What Are The Benefits Of Archery? Top 5 Health Perks

Archery is an incredible sport – it’s really active and fun. But is it good for your health? In this post, we’re going to discuss the main physical and mental benefits of archery.

The main benefits of archery are strength building and improved hand-eye coordination. By practicing the sport you’ll also benefit your focus, patience, and self-confidence, and relax by spending more time outside. Overall archery has a lot of physical and mental health benefits.

So let’s go over every health perk of archery and explain a bit more how it benefits it, and why it’s important.

1. Strength & exercise

Archery involves a lot of muscles, mainly in your upper body. These include your back, shoulders, core, and arms, but other parts of your body are involved in the movements as well. The short bursts of hard exercise are really great for building strength and developing your muscles. With proper form, archery can stimulate a lot of muscle growth.

Along with the strength building, archery also involves a lot of cardio. Running from target to target in a 3D shoot or to retrieve your arrows are only some of the examples. Clearly, some types of archery, like 3D and field archery, involve more cardio exercise than others, but all have some aspects of cardio in them.

Surprisingly, a lot of calories are burned when practicing archery. A research many people like to show when discussing this, by The Economist, was done on Olympic gold medal winners and stated that archery is among the top calories burning sports. So if you’re tired of running on a treadmill, pick up a bow and start practicing.

What you have to notice while practicing archery is that you properly stretch your muscles and work to balance them. Many archers have an overdeveloped back and arms, which creates an overall bad posture. To avoid this, always shoot with proper forms and stretch your muscles often. Also, try to hit the gym and work on your weaker muscles for balance. If you put attention to these things, archery will be a great sport that will help you develop your muscles and do cardio.

2. Hand-eye coordination

Practicing archery can help build a strong connection between your eyes and hands. This connection is essential for performing your shot process. Archers have to notice the visual cues and rely on them when performing the shot. With everything happening at the same time, they don’t have the time to think about what they’re doing or get mixed with small details of the shooting.

After some time, archers become more able to control their hands based on sight, with incredible precision. It really helps with aiming and with the overall shooting process.

3. Focus & Patience

Any precision-based sport requires a lot of concentration and patience to master. Being a quick shot can be important, but being focused is essential for eliminating distractions and performing. It takes time to build focus and patience, but archery benefits that.

Bowhunters and target archers alike know that timing is an essential aspect of archery. You have to pull the trigger right in time to hit the target. Waiting for the correct timing requires a lot of patience – you might crouch on the ground for a long time until your target is revealed, or hold your bow at full draw until you feel comfortable to pull the trigger. Becoming more clam and patient is one of the best perks that come with archery.

But to perform at the correct timing without messing up your shot, you have to ignore the surrounding distractions, that might be hectic and loud at times. This requires a complete focus on the shot process. A target archer about to shoot in an archery tournament has a lot of pressure on them, and disturbances from around. The habit of being able to put your entire focus on the actions you’re currently doing (commonly referred to as “flow“) is built in archery.

4. More time outdoors

Nowadays most people spend their time inside, barely seeing any sun and feeling the wind on their skin. Even with sports, people go to inside gyms. Though some people practice archery in indoor-ranges, it’s mostly an outdoors sport. Being outside more is really relaxing and gives the sport a recreational aspect to it. So if you’re into archery, you’ll have a few hours every week set aside for being outside.

5. Overcoming challenges: confidence building

Learning to deal with facing hard challenges and overcoming will enable you to build deep confidence. In archery, you’re mostly competing against yourself, by trying to improve your skills and beat your previous records, or challenges you’ve set for yourself. By setting goals for yourself and achieving them, you’ll slowly learn to trust yourself more and more and build incredible confidence in your capabilities.

This sort of mental shift is something you see a lot in people who begin with training more sports. In archery it’s especially easy to spot: the sport itself has a scoring system you can measure your progress with. It important that you take the benefit of improved confidence and learn to base it on yourself, not on physical circumstances. But having a full, rich life is a big part of being more happy with yourself, and I’m sure that sports, and particularly archery, can benefit that.

Conclusions

Archery has a lot of health benefits, including some mental and physical ones. By practicing archery you’ll become stronger and exercise more, improve your hand-eye coordination and learn to be patient, focused and confident. These benefits can translate to your whole life, and that’s why I like the sport that much and recommend it to everyone. I hope you enjoyed reading about the health perks of archery and that this post was interesting for you.