On the range you often hear that a good archer stands still. You can see it, people say, from the way they take their place on the line: feet planted, a body that no longer moves once they are aiming, while the beginner next to them sways like a reed. From there it is a short step to the idea that stillness comes with level, and so has to be pursued in order to move up, and many archers take that step without noticing.
The idea can be tested. All it takes is to put archers of different levels on a force plate, have them shoot and look at how far their weight shifts while they aim. Since 1994 six research groups have done exactly that, and three of these comparisons appeared in 2026 alone, two of them in October. Set side by side, they do not say the same thing. Two find the better archers much stiller, two find no difference at all, and two sit in the middle, with a result that holds only in part.
The disagreement, however, is not random. If you look at who was being compared with whom, the results fall into a recognisable order: the difference shows when the groups are far apart, and it narrows until it disappears when they are close. This is why, in the registry, the claim that among archers, those at a higher level show less body sway while aiming is contested, and it is one of those cases where the label on its own says little and the studies are best read one by one.
What a force plate measures
For an archer, standing still can mean three different things. It can mean that the body does not sway over the feet, that the bow does not move in space, or that the sight stays on the centre of the target. The three are related, but they do not coincide: a bow can shift by a few millimetres without the aim changing, and the aim can drift a long way with a minimal rotation of the wrist. Almost all the studies in this article measure the first of these, the body.
The instrument is the force plate, a platform that records hundreds of times a second how hard and where the body pushes on the ground. The point where that push is concentrated is called the centre of pressure, and even when a person believes they are standing motionless it never stops: it shifts continuously by a few millimetres, because the body is constantly correcting its own balance. For an archer standing side-on to the target, two directions matter: along the line of the feet, which points towards the target, and between toes and heels, which runs across it.
Many measures can be drawn from that trace: the area the point covers, the length of its path, the amplitude of its shifts, the speed at which it moves. Each research group picks a few of them, and often gives them all the same name, sway or stability. That is the first reason the results cannot be added up as though they were the same measurement repeated six times.
The second is that not everyone uses the force plate in the same way. Some put the archer on a single plate and measure the whole body. Others place one foot on each of two plates and measure what happens under each foot: this shows how the two legs are working, but it misses the transfer of weight from one foot to the other, which is precisely the sideways sway of the whole body. Shooting distance, setting and time window also count. Eighteen metres indoors is not the same as seventy outdoors in the wind, and the seconds before the release are not the whole draw.
Then there are the numbers involved, which are small. In one of the comparisons, six elite and seven sub-elite archers shooting at 70 m, the mean sway while aiming was 1.9 mm. Telling apart two groups that differ by a few tenths of a millimetre, with ten or fifteen people per group, is difficult even when the difference exists.
When the groups are far apart
The most cited comparison is Turkish, from 2019. Twenty-seven recurve archers, all men and all right-handed, were split into three groups of nine by FITA score: the beginners had a year and a half of practice and an average of 915 points, the intermediates more than six years and 1,150 points, the elite almost nine years and 1,244 points. They shot at 18 m standing on a force plate. The amplitude of the centre-of-pressure displacement was smaller in the elite than in the beginners, while the intermediates sat in between without differing significantly from either. The values appear only in the paper's charts, and the horizontal forces, although lower in the elite in every phase of the shot, did not differ significantly. The same study also measured reaction time to the clicker, which fell with level: 167 milliseconds in the beginners, 140 in the intermediates, 112 in the elite.
The second clear comparison came out in October 2026. Eight professional archers and eight beginners stood on a force plate for five forty-second trials, once simply standing and once aiming. While aiming, the professional archers moved the centre of pressure less on both axes, with less variability forwards and backwards. Standing without a bow, the difference shrank to a single detail: less side-to-side variability.
This is the most interesting result in the study, even though I know it only from the abstract, because the full paper sits behind a paywall. If the two groups look alike when standing and not when aiming, the professional archers' advantage is not better balance in general, but something that appears when they shoot. A different comparison, carried out in Poland in 2023, points the same way from another angle: fourteen national team archers and fourteen people who had never shot, filmed with nine cameras during the draw. The archers' centre of mass moved within a much narrower range of positions and velocities, 6.3 against 11.2 on the measure the authors used. There, though, the comparison is with people who do not shoot, not between archers.
The systematic review published in 2025, covering sixteen studies on body stability in shooting, reaches the same count: in three of the four comparisons between levels, the less experienced archers moved the centre of pressure more. The fourth found no differences.
When the groups are close
The oldest of the six comparisons is Italian. In 1994 a group from the Politecnico di Milano and the Istituto di Scienza dello Sport in Rome measured twelve recurve archers from the federation, five above 1,300 FITA points and seven between 1,180 and 1,300, using kinematics, electromyography and a force plate, twenty arrows each at 12 m. Their conclusion on balance was that the displacement of the centre of pressure, on its own, was not enough to tell the two levels apart. The authors did not report the figures, and the work is a conference contribution, so it carries little weight. But the question was already the right one, and the answer was already the one that would come back thirty years later: among archers who are all of a good standard, the force plate tells little apart.
Then there is the comparison between six elite and seven sub-elite archers shooting eighteen arrows at 70 m, one foot on each of two plates. While aiming, the elite archers swayed less, but only on one axis, the one perpendicular to the direction of shooting. Along the line of the target the two groups could not be told apart. The result holds only in part for another reason as well: the sub-elite archers were teenagers with half the years of practice of the elite, and age alone changes balance.
The most recent comparison, published in October 2026, is the one that shifts the picture most. Twenty recurve archers from the Brazilian national squads, thirteen from the senior team and seven from the junior team, shot eighteen arrows at 70 m outdoors at the federation's centre in Rio de Janeiro, with one foot on each of two force plates. The score separated the groups clearly: 8.67 points per arrow for the seniors, 7.85 for the juniors. The plates did not. In none of the four centre-of-pressure measures, under each foot, forwards and backwards and side to side, was there a difference, with p values between 0.47 and 0.98. If anything is to be read in the raw numbers, the seniors moved slightly more: under the dominant foot 21.5 mm against 19.7 forwards and backwards, and almost the same side to side, 5.5 against 5.6.
Before concluding that stability does not matter between seniors and juniors in a national squad, it helps to read the sentence the authors themselves highlight: not finding differences should not be interpreted as evidence that the two groups are equivalent. It is a distinction that often gets lost when studies are discussed, and here it carries weight. There were seven juniors, and with seven people in a group a study can detect only large differences. If the seniors' stability were slightly better, a study of this size might well miss it. The wind, which at 70 m outdoors moves both the archer and the bow, was not measured. And eighteen arrows are few compared with a qualification round.
There is also a measurement detail to keep in mind. Under each foot the forwards-and-backwards displacement was about four times the sideways one, in both groups. That does not mean the Brazilian archers' bodies swayed mainly in that direction: a foot is longer than it is wide, and the centre of pressure under a single foot moves more along its length. To describe how the whole body sways, the two plates would have to be combined, and the paper does not do this. For this reason the study enters the registry only as context for the claim that while aiming, the body sways more sideways across the target than back and forth towards it, which remains contested.
The order behind the disagreement
Lined up, the six comparisons give four results in favour of the idea that better archers sway less, two of them only in part, and two against. The two against, the Italian conference paper of 1994 and the Brazilian national squads of 2026, share the thing that matters: they compare archers who are all already of a good standard. The two clearest results in favour, by contrast, compare elite or professional archers with beginners, people who have been shooting for a year and a half.
The reading that holds the results together is a simple one: between an experienced archer and one who has just started, there is a difference in stability while aiming, and it is large enough to show up even in a sample of eighteen people; between two archers who both shoot well, the difference, if there is one, is smaller than these studies are able to measure. It is a reasonable reading, but it remains a reading. No study has tested it directly, for example by measuring beginners, intermediates and elite archers with the same force plate and the same protocol, in numbers large enough to see where the curve flattens. The Turkish study with its three levels comes closest, and its intermediates, who differ neither from the beginners nor from the elite, are consistent with this idea without being enough to prove it.
There are other possible explanations too, and they are not mutually exclusive. In comparisons between distant levels many things change together: years of practice, age, strength, often equipment. In the Brazilian study the seniors had 14.4 years of practice against 5.7 and weighed almost fifteen kilos more, 78.9 against 64.4. In the French study, which I discuss further down, the elite archers were nineteen years old on average and the regional archers almost twenty-nine. A comparison between groups does not tell you which of these differences produces stability, if any of them does. And nobody has ever followed the same archers as they improved, to see whether they became stiller as they moved up. So it is not even known which way the link runs: whether standing stiller helps archers improve, or whether improving, by routes that go through technique, brings a stiller body with it.
Not only how much, but how
The French comparison is the one that complicates the question most, because it answers yes and no at the same time. It comes from a 2026 doctoral thesis. Eight elite recurve archers, among the top twenty in the national 70 m ranking, training around twenty-one hours a week and with an average best score of 654 out of 720, against seven archers from the regional circuit, six hours a week and 523 points. During the measurements the elite scored 8.87 points per arrow, the others 6.94.
While they aimed, the elite archers' centre of pressure covered a smaller area, with shorter excursions. So far the common idea holds. But the mean speed of the displacement, side to side, forwards and backwards and at its peak, was higher in the elite than in the regional archers. Their bodies moved within a tighter space, but faster. The author reads this as a series of small, quick corrections: rather than letting the body drift and then bringing it back, the experienced archer catches it straight away, before it wanders off.
If this reading holds, the advice to stand like a statue rests on a mistaken premise. The elite archers were not stiller in the sense of moving less: they moved in a different way. The 2026 comparison between professional archers and beginners also points in this direction, with a measure the registry had not yet come across. As well as how far the centre of pressure moves, the authors calculated how regular its trace is over time, using a method called detrended fluctuation analysis. Forwards and backwards, while aiming, the professional archers' signal was more regular than the beginners'. What this means for the control of the body is an open question. But it is a sign that mean displacement, the most widely used measure, does not tell the whole story, and that two archers with the same mean sway can sway in different ways.
I have written at greater length about how the body moves on the good and bad arrows of the same archer in the article on posture and stability. There the signals are clearer, because the comparison is within the same person.
And the bow?
When archers say they are standing still, they often mean the bow, not their feet. Here too a study arrived in October 2026, from Spain, measuring the bow in a way not seen before. Eight young recurve archers from the Madrid federation, aged between 14 and 21, all with at least four years of training and competition at national or international level, shot twelve arrows at 18 m in a laboratory with eight infrared cameras. Three markers on the bow, at the tip of the long rod, on the grip and at the tip of the lower limb, made it possible to track its movement on three axes in the five seconds before the release.
On average the bow moved 8.6 mm vertically, 6.7 towards the target and 5.3 sideways. One archer weighed very heavily on these averages: the one with the lowest score and the largest movements on all three axes. Without that archer, the averages fell to 6.8, 5.2 and 4.4 mm, but the order stayed the same, and archer by archer the vertical movement exceeded the sideways one in six cases out of eight.
This is the opposite of another common idea, that while aiming the bow moves mainly horizontally. In the registry the claim that while aiming, the bow sways more horizontally than vertically nonetheless remains reported, and the reason lies in the measurement. The studies in favour of that claim record where the aim points on the target, while this one records how far the bow moves as an object in space. These are different things: the bow can rise and fall by a few millimetres without the sight leaving the centre, and a small rotation of the wrist moves the aim a long way without shifting the point between the three markers by much. The study, moreover, describes the three axes but does not compare them with a test, and a single archer pushes up all the averages.
On score the results are weak. Score went with movement towards the target in the expected direction, more movement and fewer points, but with eight archers the uncertainty interval crossed zero, and the correction for the many comparisons made took it well away from the threshold. The only link that held was the one between score and group size, which measures the same thing twice, because tighter arrows score more points. Some numbers, moreover, do not match between the text and the tables, and the authors themselves present their results as estimates for designing larger studies.
One thing, though, the study does say fairly clearly. Grip strength, 30.5 kg on average, showed no link with score. Draw weight at full draw, from 31.5 to almost 48 lb, tended rather towards higher scores, without reaching significance. Among archers who are already trained, hand strength does not seem to make the difference, and in the registry the claim that arm strength is linked to shooting accuracy remains contested, with one more null result on the side against.
What remains for archers
The first thing that remains is a distinction. That experienced archers sway less while aiming than beginners is reasonably well supported: two clear comparisons find it, most of those gathered in the 2025 review find it, and it fits with the other finding in the registry, that archers stand more still than people who do not shoot. That among archers of a good standard body stability marks the difference between those further ahead and those further behind, on the other hand, is shown by nobody. The two studies that looked where you would expect to see it did not find it.
For a club archer comparing themselves with a stronger teammate, then, force plates say little. The teammate probably scores more for reasons that lie elsewhere: consistency of the release, aiming time, regularity from one arrow to the next, the things the Brazilian scores show and the plates do not. For a beginner, by contrast, part of the journey really does go through a body that settles, even if nobody yet knows whether that body can be trained directly or arrives by itself with technique.
Finally, there is a caution about the way of swaying. If the French results hold up, stillness as a goal is a misleading image: the elite move within a smaller space but with quicker corrections, and trying to lock the body could remove exactly those corrections. It is a thesis on fifteen archers, and it has not been repeated. But it is enough to advise against turning "stand still" into stiffness.
In the Brazilian study, the thing that separated the two groups most, beyond the average score, was how consistent that score was. The seniors' score varied from one archer to the next by 4%, the juniors' by 12%. They were better and also more alike, and neither of the two showed up under their feet.