Anyone who trains outdoors asks it sooner or later: should you spend the season at seventy metres, the competition distance, come back close to the target often to work on the shot, or keep changing distance? Beginners' courses almost always start a few metres from the boss and move back as the groups tighten; in clubs you hear that you should shoot mainly the competition distances, because the sight and the shot are tuned to those metres; others advise never staying at the same distance, because changing it forces you to find your aim again every time. Then there are those who shoot long to build stamina, convinced that seventy metres is more tiring and that this prepares them for the fatigue of a tournament.
The studies that have put these ideas to the test are few and small, almost all of them recent, with one exception from 1966. What they find often runs against habit on the range, and in one case two experiments built the same way reach opposite conclusions: in one, always training at the same distance raises the score more than alternating; in the other, the reverse happens. Here I set out what they measured, how firmly, and where the measurements stop.
Where a beginner starts
The only experiment on starting distance is also the oldest. In 1966 a lecturer at Ohio State University followed three of his own archery classes, fifty-eight beginner university students, who trained twice a week for ten weeks. For the first five lessons one class shot at 10 yards, just over nine metres, one at 25 and one at 40; after that, each class worked through the other distances in a different order, and all of them were tested several times with 24-arrow tests worth a maximum of 216 points.
At the middle distance, 25 yards, the three means ended up at 99.45 points for those who had started close, 107.00 for those who had started right there and 106.55 for those who had started far away, with no significant differences. The same happened at the end of the course, over a full round at 20, 30 and 40 yards: 315.30, 292.44 and 315.60 points. Even at 10 yards the class that had learned there had the lowest mean of the three, 177.65 against 183.10 and 189.55, and at 40 yards the same thing happened to the class that had started at 40, with 50.65 points against 58.80 and 62.00.
Before turning this into a rule, one has to look at how the study was built. The classes were not randomised, and when they were tested at a given distance they had not had the same number of lessons: at 40 yards, for example, the class that had started there was at its sixth lesson, the other two at their tenth and eleventh. The author himself saw a trend in it, without significant differences: how much had been shot counted for more than the point one had started from. That is why the registry writes the claim in the direction of the result, namely that for a beginner, starting close and moving back gradually gives no better results than starting far, and lists it as reported: there is a single study, and in sixty years nobody has repeated the test. An Indonesian study from 2024 on ten club archers, with a cycle that rises from ten to twenty and thirty metres and then starts again, saw them all improve, but without a group starting far away it says nothing about the comparison.
The same 1966 study also shows how much the first few metres weigh. Moving from 10 to 20 yards, the classes lost 58 points out of 216 on average, then about 20 at each further step, up to 40 yards. It is one of the findings behind the claim that scores fall as shooting distance increases, listed as reported in the registry, and I discuss why the group opens up with distance in a separate article. It also explains, in part, why courses start close: the arrows land on the target, and the idea, which the author mentions in his opening lines, is that the satisfaction of the first shots helps learning. Whether it helps people learn better, however, the only test we have does not show.
Competition distances
For experienced archers the question takes a different shape. Anyone who has shot recurve for years has spent thousands of hours at competition distances, and if training leaves a specific advantage, those distances should score better than their length alone would predict. A 2016 study went looking for it with a simple idea. It had ten experienced archers recruited in several countries, including five national champions and a European championship medallist, shoot thirty arrows from twenty distances between 22 and 98 metres; it then repeated the test with eight archers from the Polish women's national team, two of them Olympians, from eighteen distances between 22 and 75 metres. The distances included the competition ones and many that none of them ever shoots, such as 46, 62 or 86 metres.
From the scores at the distances never trained, the authors drew for each archer the line linking score to distance, and used that line to calculate the expected score at the competition distances. If training there gave a specific advantage, the real score should sit above the line. The decline with distance turned out to be almost linear in both groups: about 1.34 points over thirty arrows for every metre in the men and 0.60 in the women, with a line that accounted for 90% and 91% of the variability in the scores. The test that looks for a curve where a straight line is not enough did not find one, at the strict threshold the authors had set themselves.
There is one exception, at 70 metres in the men, where the real score clearly exceeded the expected one (p = 0.001, with a medium effect size). At 30 metres there was a difference, but it did not survive the correction for multiple comparisons that the authors themselves apply; at 50 and 90 metres there was none. In the women no competition distance sat above the line, and at 50 metres the real score was even below the expected one, by a difference that was no longer significant after the correction. Among the archers with the most accumulated hours, between 7,280 and 19,448 by their own estimates, the two women and one of the two men had nearly linear curves; in the other man the curve bent, with the real score above the expected one at 70 metres and below it at 50. For 70 metres the authors put forward an explanation that they themselves call speculation: it is the only distance at the Olympic Games, and archers may shoot it more than the others.
The same study therefore points both ways, and the claim that training at competition distances gives a specific advantage at those distances is contested. The authors state two limitations: in the first experiment the archers recorded their own scores, and those shooting outside Poland sent them by email; and the distances were shot in blocks, over three or four consecutive sessions. I would add that eighteen archers in all are few for detecting a small effect.
A fixed distance or changing distances
The only training experiments on this question come from the same Indonesian university, with one author in common and the same design: twenty archers in two groups matched on their starting score, one always training at the same distance and one changing it, and a final test of 36 arrows at 30 metres, with a maximum of 360 points. The first, from 2022, points towards changing distance: the group that alternated went from 274.7 to 302.0 points, an average gain of 27.3, and the fixed-distance group from 275.7 to 291.2, a gain of 15.5. The second, from 2024, points the opposite way: after eighteen sessions of 72 arrows over six weeks, the group always at 30 metres went from 278.9 to 303.6 points, up 24.7, and the one alternating 10, 20 and 30 metres from 272.4 to 286.9, up 14.5.
The two results do not carry the same weight. The 2022 study appeared in a journal with questionable editorial standards, does not say at which distances the two groups trained or for how many sessions, and gives two different values of the statistical test for the same group. In the 2024 study the final test was at 30 metres, the very distance at which the fixed group had shot all its arrows, so it also measures the advantage of training at the test distance; the abstract, moreover, and one line of the methods mention 40 metres, while the description of the test says 36 arrows at 30. In both, finally, all twenty archers improved, and neither has a group that went on training as before.
For this reason the claim that training at varied distances raises the score more than always shooting at the same one is contested: there is one study in favour, in a questionable venue, and one against, in a venue with no warnings, with a design that favours the fixed group. This question and the one about competition distances also overlap. If the 2024 group came out ahead because it trained at the test distance, its result speaks to specificity more than to variability, and neither experiment tested the archers at a distance they had not trained, which is exactly the comparison on which the 2016 study rests.
Long distances, fatigue and concentration
That leaves the idea that shooting long builds stamina. A single study has put it to the test, on forty sub-elite archers aged 14 to 20 from East Java, randomly divided into four groups of ten for twelve weeks. Three groups followed the same protocol at 20, 50 or 70 metres, with 108 arrows per session and no more than ten seconds per arrow; the fourth carried on with its usual training, which also took place at 70 metres, but without the time limit. Endurance was measured with a test of six 35-metre running sprints, through a fatigue index that falls when repeated effort is better sustained.
The index fell in the 50-metre group, from 3.29 to 1.68, and in the 70-metre group, from 4.84 to 2.95, while at 20 metres it did not change significantly. The usual-training group, which also shot at 70 metres, barely moved, from 3.71 to 3.47, and between the three distances of the protocol the differences were not significant. The most telling finding is that of the usual-training group: the long distance without the protocol did not change the measure, and neither did the protocol at the short distance, so the study does not allow the improvement to be attributed to either one on its own. The 70-metre group also started from a higher index than the others, and part of its fall may be regression to the mean. The claim that training at the longer distances improves resistance to fatigue is therefore contested, with a limitation that applies to the whole study: a running sprint is not the same as holding your score over the last ends of a tournament.
The same study measured concentration with a mirror-drawing test, and the authors conclude that the long distances improve it more than usual training. Their tables tell a different story: the time on the test shortens in every group, and the largest drop is in the usual-training group itself, from 74.5 to 47.0 seconds, against 74.0 and 54.8 in the 70-metre group; on errors the four groups cannot be told apart. Much of the improvement is learning the test, and the claim that training at the longer distances improves concentration more than ordinary training is contested as well. In neither case did the study look at the score on the target.
Where the studies stop
Taken together, these studies answer narrower questions than the one we started from. Nobody has compared a season spent at 70 metres with one spent at varied distances by measuring competition scores. The recent training experiments last twelve weeks at most and put ten archers in each group, young, from clubs or from a provincial squad; when they measure shooting they do so at a single distance, 30 metres, and the one on long distances did not measure the score at all. The study on competition distances, the only one on archers of international standard, is not a training experiment: it takes a snapshot of archers who had already trained as they wished.
What emerges is a picture in which the ideas of the range find no support, without the opposite ideas finding it in their place. Starting close did not give better results, although the only test is sixty years old and its classes were not randomised; competition distances showed no specific advantage, apart from 70 metres in the men; changing distance came out ahead in one experiment and behind in the other; and the long distance on its own neither changed the fatigue index nor gave an advantage on the concentration test, where everyone improved.
What I take to the shooting line
No single right distance to train at comes out of these studies, and I will not propose one. They do suggest a few things that change how I look at habits on the range, and I keep each of them at the level of the evidence behind it.
The first concerns beginners. Starting a few metres away has practical reasons, and the registry does not say it does harm: it says that the only comparison found no advantage in doing so. With a pupil who can already hold the shot together after a few lessons, then, I see no reason to keep them close to the target just to follow a progression, all the more so because in the 1966 study the trend, though without significant differences, favoured the lessons taken, in other words how much had been shot.
The second concerns competition distances. In the experienced archers of that study the curve of score against distance was almost a straight line, and the distances trained for years did not sit above it, apart from 70 metres in the men. From this I draw a hypothesis that nobody has tested with an experiment: the work done at one distance does not seem to stay locked there, and shooting now and then at intermediate distances, or at ones you never shoot, may cost nothing. Before a tournament, on the other hand, its distance is needed anyway to set the sight and see your group there, and that is a practical reason that does not depend on these studies.
The third concerns the choice between a fixed and a varied distance, and it is the one on which I am most cautious. The two experiments contradict each other, and the better-built one also measures the advantage of training at the test distance. If I am preparing for a tournament at a single distance, training mostly at that distance is consistent with the sounder of the two experiments, with the limitation just mentioned; if the tournaments change distance, alternating has not shown a cost that can be confidently attributed to the variation. From the point of view of motor learning there are good theoretical reasons to vary conditions, but in archers, for now, the measurements neither confirm nor refute them. In both studies, moreover, every archer improved, and without a group that carried on as before there is no way of knowing how much of the gain came from the programme and how much from the distance.
The last concerns fatigue. Shooting at 70 metres did not, on its own, change the fatigue index, nor did it give more on the concentration test than ordinary training did, and nobody has measured end-of-tournament staying power as a function of training distance. If I am looking for staying power, then, I do not leave it to the metres: I look at how the session is built, how many arrows and at what pace, and I check it against the score of the last ends of a full round, compared with that of the first ones, which is the measure that matters to an archer.