Everyone has a ritual before stepping up to the shooting line. Some swing their arms and circle their shoulders a few times, some lean against a wall and stretch their chest for half a minute, and for a few years now some have been bringing a foam roller to the range and running it over the lats and forearms. Then come the warm-up arrows, and by that point the question is always the same: which of these things helps, and whether one of the two kinds of stretching might cost something on the very first arrows that count.
The answer starts with the size of the effect. The only study that compared dynamic stretching, static stretching and no stretching just before shooting found differences of about one and a half points out of three hundred: after dynamic stretching the score was slightly lower, after static stretching almost the same as with no stretching at all. On the foam roller there is a single study, and its design cannot say whether the roller helps. These are small results from small samples, and here I set out what was measured, how firmly, and what can be taken from it to the range.
What archers do before shooting
You often hear that archers turn up at the range, string the bow and start shooting. Questionnaires on today's competitive archers describe a different habit: 86% of 156 Indian archers and 88% of 200 young elite archers at the European youth championships say they warm up, the latter for about a quarter of an hour, and in Korea competitive archers warm up for 17 minutes on average, a time that drops to 10-11 minutes among university and company teams. Among the young European archers, 73% also stretch before training, so the question in this article concerns most people who compete.
What remains rare is the work done away from shooting. Of the same Indian archers, 85% do no gym work at all for the shoulder, among 75 German competitive archers only 22% add strength training related to shooting, and fewer than half of the young European archers cool down. That is why the claim that few archers warm up or do supplementary exercises is contested: the studies point in opposite directions because they measure two different habits, and today almost everyone warms up while few do strength work. They are all questionnaires, so they report what archers say they do.
The shoulder stretching study
The study that comes closest to the question is from a Turkish university and appeared in 2021. Thirty intermediate recurve archers, fifteen young women and fifteen young men of about 17, shot on three different days, 72 hours apart and in random order, so that each of them served as their own comparison. Every day began in the same way, with five minutes of easy running and the usual warm-up arrows. Then came the part that changed: five shoulder exercises in three sets of 15 seconds, done either as static stretching, that is held positions for the chest, the latissimus dorsi, the trapezius and the rotator cuff, or as dynamic stretching, that is rhythmic arm swings and rotations, or no stretching at all. Straight afterwards came three ends of ten arrows at 18 m.
The average score out of 300 was 246.2 with no stretching, 245.5 after static stretching and 244.8 after dynamic stretching. Statistically, dynamic stretching stands clearly apart from both other conditions, with p below 0.001, while the test between static and no stretching gives p = 0.055, just above the threshold. This is where the size of the effect matters: the largest difference, between dynamic stretching and none, is just under one and a half points over thirty arrows, less than a tenth of a point per arrow, while scores varied from one archer to the next by 12-14 points.
One detail of the statistics calls for caution. There are 0.6 points of average difference between dynamic and static stretching, yet the test gives a value that would mean almost all thirty archers shot worse after dynamic stretching, which is unusual when people differ from one another by 12-14 points. The individual data are not published, so this cannot be checked.
For this reason the claim that dynamic shoulder stretching just before shooting worsens the score is reported in the registry: there is supporting evidence from a design that is sound on paper, but it is a single study, on intermediate archers and over a short test of thirty arrows, and what it shows is that dynamic stretching does not help rather than that it does serious harm. Its twin, the claim that static stretching before shooting does not change the score, is also reported, with one more limit: with p at 0.055 and thirty people, a difference of seven tenths of a point can be neither confirmed nor ruled out. In this sample static stretching did no visible harm over a short test, and the study says nothing about competition or about stronger archers.
One last point about the design, because it changes what the question means. All three days began with the run and the warm-up arrows, so the study does not compare stretching with not warming up: it compares three ways of finishing a warm-up that had already been done. The thirty arrows also came straight after the exercises, so they are exactly the first arrows that worry the archer asking the question.
The foam roller
On the roller there is a single study, also Turkish, published in 2023 in a regional journal. Twelve male archers aged 18 to 20, with two years of practice, were measured on three days 48 hours apart: the first with no roller work at all, the second after thirty seconds of foam rolling, the third after sixty. Each day they took a reaction time test to light and to sound, a one-leg balance test and a shooting test.
The numbers are large. The score on the shooting test goes from 79 on the first day to 134.5 on the second and 117 on the third, and reaction times and balance improve alongside it, with the time on each leg rising by twelve or thirteen seconds. The problem is the order: the three conditions always took place in the same sequence, with the day without the roller always first, so that was also the day on which the archers knew the tests least well, and it was the only one without any warm-up. A gain of about 70% in score over two days, turning up on four different measures at once, looks more like the effect of warming up and getting used to the tests than that of half a minute on a roller, and the study has no way of telling them apart. The paper also does not say how many arrows the test included or at what distance it was shot.
This is why the claim that foam rolling before shooting improves score is not studied: the study exists, but as designed it cannot say whether the roller helps, and the registry keeps it as context. The one comparison in which the duration matters is the score itself, with thirty seconds doing better than sixty, 134.5 against 117, and that comparison carries the fixed order with it too, because the sixty seconds always came last.
The roller and reaction times
The same study also measures how quickly the archers respond to a signal. Compared with the first day, reaction to light goes from 347 to 271 milliseconds after thirty seconds on the roller and to 285 after sixty, and reaction to sound from 397 to 277 and 289. The difference between the two durations is not significant, and the largest gain is on sound, the test that started from the worse value, which is the typical pattern of regression to the mean. The fixed order remains the main limit, and the study does not link reaction times to score either.
The claim that using a foam roller before shooting shortens an archer's reaction times is nonetheless reported, and the difference from the score lies in what is being asked of the measurement. That reaction times shorten, under the conditions of the study, is a finding with limited supporting evidence: twelve participants, a fixed order, a regional journal. That the roller is the reason, and that it helps on the target, the study does not show.
Flexibility, through a programme lasting weeks
Stretching before shooting and a flexibility programme are two different things, even when they use similar exercises: the first is judged on the arrows that follow, the second on the body after weeks of work. There is one study of the second kind on archers, published in 2025. Thirty Indonesian archers of regional and national level, chosen because they were inflexible, followed a twelve-week programme of three sessions a week combining myofascial release with a foam roller, stretching and mobility exercises, with the load and the length of the holds increasing every four weeks. On the sit and reach test they went from 13.2 cm to 18.9 cm at six weeks and 22.6 cm at twelve, a large effect, and the response was similar in men and women.
The claim that a mobility and stretching programme improves an archer's flexibility is reported, with three limits: there was no control group, the sample was chosen precisely because it was stiff, which makes gains easier, and the sit and reach measures the posterior chain, not the shoulder and thoracic mobility that shooting asks for most. Nobody then looked at the score after the programme. I go into thoracic mobility at more length in the article on thoracic mobility and diaphragmatic breathing.
The first arrows
That leaves the second half of the question, the one about the first arrows. The thirty arrows of the stretching study are already a partial answer, because they came straight after the exercises: static stretching did not change them visibly, and dynamic stretching lowered them by less than a tenth of a point each. In competition there is another finding about the start. In World Archery matches from 2013 to 2019 that went to a shoot-off, comparing each archer with themselves, the score in the second set is 0.3% higher than in the first, and across all matches that went to five sets the average per arrow rises from 9.138 in the first set to 9.151 in the second.
In the registry the claim that in a match the first set is shot slightly lower than the second is reported, but the study does not say why it happens. The warm-up, early tension or simply settling in are all possible readings that nobody has separated, and the gap is measured in hundredths of a point per arrow.
Where the research stops
Taken together, these studies answer a narrow question. They tell us what happens to thirty arrows at 18 m shot by intermediate archers aged 17 straight after five shoulder exercises, and what happens to twelve archers trying the roller in a fixed order. With stronger archers, at outdoor distances, over a full competition, or half an hour after stretching, the question has not been tested. The same goes for the simplest comparison, warming up or not, which has not been measured on archers' scores with a design able to separate it from anything else: in the stretching study every condition included a warm-up, and in the roller study the day without a warm-up was also the first. Nobody, finally, has looked at whether a few weeks of flexibility work change the shot.
What I take from it for the range
The first thing I take from it is proportion. Between the kinds of stretching tested the difference is about one and a half points out of three hundred, far less than the spread from one archer to the next, which in the same study was 12-14 points, so the warm-up is not the place to look for points. It makes sense to keep what the study had in every condition, a few minutes of light activity and the warm-up arrows, and to do it the same way every time, so that the first arrows do not depend on how the preparation went that day.
On dynamic shoulder stretching, the only data say that just before shooting it does not help. If arm swings and shoulder circles help you feel loose, I would put them at the start of the warm-up, before the practice arrows, rather than just before the arrows that count: this is a cautious choice, not something a study has compared. Static stretching, on the numbers we have, did no visible harm over a short test, so archers who are used to it have no reason to drop it out of worry about their first arrows.
On the foam roller, the data are not enough to say anything about score. If you like it and it gets you to the line feeling more comfortable, no study says you should drop it; expecting extra points from it, on the other hand, asks of the roller what the study could not show. Flexibility, finally, is a matter of weeks, and belongs in your training plan rather than in the five minutes before you shoot. I discuss the warm-up as a habit for the shoulder, and what the data say about injuries, in the article on injuries in archery.