You step up to the line, nock, and the first arrow of the end nearly always feels like the one that goes off best: the target is still empty, the clock is full and there is no score to protect. At the club this feeling has become a rule, and it travels with another one about the same moment: if you reach the peg out of breath, after the walk to the target or a climb on a course, you should wait for your breathing to settle before you shoot. Both rules lead to the same practical question, which is whether to shoot the first arrow straight away or to take your time.
On both of them the measurements are few. That the first arrow scores more than the ones after it was found in a study of ten adolescent archers, while eighteen elite archers give a different picture, and that is why the claim is contested in the registry. On breathlessness there is a single conference abstract, which measures the first arrow after a run but never sets it beside a first arrow shot at rest, and the claim is not studied. Around these two questions there are a few nearby findings, on the time each archer takes per arrow and on heart rate raised by running, which help to show how far the evidence goes.
The first arrow in an indoor competition
The finding in favour comes from a real competition. A Greek group followed seventeen adolescent male archers during an indoor event under FITA rules: twenty ends of three arrows in two minutes at 18 m, split into two rounds of ten with half an hour's break between them. Ten were experienced, with about four years of shooting and an average age of sixteen and a half; seven were novices, with a few months of shooting and an average age of fourteen. The study was mainly about the heart, using a monitor that recorded every beat, but it also noted the score of each arrow and its position in the end.
In the experienced archers the second arrow scored less than the first, with p below 0.05, and the third scored less again, with p below 0.001. In the novices no such drop is reported. The study does not publish absolute scores, so it is not known how many points the difference is worth, and it treats the thousand or so arrows as independent observations, even though they came from seventeen people who shot sixty each: that way of doing the sums tends to make differences look more solid than the sample allows. Within the end, moreover, the hearts of the experienced archers and the novices behaved differently, with heart rate variability indices moving in opposite directions, and the authors do not tie the drop in score to any particular cause.
Six arrows from eighteen elite archers
The second finding was not designed to answer this question. A Bulgarian study from 2025 measured shoulder position in eighteen elite archers as they shot six arrows indoors, at 18 m on a 40 cm vertical triple face, and one of its tables gives the average score of each arrow: 8.3 for the first, 7.5 for the second, 8.5 for the third, then 8.0, 7.7 and 7.6. The first arrow is not the highest, because the third beats it, and across the six arrows the average stays broadly flat. Arrows outside the scoring zone, counted across all eighteen archers, number none on the first, one on the second and one on the third, and two on each of the last three.
It is weak evidence, and the registry treats it as such: descriptive statistics only, no test of arrow order, a regional journal. The paper does not even say whether the six arrows were a single end or two ends of three, as is usual indoors, so it is not known which arrow was the first of each end. Read in the most prudent way, though, it is a result on elite archers that does not go the way of the rule, and with one study in favour and one against, the claim that within an end the first arrow scores more than the ones after it has been contested since 2025.
Nor do the two studies allow two different explanations of the same pattern to be separated. If the last arrows of an end go worse, it may be that the first has something extra, because it is shot calmly at an empty target, or that the last ones have something missing, because time is running short and they are shot in a slight hurry. It is an alternative reading that nobody has yet put to the test, and for the archer it is not a detail: in the first case the task would be to repeat the first arrow, in the second to manage the clock.
Widening the view from the end to the match, elite competition tells yet another story. In World Archery matches between 2013 and 2019 that went to a shoot-off, 3,645 performances by adult archers each compared with themselves, the second set was shot 0.3% higher than the first; in matches that went to five sets the average per arrow went from 9.138 in the first set to 9.151 in the second. It is a different question, because it concerns the set and not the single arrow, and the gap is measured in hundredths of a point, but in the registry the claim that in a match the first set is shot slightly lower than the second is reported. In competition, at least on that scale, the start is not the highest point, and the study does not say why.
The time each arrow takes
The archer's question, shoot straight away or take your time, has a side that these studies only touch in passing. In the Greek competition the time for each shot was measured from the moment the archer reached into the quiver to the release, and the experienced archers took 28.1 seconds on average against 20.2 for the novices. Of everything measured, shot time was the most closely related to the score of the arrow, more than the heart indices; the model, though, explained about 12% of the variation in score and pooled experienced archers and novices, so what it mainly says is that those who shoot better take more time, not that taking more time makes you shoot better.
On the length of the aim, the studies do not agree. In a British experiment eight elite recurve archers, made to hold their aim for three times their usual time, dropped from 8.60 to 7.75 points per arrow at 70 m, with the conditions always in the same order and so with fatigue adding to duration. In sixteen young Malaysian archers, on the other hand, across 576 arrows at 70 m, aiming time said nothing about the score of the single arrow, and in eight high-level French archers the relationship changed from one archer to the next, in opposite directions. That is why the claim that holding aim for too long makes the shot worse is contested, and the right length of time, if there is one, looks like a personal measure rather than a rule.
On one point, by contrast, the evidence goes one way. In Japan forty-eight experienced archers, from high school, university and adult clubs, shot six-arrow trials at 50 m with forty seconds per arrow, and every one of them finished each shot inside the limit, with time to spare for some. That is the basis on which the registry reports that the time allowed for each shot does not trouble experienced archers, with two limits: the trials were short and held on the practice field, and the archer who stretches out the shot under pressure has not been studied. Forty seconds per arrow is also what the indoor end of three arrows in two minutes allows.
Reaching the line out of breath
The second belief is about breathing. In field and 3D archery you reach the peg after a walk, sometimes uphill, and in target archery too you may come back from the target at a brisk pace so as not to miss your turn; the advice you hear is not to shoot until your breathing has settled. The only study that has looked at the first arrow after effort is an abstract presented in 2016 at an American sports medicine congress. Fifteen experienced archers, using two compound bows supplied for the test, one single-cam and one dual-cam, shot at 20 yards first at rest and then straight after five minutes of uphill walking on a treadmill, thirty seconds' rest and a 300-yard run, each time four arrows as quickly as possible without giving up accuracy.
The first arrow after the effort landed on average about six centimetres from the centre of the group shot at rest, 59.07 millimetres with the dual cam and 59.27 with the single cam, and aiming time did not change: 3.49 seconds at rest and 3.72 after the effort with the dual cam, 3.62 and 3.59 with the single cam. The offset of the first arrow did not follow heart rate, with correlations of -0.02 and 0.24, and the authors conclude that a raised heart rate does not spoil the first arrow.
The comparison the abstract reports, however, is between the two bows, and that is why in the registry the same study supports a different claim, that after physical effort, single-cam and twin-cam bows lose the same amount of accuracy. To answer the archer's question you would need the first arrow after the effort set beside a first arrow shot at rest, and the abstract does not report one: on their own, six centimetres do not tell you whether that is a lot or a little for those archers. The standard deviations, around five centimetres on means of six, also show that things varied enormously from one archer to another, with a single first arrow per archer and per bow. There is also a passage that does not add up: with the dual cam the group of the best three arrows measures 80 millimetres at rest and 56 after the effort, and the authors call it a significant difference with a p of 0.16. Finally, the question has not been tested on recurve, nor with breathlessness of the kind that happens in competition, so the claim that arriving at the shooting line out of breath spoils the first arrow is not studied.
A nearby finding comes from thirteen archers of a national team, all of international standard. They shot ends of three arrows at 18 m, within one minute, first at rest and then straight after three minutes of shuttle running, with the shooting line three metres from the finish; heart rate while shooting rose from an average of 112-119 to one of 166-168 beats per minute, and the score of the ends did not change. It is one of the results that make the claim that a lower heart rate at the moment of the shot improves the score contested: when heart rate was raised by running, the score did not follow it. The study, however, adds up the three arrows of each end and does not say how the first one went, which is exactly the arrow the question is about.
Where the studies stop
Taken together, these findings leave open the two questions we started from. On the first arrow, the question has not been tested over many ends shot outdoors and indoors, with different time limits and with an analysis that accounts for arrows coming from the same archer: that is the check that would show whether an order effect exists and, if it does, whether it comes from the first arrow going better or from the last ones going worse as time runs short. On breathlessness, nobody has compared, in the same recurve archer, the first arrow after a brisk walk or a climb with a first arrow at rest, with enough arrows to pick up a small effect.
What can be said, then, is little and precise. In ten experienced adolescents the first arrow did better than the other two; in eighteen elite archers it did not. In the study that measured the score of ends straight after a shuttle run, an average heart rate above 160 beats per minute cost no points, but the first arrow was not looked at on its own. And the time allowed for each arrow, at least in the short trials that have been measured, is enough for experienced archers.
What I take from it on the shooting line
The first thing I take from it is that I would have no reason to change the rhythm of the end to make use of an advantage of the first arrow, because in elite archers that advantage did not show up. It makes more sense to shoot the first arrow with the same routine as the others, without rushing it because the target is empty and without loading it with expectations because it ought to be the best.
The second is that your own pattern can be looked at, but it has to be recorded on purpose. The scorecard lists arrows from the highest score to the lowest, and the shooting order is lost; in practice it is enough to number your arrows, or to note the position of each one on a plotting sheet, and after a few dozen ends you can see whether the first, second or third stands apart from the others. Over a handful of ends a difference of a few tenths can arise by chance, so it makes sense to wait until you have many before drawing anything from it.
The third concerns breathing, and here the evidence neither tells you to wait nor tells you not to. What it says is that the time allowed for each arrow, at least in the short trials that have been measured, is enough for experienced archers, so if I reach the line out of breath, taking a few breaths before the first arrow costs me little; I do it to feel ready, not because a study has shown that the arrow gains from it. The same reasoning applies to aiming time: since the right length varies from archer to archer, it pays to know your own rather than follow a general rule, and the article on aiming time explains how to measure it.