Garmin put out ArcheryX on August 25. Smartwatch activity, compound bows, and it comes standard on the new fēnix 9 and fēnix 9 Pro. The press release calls it "a first-of-its-kind smartwatch activity." Their words, not mine. I'm quoting it, I'm not signing off on it.
What it does, going by the release: it tracks the movement of your bow arm and your body, then gives you real-time data, biometrics and suggestions on the wrist. The fuller post-session analysis and the long-term trends live in the ShotView phone app.
Seven items on the list. Shot break analysis, which is bow-arm movement right before the release. Shot execution time, draw to release. An arrow counter. A per-shot "minutes of angle" steadiness statistic. An aim trace with animated playback. Heart rate, respiration rate and stress. Arrow totals by day, week, month and year.
No standalone price in the release. No subscription detail. No launch information.
That's the news. From here it's my read, and it's narrower than you might expect. Three of those seven are things I'd actually write down.
Shot execution time. Arrow counter. Arrow totals.
Those three record the plainest things in the sport, and the plain things are what decide whether practice compounds or just piles up. Time from draw to release, written down and held steady across ends. Arrows per session, arrows per week. Know your volume rather than guessing at it.
One warning on execution time. It isn't a number where lower is better or higher is better. What it means depends on what you're training that day. Warm-up ends and peak-state ends want different tempos. Fast shots and long holds build different capacities. Set it by purpose, hold it consistent inside a set, and it's a useful parameter. Chase it as a score and you'll spend the consistency you came for just to push the number up.
Here's the thing about the shot break feature. Garmin's wording puts the measurement on the bow arm and the body, and that's the part where I slow down.
A clean release is mostly a string-hand and back-side story. Is the thumb action clean. Does the hand stay out of the string path after the anchor. Does the release angle hold. How do the shoulder blades open, and does the back keep tension alive through the shot. Those are the variables that decide what a release actually looks like.
The bow side wants close to the opposite. Your bow arm should be as still and as committed as you can make it, because the pull comes from the other side. Which means motion a watch can see on the bow arm and the torso sits much closer to an outcome than to a cause. It can tell you something moved. Getting from there to why it moved is a longer walk, and it usually needs a camera at the right angle and a second pair of eyes.
Use it as a trend line. This week's pre-release stability against last week's. Keep it out of the diagnosis column. A diagnosis comes from a coach's eyes, a camera and the shooter's own feel, roughly in that order.
And if you're the type who reads spec sheets: Garmin hasn't published the sensor setup, the sampling rate, or whether any external sensor is required. Anything about how that number gets derived is inference, not fact. Treat it that way.
On the MOA thing. This one's worth being precise about, because it's an easy mistake to make and a hard one to undo.
Garmin says ArcheryX "measures the steadiness of each shot to provide archers with a 'minutes of angle' statistic for each shot," so a shooter can associate hold stability with the shot result. Read what that says and what it doesn't. No conversion method is published. No measurement path is described. At face value, the statistic is describing the wobble of the bow arm and wrist in angular terms.
MOA on your target face is a different quantity, and nothing in the release links the two. Wobble is one input into where the arrow lands. It isn't the landing. Two shots with identical hold stability can land in very different places depending on release quality, tune and conditions, and a tight hold with a poor release will still send the arrow into the wrong part of the target.
Keep the two numbers in separate columns in your head. When the hold number improves and the group doesn't, you have two measurements telling you two different things. The group is the one you get scored on.
Heart rate, respiration and stress, those I'd keep. They say something about arousal level and about how hard the session actually was, and that second one is genuinely hard to judge from the inside.
Measured isn't the same as correct, though. A breathing pattern can be captured perfectly by a sensor and still be wrong for the shot. Aiming calls for diaphragmatic breathing and a stable upper body. Chest breathing moves the upper body and costs you the float you were trying to hold. A watch can record that all day long. Fixing it happens on the line, with somebody watching you.
Then there's the screen itself. Shooting well means pulling attention inward. Outside senses off, eyes steady in the socket, and once you're on target there's only the internal task left. That's the state you're building, and while you're building it, it's fragile.
A live data display on your wrist suits a shooter who already owns that state and can set it aside on command. For someone still assembling fundamentals it's one more thing to look at, and the cost shows up as the shot you didn't finish. My default advice is the boring one. Record during practice, review afterward. Don't read the dial while you're aiming.
One more thing, and it's the part I'd push hardest on. You don't train precision as a subject on its own. It comes out of a system: form, tune, arrows, release, conditions, and your own repeatability. A training log is worth exactly the changes it produces.
"I shot 300 arrows this week and looked at a lot of curves" is not a training plan. "This fortnight I'm fixing my release tempo" is. A tool like ArcheryX earns its place when it helps you locate the problem. Tempo? Stability? Something in the setup? Answer that first, then go back to the bow and the body and change one thing.
I make equipment, so this last part I can't be neutral about. Our route at AAAW is additive manufacturing, where the variables under control are design and process. Build a part so its geometry and material behave the way they were drawn, and you remove uncertainty before the shooter ever nocks an arrow. Garmin's route is different. Put sensors on the process and quantify what happens during the shot.
The two aren't competing. They come out of the same realization, that archery stopped being a by-feel game a while ago and that seeing what you're actually doing is worth something in the training loop. A watch that records every arrow and a printed component that behaves like its drawing are both ways of taking guesswork out of the system.
Two things the release doesn't say, and I want them said plainly, because this is where product announcements get read too generously.
"First-of-its-kind" is Garmin's characterization. Take it as the company's claim.
The bigger one: there's no accuracy improvement figure, no hit-rate change, no third-party testing. Nothing in that release says your scores will go up. The honest description of ArcheryX is the narrow one. It surfaces these measurements and lets you keep records over time. Whether that changes your results depends on what you do with it.