"I shoot well in training, then I fall apart in competition." It is one of the things you hear most often at the club, and it usually comes with the explanation already attached: competition brings pressure, pressure fires up the body, and a fired-up body loses points. That chain holds two separate claims, and research has measured them separately. The first is about the body, whether an archer is more aroused in competition than in training; the second is about the target, whether accuracy drops in competition.
The two answers do not point the way most people expect. Several independent samples show the body running at a higher level in competition, and they all point the same way. Nobody, on the other hand, has found a systematic drop in accuracy: the few studies that compare the same archers in training and in competition show no fall, although they are so small that they cannot rule one out. Between the two measurements lies the gap between what the archer feels and what goes on the scorecard, and I come back to that gap at the end.
The body is more aroused in competition
The cleanest comparison comes from eighteen elite Turkish archers, with an average age of just over eighteen, measured twice in the same way: seated, in a quiet room, for five minutes, half an hour before a training session and half an hour before the national indoor championships. Before the competition their hearts beat on average 75.8 times a minute, against 67.7 before training, and the interval between one beat and the next shortened from 902 to 775 milliseconds. The measurement was taken at rest, before the first arrow, so the difference does not come from the effort of shooting: what changes the level is the competition itself, or rather waiting for it.
The same study holds a detail to keep in mind. The archers also filled in a competition anxiety questionnaire, and before the championships their answers were the same as before training: the heart changed, what they reported did not. On reported anxiety the picture is contested, because in forty Brazilian archers measured at their national championships anxiety on the first qualification day was much higher than on the free practice day at the same venue. On heart rate, by contrast, no study points the other way.
Alongside this measurement there are two more, made with different instruments. In nineteen Korean women university archers followed around a national competition, anxiety on a one to ten scale went from 5.89 ten minutes before the start to 8.15 in the final minute. In two archers shooting at 70 m in an instrumented shirt, the aiming heart rate of one of them rose from 94.9-101.8 to 104.7-120.5 beats per minute between the practice arrows and the ones that counted, while in the other it stayed the same. These are three independent samples, and no study points the opposite way: that is why the registry marks as corroborated the claim that archers are more aroused in competition than in training. The limit is size, since the samples are small and two of the three studies appear in journals with a regional readership.
The more is at stake, the higher the body goes
Arousal, for that matter, is not a switch that competition flicks on all at once. The tidiest measurement on the subject shows it, in five university kyudo archers; kyudo is Japanese archery, and the registry counts it as archery. Each of them had the peak heart rate of every shot recorded in four situations: free practice alone, free practice with the opposing team present, formal practice with the score recorded, and competition. In all five the lowest heart rate came in free practice alone and the highest in competition, with a wide gap between the two; the two situations in between sat in the middle, but their order changed from one archer to the next.
The same pattern turns up elsewhere. An Olympic archer recorded in competition with a portable device showed higher physiological tension at the United States championships than at a regional event; and in a real indoor recurve competition at 18 m, the markers of parasympathetic activity, the part of the nervous system that slows the heart, fell end after end across twenty ends of three arrows in ten experienced adolescent archers, while in seven novices they stayed flat. The statistical effect is small, but it adds something: arousal keeps rising inside the competition, and in the novices that climb did not appear. With three independent samples pointing the same way, the claim that arousal rises with what is at stake is also corroborated. What these studies measure is the body, though, not the score.
How fast the heart beats while shooting
One number does the rounds at the club, a hundred beats a minute, as if it were the normal rate for shooting. The measurements taken while shooting disagree. Many fall between 95 and 108: 95 in eleven national-level university archers during a simulated competition, with 82 at rest, and 102 in the men and 108 in the women among forty-five Turkish traditional archers over five arrows at 18 m. Others sit much higher, such as the 128 and 142 beats while aiming in ten Indonesian university archers in a simulated competition with alternating shots, or the mean competition peaks between 138 and 162 of the kyudo archers in the figure. A hundred is a fair description of shooting in training or with little at stake, but not of every competition, and that is why the registry marks as contested the idea that the heart sits at around a hundred while shooting.
The question archers care about most comes straight after: do the archers who get more aroused lose points? Here too the picture is contested. In observational studies, archers who shoot with a lower heart rate, or see it slow in the last beats before the release, tend to score higher; but when an intervention has moved heart rate, the score has not followed, and raising it by running did not cost points. The most cautious reading is that a slowing heart goes with a good shot without causing it. And no study has yet put arousal next to the score of the same official competition, arrow by arrow.
Measured accuracy does not drop
Now the target. Studies that compare the accuracy of the same archers in training and in competition are very few, and the first concerns the five kyudo archers in the figure again, the ones whose heart rate in competition reached between 138 and 162. In the five days before the competition they hit the target with 46 to 59% of their shots, a wide margin in which a fall would have shown, and in competition the probability of a hit did not drop: four out of five did no worse. The only one who fell back was also the one with the highest heart rate already in training, between 140 and 153, rising to 162 in competition. Nothing can be built on a single archer, but the rest of the group shot at least as well as in training with their hearts beating much faster.
A second group of six university kyudo archers gives a similar picture. The hit rate in the practice week and the hit rate in competition do not move in a common direction: four archers go up, one stays level and one drops sharply, from 67.6 to 44.4%. The data come from a conference abstract, and the practice rates are those of the preceding week, not of the same sessions.
There is only one result in the opposite direction, and it is a narrow one. Three Korean women on the national-squad shortlist, followed for a season over 1440 rounds, shot below their practice level at the first national competition of the year: 1320, 1303 and 1295, against 1338, 1335 and 1320 in practice at the end of March. At the next two tournaments, in late July and early August, all three went above it. These are three cases with no control group, and an arousal control programme running at the same time gets mixed up with the effect of competition, but they show that the answer may depend on which competition you look at.
Taken together, these studies give an indication that is clear and weak at the same time. It is clear because nobody has found a systematic fall in accuracy in competition; it is weak because two of the three measurements come from kyudo, where a shot counts as a hit or a miss rather than across ten scoring rings, and because every sample has between three and six people. The registry marks as reported the claim that accuracy does not drop in competition compared with practice: nobody has found the fall, but nobody has looked for it in a sample large enough to rule it out.
A related result points the same way and concerns the score within a competition. In the studies that have looked, the second half of a competition is worth as much as the first even when reported fatigue rises, and the registry marks this as reported; nearly all of them, though, are simulated competitions with small samples.
Why it feels like falling apart
The fact that the measurements show no fall takes nothing away from the feeling, which is widespread. Among sixty-nine competitive British archers, 75.4% say they have had at least one drastic drop in performance beyond their control, and among a hundred and fifteen Italian competitive archers the average is three episodes in the last six months. Neither survey, however, checks the account against competition scores, so the registry marks as reported that choking is common among archers, without saying how much it weighs on the scorecard.
There is also a very practical reason why the comparison each of us makes from memory does not hold up well: practice scores and competition scores rarely come from the same shooting. The number of arrows changes, and so do the distance, the target face and the time allowed. In a study of nine competitive Korean archers aged sixteen and seventeen, at 50 m, the size of the face alone moved the average per arrow from 7.7 points on the 60 cm face to 8.93 on the 100 cm one: more than a point per arrow for a single changed condition, more than any effect of competition measured so far. And the only contrary result concerns one particular competition, the first of the season: nobody has checked whether a fall exists only there.
Does a competition day take more out of you?
To anyone who comes out of a tournament exhausted it seems obvious that competition is more tiring than training, but the comparison has not been made yet. Descriptions of the load exist, and the numbers are large: eight top archers at a World Cup stage shot 178 arrows in about two hours on the first day and walked more than five kilometres between the shooting line and the target, with a load that then fell day by day to 97 arrows. Nobody has set these numbers against a training day for the same archers, and the only study that measures the same archers in both situations, with urinary lactate, reaches no answer, because its results and its discussion say two different things. For the registry, the question of whether a competition day loads the archer more than a training day is not yet studied.
Training under competition conditions
The classic advice is to bring competition into training, with the clock running, opponents alongside and some spectators or noise. There is very little underneath such a widespread idea. The most direct account comes from a group of sport psychologists working with the six archers of the Taiwanese Olympic team before Athens 2004: a mock competition with crowd noise, announcements in English, loved ones in the stands, the bus transfer from the warm-up field to the competition field, and wind. Most of the archers felt pressure, and they said the experience had taught them how to handle it in later competitions.
That is their impression, collected by the same authors who ran the programme, with no measures of anxiety or score and no comparison group. The simulation was also one part of a broader programme, with breathing, mental imagery and more, so the team's best Olympic result cannot be put down to it. More recently three coaches of the Korean national team have said that training in baseball stadiums, to get used to crowd noise, has worked; that too is testimony, and the registry leaves as reported the idea that a mock competition gets archers used to pressure.
What I take from this for the shooting line
The first thing is to expect the body to change in competition. A higher heart rate half an hour before shooting is what studies find in elite archers too, and the more is at stake, the higher it goes. Whether this costs points is still contested, and the studies that have moved heart rate did not see the score follow it: a faster heart, on its own, does not let you predict that the competition will go badly.
The second concerns the comparison. To know whether you lose points in competition, the comparison has to be like for like: the same round, the same distance, the same face, the same number of arrows, and the average of many training sessions rather than the best ones. Keeping complete practice scores, round by round, is the simplest way to have a reference that holds. If the difference remains even then, it is a personal finding to look at with your coach; if it shrinks, part of the feeling of falling apart came from the comparison.
The third concerns the calendar. The only contrary result falls at the first competition of the season, and arousal rises with what is at stake: reaching the important competition after a few minor ones is a reasonable choice, but no study has put it to the test. The same goes for mock competitions in training, which cost little and for now have only testimony behind them.
What is missing
First of all, the comparison on the Olympic recurve is missing: many archers, the same number of arrows at the same distance in training and in competition, several competitions in the same season, to see whether a fall exists and whether it appears only at the first one. The link between arousal and score, read arrow by arrow in the same official competition, on larger samples and in both sexes, is missing too. And so is a trial with two groups in which the mock competition is the only difference, with anxiety and the score in an official competition as outcomes. Until then, this much can be said: in competition the body is more aroused, and in the little data there is, accuracy does not drop.