Anyone moving from indoor to outdoor, or the other way round, hears much the same thing: they are two sports shot with the same bow. Indoors you shoot at 18 metres, on the 40cm face or the vertical triple face; outdoors recurve archers shoot at 70 metres on the 122cm face and compound archers at 50 metres on the reduced 80cm face. Between the two seasons the distance changes, and so do the target, the arrow's flight, the wind and the length of the competition, which is where the idea of two techniques and two separate preparations comes from.
One study cuts that idea down at a specific point. The only direct comparison between indoor and outdoor distances found the same muscle pattern from 18 to 90 metres, with higher intensity outdoors, which suggests that what changes is mostly everything around the shot rather than the shot itself. On the question that matters most to someone moving from 18 to 70 metres, how much of what you train at one distance carries over to another, the answers do not agree, either on the advantage of training at the competition distances themselves or on the advantage of changing distance often. And in the few archers in whom it has been measured, the arousal zone in which they shoot best also changes with distance.
What changes between 18 and 70 metres
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Distance and target face
Indoors, 18 m, less often 25 m, on the 40cm face or the vertical triple face, which keeps only the 6 to 10 rings of each face; for compound only the inner ten, 2cm across, scores 10. Outdoors, recurve shoots 70 m on the 122cm face and compound 50 m on the 80cm face reduced to the 5 to 10 rings.
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Format
Indoor qualification is 60 arrows in ends of three, with two minutes per end; the outdoor 70-metre round is 72 arrows in ends of six, with four minutes. The time per arrow is the same, but indoors you are back on the line every three arrows instead of every six.
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Arrow flight
At 70 m an elite recurve archer's arrow arrives in just over a second: 1.24 and 1.29 seconds on average in the two measurements available. At 18 m, leaving the bow at around sixty metres per second, it takes, by simple arithmetic, about three tenths of a second.
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Conditions
Indoors, no wind, constant artificial light and temperature. Outdoors, wind, light that shifts through the day and sometimes rain.
The drawing undoes a widespread idea, that the indoor ten is the harsher target. The 4cm recurve ten seen from 18 metres looks about a quarter larger than the 12.2cm ten seen from 70: in angular terms the indoor margin is slightly wider, not narrower. Compound is the exception, since indoors it scores only the 2cm inner ten; this is why, in a scoring model built on competition results, the recurve and compound curves separate indoors, whereas outdoors, with compound at 50 metres on the 80cm face, they almost coincide.
What makes outdoor harder lies elsewhere. Scores fall steadily with distance: in eighteen experienced archers asked to shoot from eighteen or twenty different distances the decline is almost linear, and across thousands of arrows shot in official Chinese competitions about 0.03 points per arrow are lost for every extra metre. The decline is also steeper than geometry alone would give. In the scores of major international events, 70 metres on the 122cm face scores like 50 metres on the 80cm face, whereas if the group grew only in proportion to distance the equivalence would fall at 76 metres. According to the same author's model, at 70 metres about three quarters of the points lost come from errors that grow with distance and a quarter from errors that grow with its square, wind among them, since according to ballistic models its drift grows in exactly that way. In the registry both the claim that scores fall as shooting distance increases and the claim that the group widens more than in proportion to distance are reported; the second with two limits, because everything is read through scores and the share that grows with the square is set by a calibration the author chose.
Wind is the part that does not exist indoors. Across 3,196 professional Chinese archers between 2010 and 2016, with temperature held constant, more wind means a lower average score per arrow and fewer arrows in the ten. And when sixty-five high-level Korean archers describe how they shot one of their arrows into the X, in the aiming and release phases the most cited theme is managing the wind, nearly half of all mentions. Both claims, that the more wind there is, the lower the score and that for high-level archers wind is the main challenge outdoors, are reported, the first on a single circuit and the second on a single national squad. The flight time, after all, is that of an arrow that reaches 70 metres in just over a second, and in that second the wind has plenty of time to move it.
The shot across distances
Two versions circulate among coaches. One holds that the shot is identical at every distance, with only the sight mark changing; the other treats indoor and outdoor as two disciplines with their own technical adjustments, such as an even more careful anchor indoors. The only study that has compared the distances of the two settings sides with the first.
It is a Belgian electromyographic study from 1990. Eight skilled archers with experience of FITA competition shot nine arrows at 18, 25, 50, 70 and 90 metres with electrodes on six shoulder and arm muscles. The activation pattern stayed similar at every distance, and trunk inclination did not depend on distance. Intensity did change, but not gradually: there were no differences between 18 and 25 metres, none between 50, 70 and 90, and the only significant step came between 25 and 50 metres, exactly between the indoor and the outdoor distances. Some of the series, however, were shot with a standard bow supplied by the researchers, whose draw force rose with distance, from 133 newtons at 18 metres to 235 at 70; the authors report no significant difference in activity between that bow and the archers' own, but the possibility that part of the step comes from the load remains.
That is why in the registry the claim that shooting technique is the same indoors and outdoors is reported: it holds for the muscle pattern and not for the load, and it rests on a single study, with the pattern compared qualitatively and no measurement of shot timing. It is not much, but it is the only direct evidence, and it points the opposite way from what archers usually hear.
If the shot stays the same, what changes between seasons is everything around it. Indoors, ends of three bring you back to the line more often, so a pre-shot routine that you can pick up again quickly matters; outdoors you have to hold the shot together for 72 arrows and read a wind that shifts during the round. The idea that the anchor has to be more precise indoors, because "at 18 metres millimetres count", finds no support in the geometry of the face either, since the indoor recurve ten looks slightly larger from the line than the ten at 70 metres. If anything, indoors, with no wind and a short flight, what shows up on the face depends almost entirely on the archer and the equipment, and a bad arrow has fewer outside explanations.
What scores look like indoors
A number circulates indoors too: a top recurve archer should be averaging over nine and a half per arrow, and anyone below that is not yet at a high level. Among the few comparable figures, the only one that concerns recurve alone goes against it. Six recurve archers from a national team, all with at least a year of international competition, shot a hundred arrows at 18 metres on a 40cm face, and over the ninety analysed their averages ranged from 8.22 to 8.94, with totals from 740 to 805: none reached nine. They were shooting in a laboratory, with motion-capture markers on the body, a condition that may cost something compared with a competition.
The other figures do not settle the matter. Seven elite Indian archers, over 210 arrows at 18 metres, shot 117 tens, 86 nines and 7 eights, an average of about 9.5, but four of them shot compound and the figure for the three recurve archers cannot be separated out. A German study of seven national squad archers gives averages from 9.42 to 10.13, but it records each arrow to a tenth of a zone with the exact centre worth 11, so those numbers sit above a competition score by construction. The claim that indoors at 18 metres an elite recurve archer averages over nine and a half points per arrow is therefore contradicted: the only direct evidence goes against it, and it is a single study of six archers. The nine and a half remains a figure heard on the range, not a measurement.
From 18 to 70 metres: what carries over between distances
The change of season raises a practical question: whether arrows shot at one distance also count at the others, or whether each distance has to be built on its own. Archers are often told to train mostly at the distances they shoot in competition, because the sight, the shot and the reading of the group get tuned to those distances and not to others. The most direct study, from 2016, put exactly this idea to the test.
Ten Polish international recurve archers shot thirty arrows from each of twenty distances between 22 and 98 metres, and eight women from the national team from each of eighteen distances, including many they never train at. From the untrained distances the researchers built a line and checked whether, at competition distances, the score sat above it. The decline with distance turned out to be almost linear, about 1.34 points per metre on the thirty-arrow total in men and 0.60 in women, and at competition distances the score sat no higher above the line than expected, not even in the archers with the most training hours behind them. The exception is 70 metres in men, where the actual score clearly exceeded the expected one (p = 0.001). In women, at 50 metres, it even went the other way, although the difference does not survive the correction for multiple comparisons.
The training studies do not settle the matter either. Two Indonesian experiments from the same university, with the same design, twenty archers matched on starting score and a final test of 36 arrows at 30 metres, give opposite answers. In the first, from 2022, those who alternated distances gained 27.3 points and those who stayed at one distance 15.5, but the journal has questionable editorial standards, the paper gives two different values of the statistical test for the same group, and it does not say at which distances or for how many sessions the archers trained. In the second, from 2024, after eighteen sessions of 72 arrows over six weeks the group always at 30 metres came out ahead, up 24.7 points against 14.5 for those alternating 10, 20 and 30 metres; the final test, however, was at the very distance at which the fixed group had shot all its arrows. In both studies all twenty archers improved, and neither measures the untrained distances.
In the registry both ideas are therefore contested: that training at competition distances gives a specific advantage at those distances, and that training at varied distances raises the score more than always shooting at the same one. For an archer moving from 18 to 70 metres, this means that the studies do not agree on a better way of spreading arrows across distances. Scores fall with distance along a line that belongs to each archer, and the only specific gain measured is at 70 metres in men, the Olympic distance.
Arousal and attention
Mental preparation often talks about finding your ideal arousal zone, as a single level to recover at every competition, whether you are shooting 18 metres indoors or 70 metres in head-to-head matches. In the few archers in whom it has been measured, however, the zone changes with distance. A 25-year-old Brazilian archer, ranked second in her country, rated her arousal on a scale from 1 to 9 after every competition end: the band in which she was most likely to shoot her best ran from 5.0 to 7.7 at 18 metres, from 3.9 to 5.1 at 50 and from 4.1 to 4.6 at 60, narrowing as she moved away from the target up to 60 metres. The following year three top Brazilian archers, followed from March to December with at least forty readings per archer at each distance, showed the same picture: different zones at 18, 30, 50, 70 and 90 metres and in the Olympic Round at 70 metres, for arousal as for heart rate.
The claim that the arousal zone in which an archer shoots best changes with distance and with the competition format is reported, and no more than that. These are four archers, studied by the same research group, with comparisons read off graphs without a test and zones described on the same data they were derived from; nobody has checked that they predict later competitions. The format, too, was that of the time, with the four-distance FITA round and the Olympic Round shot separately. The cautious lesson is that the arousal level at which an archer shoots well indoors is not necessarily the one they need at 70 metres, and it makes sense to watch it distance by distance rather than look for a single one.
The rhythm differs as well. Indoors, concentration switches on and off every three arrows, and what counts is being able to start again after a poor arrow without carrying it into the next; outdoors the ends are longer, the round lasts longer and conditions change while you shoot. Mindfulness is often suggested for holding attention over long stretches, but in archers the studies on its effect on attention do not agree, and the claim that a mindfulness programme improves an archer's attentional control is contested.
Equipment across the two seasons
Many archers keep the same bow all year, and the most common change between seasons is the arrows. Indoors, archers often use fat shafts, up to the maximum diameter the rules allow, 9.3 millimetres, because an arrow that touches the line takes the higher score and a fatter shaft touches it more often. The advantage, however, does not come from shooting tests: it sits inside a calculation, which is why the claim that indoors the thickest shaft allowed is the better choice is transferred. Outdoors the opposite holds. In a wind tunnel and at 70 metres, with machine-shot arrows, the thinner arrow drifts less, and that claim is reported; that a heavier arrow drifts less at the same diameter rests on calculations alone, and is transferred.
Indoors, recurve archers often drop their draw weight slightly, because with no wind and at 18 metres a slower arrow costs little. Every change of draw weight or shaft, though, also changes how the arrow's spine matches the bow, and calls for fresh tuning, both when moving indoors and when going back outside. On stabilisers habits vary a great deal from archer to archer, and the claim that stabilisers improve shooting accuracy is not studied: the only comparison with and without stabilisers, on seven elite archers, found no significant difference in accuracy, but it is too small to rule out an effect. Choosing longer or shorter rods between seasons therefore remains a matter of feel and balance.
The change of season
In Italy the indoor season runs roughly from October to March and the outdoor season from April to September. Three mistakes come up often at the changeover, and what follows does not come from any study: it is practical guidance.
The first is switching abruptly from one distance to the other and expecting last season's scores straight away. Two to three weeks is the usual guideline for finding your sight marks, timing and reading of the group again at the new distance, and it is a habit of the range, not measured data. The second is using the changeover to rebuild parts of the shot: anyone moving between seasons is already changing distance, equipment and conditions, and deep technical changes are better placed in a period well away from competition. The third is running one season straight into the next without a break, whereas a few lighter weeks between the two let you start again with the equipment properly retuned.
For those who shoot without competitive ambitions, indoor has one practical merit above all: it lets you keep shooting through the months when the weather rules out the outdoor range, and come back in spring to a shot that has not stood still for half the year.