Thoracic mobility, diaphragmatic breathing and HRV

This article deals with the part of breathing that is trained away from the shooting line: its mechanics, meaning the diaphragm, the rib cage and the mobility of the thoracic spine that houses them; slow breathing done as a daily exercise; the archer's lungs, as spirometry measures them; and morning heart rate variability, HRV, which many people use to decide how much load to take on. What happens in the minutes and seconds before the draw is covered in the article on how to breathe before the shot, and the split is simple: this page is about how the breath is built, that one about how it is used when you shoot.

On these subjects there are few measurements on archers. Nobody has measured thoracic mobility in archers, while the only mobility and stretching programme tested on archers improved flexibility on a test that looks at the posterior chain, not the thorax. The figure of six breaths a minute comes from studies of healthy adults. On the lungs there is one intervention with young beginners, in which eight weeks of breathing exercises improved respiratory function, and two young samples in which a larger lung capacity goes with higher scores. Using HRV to dose training load, finally, comes from endurance sport. The work I suggest rests on that base, and throughout the article I say where each recommendation comes from.

Thoracic rotation

The thoracic spine is made up of twelve vertebrae and, because of the way its facet joints are oriented, it allows far more rotation than the lumbar spine, which barely rotates. In archery this matters for a specific reason: in an open stance the pelvis stays turned slightly towards the target while at full draw the shoulders line up with the line to the centre of the target, and torso rotation makes up the difference between the two. The more open the stance, the more rotation is asked of the thoracic spine.

If that section is stiff, it is reasonable to expect the body to find the rotation elsewhere: the pelvis following the shoulders and taking stability away from the base, the shoulders shifting and changing the alignment of the bow arm, the lower back compensating. This is biomechanical reasoning, though, because no study has measured thoracic mobility in archers, nor its link with posture at full draw or with score. The advice that circulates, mine included, starts from here and from rotational sports, not from measurements of shooting.

Another question about the stance comes up often, and it has nothing to do with rotation: how far forward to put your feet relative to the shooting line. The rules only require the body to be over the line, and with the feet moved forward an archer gains about twenty centimetres of distance. What that is worth has been estimated by a single piece of work, and it is a model that keeps the group the same size and moves it closer: between 0.25 and 0.42 points over 72 arrows outdoors, between 0.36 and 1.08 over 60 arrows at 18 metres. Nobody has tested the two positions on the same archers, so it remains open whether a less natural position costs more in stability than those few tenths; among 99 World Cup finalists who were photographed, only 12% stood forward.

You can estimate your own rotation at home with a simplified version of a test that physiotherapists run more rigorously. Sit astride a chair, so the pelvis stays locked, with a stick resting on your shoulders behind your neck; rotate the torso to one side without moving your feet or leaning, have someone photograph you from above, then repeat on the other side. It is a rough measurement, not to be read to the degree: it is for spotting a marked asymmetry between the two sides and gives you a starting point to photograph again after a few weeks under the same conditions. Measure cold rather than straight after the exercises, because in the minutes that follow the range is a little wider and the comparison would not be like for like.

Asymmetry worries many archers, since we always shoot from the same side, and for the neck there is at least one reassuring finding. In 75 German competitive archers, with an average age of 47 and ten years of shooting, neck range of motion turned out to be good, about 20 degrees above the age threshold that separates a healthy neck from a pathological one, and the 50 who always shoot from the same side did not differ from the 25 who also train from the opposite side, either between groups or between sides. It is a single sample, measured once, and anyone still shooting at 47 has already been selected among those whose neck has given them no trouble. No similar comparison has been made for the thoracic spine.

Thoracic mobility exercises

There is one measurement on archers close to this work: a mobility and stretching programme improved the flexibility of thirty Indonesian archers of regional and national standard, chosen precisely because they were inflexible. Over twelve weeks, with three 45-minute sessions of foam rolling, stretching and mobility work, their sit and reach went from 13.2 to 22.6 centimetres, and the gain did not stop halfway: 5.7 centimetres in the first six weeks, another 3.7 in the second six. The limits are those of a first study, because there was no control group, archers who start stiff gain more easily, and the sit and reach measures the posterior chain, not torso rotation or shoulder mobility. So the study shows that an archer's flexibility responds to a regular programme; how much the thoracic spine responds is something nobody has measured.

The programme I suggest is shorter and more targeted: five minutes a day and four exercises covering the directions the torso moves in during the draw, with consistency mattering more than intensity. Two things help: the first is to breathe through them, with a slow exhalation in the position, which makes it easier to let go rather than tighten up; the second is to attach them to something you already do, like your morning coffee or getting home from work, which is the most reliable way not to skip them.

• Exercise 01

  Foam roller extension

  Lie back on a foam roller placed across the spine at mid-thoracic level, arms crossed over your chest. Let the spine drop into extension, hold for 30 seconds, and repeat at 3-4 positions along the thoracic spine.

  A passive mobilisation into extension, useful above all for anyone who spends long hours sitting.

  Duration

  3 min

  Frequency

  Daily

• Exercise 02

  Side-lying open book

  Lie on your side with your knees bent and your arms straight out in front of you, together. Slowly open the top arm towards the floor behind you, rotating only the thoracic spine, hold for 2 seconds and return: 8-10 repetitions per side.

  An active rotation dissociated from the pelvis, which is the movement the draw asks of the spine.

  Sets

  8-10 per side

  Frequency

  3-4x/week

• Exercise 03

  Thread the needle

  On all fours, slide one hand under the opposite arm, reaching towards the floor as the shoulder and thoracic spine rotate. Hold for 5-10 seconds and return: 8-10 repetitions per side.

  It combines rotation and side bending of the thoracic spine.

  Sets

  8-10 per side

  Frequency

  3-4x/week

• Exercise 04

  Slow cat-cow

  On all fours, alternate flexion and extension of the spine slowly and with control, following the breath: breathe out as the back rises, breathe in as it drops, for 15-20 breathing cycles.

  It works in flexion and extension, complementing the rotation, and it is the exercise where mobility and breathing meet, because every movement follows the breath.

  Cycles

  15-20

  When

  Before training

If some of the exercises go into your warm-up, you should know what has been measured just before shooting. In a study of thirty intermediate archers aged about 17, who shot 30 arrows at 18 metres on three separate days, after static shoulder stretching the score was 245.5 against 246.2 without stretching, a difference that a sample of thirty can neither confirm nor rule out; after dynamic stretching it dropped to 244.8, clear-cut statistically but little more than a point out of 300. Nobody would notice differences that small over an end, and in that test neither kind of stretching helped: static stretching did no visible harm, dynamic stretching did a little. That is why I keep a short dose in the warm-up, cat-cow and a few rotations, and leave the full mobility work for another time of day.

The diaphragm and the rib cage

The diaphragm is the main breathing muscle: it descends as you breathe in, creating the pressure drop that fills the lungs, and rises as you breathe out. It also has a second, less familiar job, because together with the pelvic floor, the internal obliques and the transversus abdominis it controls the intra-abdominal pressure that stabilises the spine in complex movements. It is therefore a breathing muscle and a postural one at the same time, and in archery breathing and trunk stability share the same few seconds.

There is also a mechanical reason why mobility and breathing belong in the same article. As you breathe in, the upper ribs move like a pump handle lifting and the lower ribs like a bucket handle rising to the side, the two classic images of respiratory anatomy: a full breath expands forwards, sideways and backwards too, into the back. If the thoracic spine is stiff, it is plausible that the rib cage moves less in each of these directions and that the diaphragm works in a tighter space; in archers this, too, is reasoning rather than measurement.

Chest breathing, with the shoulders rising on every breath in and the abdomen still, shifts the work onto the accessory muscles of the neck. Breathing with the diaphragm, with the abdomen expanding before the chest, makes a long, soft cycle easier, and it is the slow rhythm that counts for the autonomic nervous system: in healthy adults slow breathing shifts the balance towards the parasympathetic side while you are doing it. Many archers look for this calm alertness before they shoot, although in archers the studies point in opposite directions on whether parasympathetic activity while aiming goes with the best arrows: a conference abstract finds it higher on the best arrows, while the full study published later finds the reverse.

The calm built through breathing practice is also something different from the slowing of the heart around the release that gets talked about so much. Studies on archers do not agree on when it happens or in whom: the largest study of elite archers finds an acceleration in the last seconds of aiming, and the most recent measurements put the lowest point two or three seconds after the arrow has left. What happens while aiming belongs to the shot; breathing practice works on the state you start from.

The archer's lungs

Respiratory function is measured with spirometry: you blow into an instrument as hard as you can, and it gives the forced vital capacity, meaning how much air you can push out after a full breath in, the volume breathed out in the first second, and peak flow. The test depends on how hard you blow and on how the operator runs it, and lung volumes increase with height, age and sex. That detail matters, because almost all the studies on archers are on young people.

The most quoted link is that in archers a larger lung capacity goes with higher scores. The cleanest data come from 42 archers aged nine to twelve: forced vital capacity correlates with the score over 30 arrows at 18 metres at 0.378 and the volume breathed out in the first second at 0.367, while peak flow, maximal ventilation and inspiratory muscle strength are not linked to score. The earlier study, on 32 young Malaysian archers, shows the same direction only in a chart, without a test. Neither held height and age constant, and at that age a bigger child has more air and often more years of shooting: it is an association, and it does not say that training your breathing brings points.

That respiratory function can be trained is suggested instead by the only intervention: 36 beginners aged 14 to 18, split into three groups of twelve, added a quarter of an hour of alternate nostril breathing, or imagery, or nothing, twice a week for eight weeks. In the breathing group vital capacity and expiratory volume rose more than in the other two, and it is the only finding in archers that a few weeks of breathing exercises improve respiratory function. The same study has weak points, though: peak flow does not separate the groups, expiratory volume also rises with training alone, and group allocation is described as random in the abstract and as sequential in the methods. In the same study, moreover, the score over nine arrows at 18 metres rose more with imagery than with breathing, where the gain was two and a quarter points.

On bow type there is a single comparison, in 160 Indian university archers measured during a championship: peak expiratory flow ranged from 492.5 litres a minute with the Indian bow to 508.3 with the compound, a gap of about 3% that the author puts down to the equipment without reporting a test. Recalculating from the published means, the difference falls just short of significance, but that is a recalculation, and the journal has questionable editorial standards: the registry keeps the study as context and treats the question as not studied.

Slow breathing: six breaths a minute

The figure of six breaths a minute has a basis, and it does not come from archers. A systematic review of 15 studies of healthy adults and two narrative reviews agree: the heart-rate oscillations linked to breathing, respiratory sinus arrhythmia, meaning the heart speeding up on the breath in and slowing on the breath out, peak at around six breaths a minute, a cycle of roughly ten seconds, and the value narrows towards 5.5 breaths when inhalation and exhalation last the same time. At that rate heartbeat and breathing move in phase, and the sensitivity of the baroreflex, the mechanism that regulates swings in blood pressure, also increases. The exact rate varies from person to person, though, so six breaths is a starting point rather than a target; heart rate variability biofeedback works precisely this way, by finding each person's rate.

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The structured techniques are different routes to the same result: slowing the breath and giving the mind a count to follow. The table sets them out, with the best moment for each.

The shared principle matters more than the labels: a slow rhythm and a breath out never shorter than the breath in, and in the 4-7-8 twice as long. The reason lies in respiratory sinus arrhythmia, because the heart slows on the breath out, the phase in which the vagus nerve acts most strongly on the heart: lengthening the breath out lengthens the braking part of the cycle. The exact seconds and the name of the technique are mainly scaffolding to get there.

The 4-7-8 is also the technique used in the only study on archers that isolated breathing against anxiety: twenty para-archers, half of whom did twenty-four quarter-hour sessions over two months, and in the trained group the sport anxiety questionnaire score fell by just under a third, while in the controls it stayed put or rose slightly. The groups had five people per division and the questionnaire was filled in before and after the programme, not on competition day.

The dose I recommend is eight to twelve minutes a day, seated or lying down, somewhere quiet. In the first few weeks the slow rhythm feels unnatural, then it stops demanding attention, and that is when you can start bringing it into other moments of the day.

Among the measured effects of practice, the one closest to shooting concerns attention. In the two studies that tested it, training slow breathing improved sustained attention: in 39 healthy office workers after twenty sessions of diaphragmatic breathing with biofeedback at about four breaths a minute, and in the 36 young beginners from the lung study, who improved by 8.6 points on the Bourdon test with alternate nostril breathing, more than with imagery. In both, though, the controls improved as well, a sign that part of the gain is familiarity with the test, and attention was measured with a pen-and-paper task lasting a few minutes, not across a competition.

A few pointers are enough for practice: breathe through your nose when you can, because the nasal passage slows and evens out the flow on its own; keep a hand on your abdomen for the first few weeks, as a reminder rather than a check; use a pacer, an app or a metronome until you can hold the rhythm without counting. If you get tingling or dizziness, you are usually moving too much air: reduce the volume of each breath and keep the rhythm, and if it does not pass, stop. As for safety, a review of healthy adults finds no documented adverse effects in the literature of breathing at six to ten breaths a minute, but the data come almost entirely from short laboratory sessions: weeks of daily practice have been little studied, and the registry treats the question as not studied.

How to use HRV

HRV, heart rate variability, is the variation in the time between one heartbeat and the next. A healthy heart does not beat like a metronome: it speeds up and slows down all the time, and part of these small variations depends on how much the parasympathetic branch, the vagus nerve, is acting on the heart.

For daily measurement the index to use is RMSSD, as I explain in the article on HRV in archery: it is calculated from the differences between consecutive beats, estimates vagal tone, is little affected by breathing, and a couple of minutes are enough to compute it properly. The rule comes from psychophysiology and is transferred, because nobody has compared the indices against each other in archers. The same methodological review sets out the conditions that make readings comparable, namely the same time of day, the same sleep, no coffee or hard training beforehand, and the procedure follows from that: in the morning just after waking, seated or lying down, for two to five minutes, always the same way. You compare against your own series rather than other people's, because values vary enormously between individuals: in Turkish elite archers measured at rest, RMSSD averaged 82.8 milliseconds with a standard deviation of 52.9.

Many apps present a readiness score, a traffic light or a mark out of a hundred calculated with proprietary formulas. It is better to rely on RMSSD in milliseconds: it is the figure you can export, it means the same thing on any device and it stays comparable over time, whereas packaged scores change formula with app updates.

You do not need a laboratory: a chest strap remains the reference for signal quality, and many people use apps that read the pulse through the phone camera. Whatever the device, what matters is always using the same one, because different devices measure slightly differently and mixing them introduces artificial jumps in the series. When a reading surprises you, think back to the evening before, because alcohol, a late heavy meal or a short night can shift it, which is why the methodological review keeps them out of the hours before a reading; two lines of context next to each reading help a great deal in interpreting the odd ones.

That leaves the question of what the number says about load, and this is where caution is needed. That heart rate variability tells you whether the training load is right is a transferred claim: it has not been studied in archers, and the registry's only source is a review of elite endurance athletes that gives a two-sided answer. In the studies it gathers, both rises and falls in variability have been associated with poor adaptation, and in highly trained athletes variability can drop just as resting heart rate falls with fitness. Read as an average over several days and against the same athlete's own profile, on the other hand, in some Olympic athletes and world champions it tracked fitness and freshness before a major competition. A single morning's value, on its own, therefore does not tell you whether the load is right, while the trend over several days was useful in those athletes; whether that holds for archery, which asks far less of the heart, remains to be seen.

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Over months the series tells you other things, because the slow trend of the average, across eight or twelve weeks, is affected by everything together: training, sleep, stress and the seasons. Two warnings: if you change device the series starts again from scratch, because different instruments measure differently; and a trend that falls for weeks without a sporting explanation is a good reason to talk to a doctor, not to add breathing exercises.

On competition morning you measure as on any other morning, so as not to break the series, but that day's reading should not decide anything. The decisions HRV informs are training decisions, easing off, postponing, dosing, and they are taken on normal days; on competition morning the plan is already set, and a low reading at that moment can only unsettle you. You measure, note it down and look at it again over the following days, within the trend.

The eight-week protocol

The protocol lays the three strands out over eight weeks, deliberately staggered: in the first two you build the HRV series and learn the slow rhythm, then the mobility dose goes up and the breathing becomes a habit. Every row is designed to fit into a normal life.

Compared with the programme tested on the Indonesian archers, this one is lighter and shorter, eight weeks instead of twelve and five minutes a day instead of three 45-minute sessions. That study shows that an archer's flexibility responds to regular work, but not how much torso rotation responds, which is why expectations should be kept modest.

If you miss a day, pick up again the next day without starting over, because adaptation depends on the average across weeks, not on getting every single day right. When travelling, keep the minimum that survives anywhere, the breathing and the morning reading, and resume the rest when you are back. In week eight, repeat the stick test cold, under the same conditions as on day one, and look at the trend of the HRV average over the month.

Three things are reasonable to expect by the end: on the stick test, a few extra degrees, with no figure to promise, because nobody has measured thoracic rotation in archers before and after a programme; the slow rhythm should stop demanding attention; and the HRV series will be long enough to read a trend. Whether morning HRV rises with breathing practice, on the other hand, has not been measured in the studies in the registry: one review reports that after about three months of biofeedback twice a day, resting baroreflex sensitivity increases, which is a different measure.

Breathing in the shot

When the breathing trained at home reaches the shooting line, the oldest measurement we have is also the simplest, and it comes from kyudo. In a Japanese study from 1964, fifteen students from a university club imagined their own shot and then watched film of a master, with their breathing recorded by a tube resting on the chest: in the four graded archers breathing followed a fixed pattern, and the imagined shot closed with a slow breath out of four or five seconds, while in the eleven less experienced ones it changed with no fixed moment or shape. Nobody actually shot, the traces were compared by eye, and the question has never been measured in recurve or compound. A stable pattern does not mean the same pattern for everyone, either: in a field measurement on two trained archers, one breathed at 20 to 26 breaths a minute before the shot and the other, in the end that counted, at 7 to 9.

How that pattern is built, how and how long to hold the breath while aiming, and what to do when aiming runs long are questions about the seconds before the shot, and I deal with them in the article on how to breathe before the shot. The place where the breathing trained here enters the shot is the pre-shot routine, and the week before a competition is the time to try it under realistic conditions, not the morning of the qualification round.

The mistakes I see most often

With mobility the classic mistake is forcing it, chasing degrees by pushing rather than repeating: pushing past comfort in the first few weeks easily brings pain and guarding, the opposite of what you are after. You work within the comfortable range, every day, and accept that the degrees come slowly. With breathing the mirror-image mistake is breathing too much, turning diaphragmatic breathing into very deep breaths on the edge of hyperventilation, which bring tingling and light-headedness instead of the calm you were after. The right rhythm is soft, almost silent, and leaves you feeling quiet at the end of the session, not dizzy.

Then there is the hurry to bring everything into the shot. I have archers learn breathing techniques away from the bow for a few weeks, until they no longer need attention, because at full draw your attention is needed for the shot, as the article on attentional focus explains, and there is not enough of it for two things at once. And there is inconsistency: two intense weeks followed by nothing leave little behind, on all three strands, so small daily doses beat intense bursts with gaps in between.

With HRV the typical mistakes are three: measuring under constantly changing conditions, one day in bed, one standing, one after coffee, and then being surprised that the number jumps around; reading a single day's number as a mark, when the information lies in the average of several days compared with your own series; and, the subtlest, taking the reading while deliberately breathing slowly, which inflates the value at exactly the moment it was meant to capture your actual state.

The last mistake is the one most tied to shooting: turning breathing into one more thing to control while you shoot. Breathing work is done away from the shot precisely because its aim is to become automatic, like any other part of motor learning. If you notice while aiming that you are managing your breathing, carry on with the practice at home, away from the bow, for a few more weeks.

Away from the range

The hours away from the range weigh more than they seem: eight hours hunched over a computer work against torso mobility for far longer than five minutes of exercises, and chest breathing kept up all day is the opposite of the rhythm you are trying to train. A good part of the work on mobility and breathing is therefore done in ordinary life, not on the shooting line.

The countermeasures are simple: an active break every 60-90 minutes at the desk, with a few torso rotations and a couple of full breaths; three 30-second checks a day, morning, midday and evening, with one hand on the chest and one on the abdomen to see how you are breathing at that moment; and moving the slow breathing practice to the evening, which consolidates the rhythm and can help you switch off before sleep, one of the conditions the morning reading asks you to keep regular.

Why they are trained together

The three belong in the same programme for two practical reasons: they are trained in the same few minutes, away from the bow, and mobility and breathing meet in the rib cage, as we saw with the diaphragm. It is plausible that a stiff spine takes range away from the ribs, and breathing that is always shallow never asks the ribs to expand; HRV, measured consistently, goes alongside the work with a series to read over time. That training them together pays off more than training them separately is reasoning consistent with physiology, and nobody has tested it in archers.

This work also has its limits: it does not correct faulty technique, does not replace arrow volume and is not a therapy: persistent pain in the shoulder or back needs a professional assessment, not a foam roller, and for injuries what I say in the dedicated article applies. It is also slow work, whose effects are judged over months rather than weeks.

What you can expect after a few months remains a working assumption, not a measured result: the link between thoracic mobility and shooting in archers has not been studied, and the studies on breathing in archers are few and small. The kit comes down to a foam roller, a stick and something to measure HRV, the time to about twenty minutes a day; what it really takes is regularity, which is the hard part.

@misc{campagna2026_mobilitatoracicarespirazionediaframmaticaarcieri,
  author = {Campagna, Matteo},
  title = {Thoracic mobility, diaphragmatic breathing and HRV},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {matteocampagna.com},
  url = {https://matteocampagna.com/en/articoli/thoracic-mobility-and-diaphragmatic-breathing-for-archers},
  note = {accessed 2026-10-16}
}