second holds at full draw, twelve Italian archers kept their score and their muscle pattern, but the sideways sway of the bow grew in every one of them, by 20% on average. How many arrows into a real session form starts to give way is something nobody has measured.
Do arrows wear out?
Anyone shooting seven hundred arrows a week eventually asks the same question about their equipment. An arrow is loaded mainly at two moments, and the registry reports that the arrow is stressed hardest only at launch and at impact, while in flight almost nothing happens to it. An instrumented point with an accelerometer, shot from a 64 lb compound, went beyond its ±16 g range only at those two moments; high-speed video from the same work put launch at about 1,100 g and the stop in a bag target at about 3,700. Every arrow shot, then, adds one launch and one impact, and volume multiplies them.
What remains in the shaft afterwards has been measured by a single piece of work, a 2019 engineering preprint: one arrow per material, carbon, aluminium and cedar, vibrated by an actuator for about 600,000 cycles and then measured again. The authors conclude that nothing significant changes, but their own tables all lean the same way: after the cycles the estimated stiffness is higher in every measurement, by 52% in the carbon arrow, from 486 to 737 newtons per metre, and the natural frequency rises with it. Part of those differences is noise from the method, since the estimated mass of the carbon arrow drops from 10.3 to 9.0 grams, which an intact shaft should not do; and the cycles of an actuator are not launches and impacts. That is why the claim that hundreds of thousands of vibration cycles do not appreciably change an arrow's characteristics is contradicted in the registry, though by evidence that carries little weight. On the measurements available, nobody can say that arrows do not wear, nor how much they change over a season of training.
Volume and injury
The study of the 2012 championships also contains the finding that most upsets the usual assumptions: the archers at the Europeans shot two and a half times as many arrows as the Germans, yet 36.4% of them had had at least one overuse injury in their career, against 71.8% of the Germans (p = 0.007). Archers who belonged to a national or regional squad also reported fewer, and the registry reports that higher-level archers and those in a squad report fewer overuse injuries.
The authors read the difference mainly as the effect of more professional coaching, and they point to strength, especially in the stabilising muscles of the trunk, and to technique. They also accept that the direction could run the other way: archers who do not get injured are more likely to reach the top and stay there. The data come from a retrospective questionnaire covering the whole career, on two groups that differed in level, age and coaching, so they are consistent with this reading but not enough to prove it.
The same study feeds into a broader question, whether more training days a week go with more overuse injuries, and there the registry has it as contested. The only evidence in favour is a conference abstract on 239 archers in Florida, with a weak correlation (r between 0.15 and 0.17). Among 156 Indian university archers, those with shoulder pain shoot the same number of arrows a day as those without, and among 58 Korean competitive archers shoulder pain does not change with the number or length of sessions. All of these studies ask people to recall their load and their injuries at a single point in time, so they cannot say which came first: an archer who got hurt may have cut back on sessions.
Where archers get hurt is clearer. It is reported that in archery the shoulder is the most common site of overuse injury: six independent samples, from Japan and Florida to Germany, Korea and the European Youth Championships, put it first, often on the string side. Volume, then, is judged together with technique, strength and recovery, with an eye on the shoulder.
Young archers
The picture for young archers is the most worrying. Among the two hundred archers at the European Youth Championships, interviewed with questionnaires administered by physiotherapists, 43.5% reported shoulder pain during training, 30% used medication to be able to train, 31.8% had had to stop because of an injury and 52.3% had received physiotherapy. The registry reports that half of elite youth archers shoot with pain that has lasted for months: 50.5% report training-related pain lasting more than three months, and 45% say it stops them performing their technique as they should.
The study describes rather than compares different volumes, so it does not say how many arrows are too many for a young archer. The authors link those figures to intensive training, about 163 arrows a session five times a week, and to unbalanced conditioning: 84.5% strengthen the upper body and only 49% train their legs. A second study, of eighteen young Indonesian recurve archers, reaches the same conclusion from fitness tests, which is why it is reported that in archers' physical preparation, the legs are neglected. The authors of the European study also call for young archers' programmes to be matched to each one's skeletal maturity, which is a recommendation of theirs rather than a measured result.
How fast to increase volume
On how to build volume, the 10% rule comes up often: do not raise your arrow count by more than a tenth on the previous week. It circulates in physical preparation generally, but in archery it has no basis of its own: that weekly arrow volume should rise by no more than 10% at a time has the status "not studied" in the registry, because no study of archers has compared different rates of increase. The closest evidence comes from twenty wheelchair Paralympic archers: the ten in the experimental group raised the arrows in the middle part of their sessions by about a third for twelve weeks, alongside other interventions, and none of the measures collected got worse. Pain and injuries, however, were not recorded.
In my presentations on training load I have turned the principle of gradual progression into practical tools: a daily arrow log, session RPE (perceived exertion multiplied by duration) and the ratio between the load of the last 7 days and that of the last 28. The idea comes from other sports, and it is that the body copes with gradual increases better than with sudden jumps. Nobody has tested it in archers, so I use these tools to spot the jumps rather than as thresholds: a week of 300 arrows after three weeks at 150 is exactly the case a log makes visible. The week's volume, in turn, sits inside the season's, which is the subject of periodisation.
Quality and quantity
Conversations about volume often turn into a debate about quality versus quantity, as if the two were opposed. They are not, but there is an order between them. The muscle measurements at 100 arrows are contested, and archers themselves say their form holds up less well by the end of a session, so the last arrows of a long session are where quality is hardest to keep, and it pays to plan the session with that in mind.
- Learning or technical correction phase: shorter sessions, full attention on every arrow, stop when quality visibly drops.
- Volume-building phase: gradual increases and an arrow log, stopping before visible technical compensations appear.
- Pre-competition phase: volume comes down while competition simulation goes up, which never appeared in the filmed Malaysian squad. Cutting arrows before a competition is a choice that comes from general training theory: that cutting arrow volume in the days before a competition improves performance has not been studied in archers.
What the research does not yet tell us
No study has compared, say, 150, 300 and 500 arrows a week while measuring score, adaptation and injury over a large sample and a long period. The studies available are almost all cross-sectional and descriptive, on small samples or particular populations: they say who shoots how much and who gets hurt more often, and they open a few windows on what happens within a session. Any "science-based" volume prescription is therefore a reasonable inference rather than a validated protocol, and anyone who names an exact weekly arrow count with certainty is simplifying more than the data allow.
What you can do with these data
Putting the pieces together, this is what I take from them in practice:
- To get your bearings: the elite archers in the studies shoot around 160 arrows a session and train more than 15 hours a week, between 20 and 30 in several groups, while among club competitors one to three sessions a week is common. These are descriptions, not targets: the comparison tells you where you are, not where you ought to be.
- For the session: 100 arrows is not a proven threshold. Watching your form matters more, because once it gives way in the last ends, the extra arrows are shot with a different movement from the one you are building.
- For the week: increase gradually, keep an arrow log and note any pain. Shoulder pain that keeps coming back is information to take to your coach and to whoever looks after your health.
- For physical preparation: in the data on young archers, the legs are the most neglected area.
- For adolescents: technique and gradual progression come before volume.
The right number for you depends on your technical level, your physical base, the draw weight of your bow, the phase of the season you are in and how many sessions a week you can manage without eating into recovery. That is why there is no equation with a single solution: it is a balance you find over time, with a log to hand, rather than by copying whoever shoots more than you.