Top Archery Health Benefits

Archery is a sport in which nearly anyone can participate. From young children to geriatric adults and everyone in between, learning how to shoot an arrow from a compound, recurve, or crossbow is accessible — not to mention fun. But, archery is useful for more than just a good time; it can be good for your health as well! If you’re wondering how archery can help you, check out our list of the top archery health benefits here.

1. Build Upper-Body Strength

Many beginners think that drawing a recurve or compound bow has more to do with your arms, but that’s not the whole picture. The fact about archery is that drawing a bow utilizes your back, shoulders, and even your core. You must have a solid stance and use your upper body in unison to reliably draw and hold a bow for several seconds as you aim. Since you’re performing this repetitive motion many times over the course of a practice session, you’re developing muscles and strength each time you take your bow out for shooting.

2. General Fitness

As you may know, after shooting all the arrows in your quiver, you have to go retrieve them from your target. It’s well-known that walking thousands of steps a day is great for your well-being. This archery health benefit ensures you’re burning calories while drawing your bow (strength training) and going to get your arrows (mild cardio). In a session that’s an hour or two long, you could burn hundreds of calories — the equivalent of running a few miles.

3. Relaxation and Focus

Your health is about more than just strength and physical fitness. Another archery health benefit is for your mind too. As you work to improve your aim, your form, and your strength, you also improve your focus. You have to think about every aspect of archery at the same time — without letting your surroundings distract you. Competitive archers have especially good focus, as they have to tune out other competitors, the crowds around them, and anything else that may stand in the way of a medal.

Finding your zone like this is a type of meditation. It forces you to let go of any frustrations and problems you may be facing and allows your mind to recharge.

4. Confidence Booster

Even when you’re not competing, you’re always trying to outdo yourself. Whether you finally manage to create the perfect arrow cluster or you’ve hit the bullseye for the first time, any success in archery is a huge confidence booster and a major archery health benefit. All these positive emotions release endorphins and serotonin which are great for your mental health.

Archery with 60X

While we’re competition focused at 60X Custom Strings, we know that many people enjoy archery recreationally. We strive to encourage people at all experience and skill levels to continue with this amazing sport and enjoy the archery health benefits that come with it.

Browse our blog today for more advice, facts about archery, news, and stories about our team.