"I lose points in the second half of the qualification round: is it fatigue?" The question usually comes after a long competition, when the last ends felt heavier than the first and the scorecard seems to agree. On the range the answer is taken for granted: the last ends are the worst, and endurance is trained precisely to hold the score until the finish. Inside that idea, though, sit two different claims. The first is about the body, that is whether a competition tires the archer; the second is about the target, that is whether the fatigue shows up in the points.
Studies have nearly always measured the two separately, and the answers do not match. That fatigue builds over a competition is something archers say themselves, in the studies that asked them. That the second half scores lower is something the studies that looked for it do not find: on average the second half is worth as much as the first. The studies are small and almost all of them use simulated rounds, so the picture is a pointer, not a settled answer.
What a competition costs the body
Physiological measurements taken during simulated competitions say that for a trained archer the cost is low, but not zero. In a sixteen-year-old elite archer, over 72 arrows at 70 m, blood lactate stayed between 1.6 and 1.9 millimoles per litre, perceived exertion barely rose, from 1 to 3 on the 0 to 10 scale, and grip strength did not fall. In a novice of the same age with nine months of practice, lactate reached 2.9, exertion 5, and the dominant hand's grip lost 10.8%. These are two people, but the difference points the way you would expect: the same competition format weighs more on someone who has been shooting for less time.
Eight archers of the Brazilian national team then shot a simulated 144-arrow competition, compared with a rest day. Asked at the end of the day, overall exertion was the same on both days, grip strength did not change at any distance, and lactate, although it rose, stayed below 3 millimoles. The same study, however, found that each set of shots, rated straight afterwards, felt harder than the matching moment of the rest day, that blood glucose dropped after the 70 m and that salivary cortisol rose after every distance, with no way of saying how much came from the effort and how much from the tension of being assessed. That is why the claim that shooting a full competition puts little physical strain on a trained archer is contested: the day as a whole weighs little, the single sets are felt.
A tournament day, besides, is not a simulated round. At a World Cup stage eight archers of the Turkish national team shot 178 arrows in about two hours of competition on the first day, walking more than five kilometres between the shooting line and the target; at a European Grand Prix, on the busiest day, six archers from the same team reached 180 arrows and 335 minutes between the official start and the end of their own competition, waiting included. These are large numbers, but nobody has set them beside a training day for the same archers, so the question of whether a competition day loads the archer more than a training day is not studied.
The score half by half
The archer's question, though, is not how tired they get: it is whether fatigue costs points. Answering it means taking the score of a round and splitting it, half by half or end by end, and five studies have done so, with very different designs.
The design closest to a real competition comes from Brazil. Ten archers with competitive experience shot a simulated indoor round twice, following the World Archery format: sixty arrows at 18 m split into two halves of thirty, with a ten-minute break in between. Across all twenty rounds, the first thirty arrows averaged 218.8 points and the second thirty 216.0. The study was set up for another question, the effect of social media before shooting, and its tests compare the two conditions, not the two halves: the gap of less than three points out of three hundred is a reading of the averages, with no test behind it.
A Turkish group used the same short format. Twelve university recurve archers, with six and a half years of practice on average, shot thirty arrows at 18 m in ten ends of three, twice, with and without caffeine: here there is a test on the ends, and the score does not change from the first to the last in either condition. In Malaysia, a single university recurve archer shot seventy-two arrows at 30 m outdoors, in two sets of six ends as in a qualification round, with electrodes on the finger extensor of the bow arm and on the supraspinatus. Electromyography showed fatigue building towards the end, and yet the second set closed on 318 points against 307 for the first.
The other two studies widen the sample and change the population. In forty-two children aged 9 to 12, thirty arrows at 18 m with a fifteen-minute break after the first fifteen, the second part was no lower than the first: 110.3 and then 111.4 points in the boys, 117.3 and then 124.7 in the girls, with no test on the comparison and with a break that could on its own explain the absence of a drop. The only data from a real competition come from the 2023 Arab Championships in Riyadh: in the results table of the 42 male archers, twenty-one scored less from the first to the second 70 m half, by 1 to 18 points, among both the top and the bottom of the ranking, eighteen scored more, by up to 33 points, and three scored the same.
Put side by side, the five studies point the same way, which is why in the registry the claim that scores do not fall in the second half of a competition, even though fatigue builds up is reported. It goes no further because the limits are many: the samples range from one archer to forty-two, the rounds are almost all simulated and short, and nearly every comparison of the two halves, including the one from the only real competition, is a reading of averages with no test. At the Arab Championships, moreover, the light and the wind also changed between the first and the second half, and the table cannot separate them from fatigue.
The gap between what is felt and what is scored
The most interesting part of these studies is what happens next to the score. In the Brazilian indoor round the archers also rated how tired they felt, on a scale from 0 to 10: 2.3 before shooting, 3.8 at halfway and 5.8 at the end. Reported fatigue more than doubled, while the two halves stayed less than three points apart. In the same study tension, measured with a mood scale, stayed low and flat, between 2.2 and 3.1 from start to finish, and the registry has it as reported that the tension archers report does not build up over a competition. In that round, then, fatigue grew and nerves did not, and neither showed on the scorecard.
The same gap appears in an experiment in the heat. Ten Cypriot first-division archers shot two simulated rounds of seventy-two arrows at 70 m, at 36 to 37 degrees, once well hydrated and once after a day on little fluid: in both conditions reported fatigue grew over the round, and when dehydrated they felt more tired, but the total did not change, 550 points against 562. The study gives only the full score, so it says nothing about the two halves; it does say that arriving dehydrated at a competition in the heat did not lower the score, in a single experiment, which the registry holds as reported.
One possible explanation comes from studies that induced fatigue in the laboratory. Twelve Italian archers performed sixty twenty-second holds at full draw and then shot ten arrows at 12 m: lateral bow sway while aiming increased in all of them, by 6 to 39%, 20% on average, and the score did not change in any of them. That muscular fatigue increases bow sway while aiming is reported; how much of that sway reaches the target at competition distances nobody has measured. Fatigue, in short, shows in the shot before it shows in the points, and a trained archer seems to have room to absorb it.
Within the set and within the group
An average that does not fall does not mean that nobody falls, and two findings are a reminder of that. The first comes from the Malaysian archer: the second set as a whole was higher than the first, but within each set the lowest ends came towards the finish, 47 out of 60 on the fifth end of the first set and 49 on the fourth end of the second, which had opened on 55 and closed on 51. These are a few points, on one archer and with no test, and the authors read them as a possible sign of fatigue. In the same study the archer named aiming as the hardest phase, and towards the end of the sets he several times could not hold it and had to let down and start the shot again.
The second finding is about level. At the Arab Championships three of the four archers of the Egyptian national team scored more in the second half, from 307 to 321, from 314 to 320 and from 306 to 319, and the fourth dropped by 2 points; in the simulated round at 70 m the novice lost grip strength and the elite archer did not. Three studies on archers point towards the idea that higher-level archers cope better with the fatigue of shooting, which is reported, but nobody has shown that fatigue costs less accomplished archers more points. The drop the range expects, if it exists, would have to be looked for there, in those who have been shooting for less time, and no study has looked for it with a suitable sample.
In training the question changes
Anyone asking the question in training, after a hundred or two hundred arrows, is looking at a different situation. There the only drop measured over a sequence of arrows comes from sixteen adults who had never shot before: over eighty arrows, read in three blocks, the score fell by 8% on average from one block to the next, earlier and further with the more tiring grip. For many it was the first session of their lives, and fatigue mixes with learning; that is why the registry holds as transferred the claim that the score drops as the session goes on, because there is no such measurement on trained archers.
On the end of a session there is also what archers themselves say. Among 59 university students who practise kyudo, 58% say that at the end of training they could still shoot, but not with good form, and the registry holds it as reported that at the end of a session the archer can still shoot, but not with good form. It is an impression gathered with a questionnaire, not a measurement of form. Fatigue in training, a hundred arrows and the shoulder are covered in the article on fatigue in archery.
Where the research stops
The measurements available cover half a day at most. The longest round read half by half is a qualification round at 70 m; nobody has followed a full day with qualification in the morning and matches in the afternoon, or the second day of a tournament. The only data on many hours of competition come from clay target shooting, where seven elite double trap shooters did not fade over four rounds of fifty targets, the last two four to five hours after a dose of caffeine taken before the start; but there is no bow to draw for each shot, and the registry keeps it as context.
Even within half a day, two questions the range often asks remain outside the measurements: how much of a drop, when there is one, comes from conditions changing between morning and afternoon rather than from fatigue, and whether endurance training changes how the score moves within a round. Nobody has tested either, so the range's belief is not ruled out: in the little data there is, the drop simply does not appear.
What I take from it on the shooting line
From these studies I do not draw a rule, but a way of looking at my own numbers. The first point is that feeling tired does not, by itself, say that the score is falling: in the studies that asked about it, reported fatigue grew, and the score did not. So before blaming fatigue for a lower second half, I would look at the scorecards of several competitions, not just one. At the Arab Championships half the archers went down and the other half did not, with drops of up to 18 points and gains of up to 33: a single competition with a lower second half sits within what happens to anyone. To see whether the gap between two halves is larger than ordinary variation, you can use the tool that compares two rounds, entering the two halves in place of the two rounds.
The second point is about where the drop appears, when it keeps coming back. A second half that is always lower is one thing; the last ends of every set scoring lower than the first is another, and it is the pattern seen in the Malaysian archer. In the first case, outdoors, it is worth asking what changes between the two halves besides fatigue, that is light, wind and temperature; in the second it makes more sense to look at aiming, the phase in which archers say they feel fatigue and in which bow sway grows.
The third point is about those who have not been shooting long. The little data comparing levels says that the same competition format weighs more on a novice, and for them the question might have a different answer, one that nobody can give with today's data. On long days, finally, the load data say how many arrows are shot and how many kilometres are walked, and what we know about water and food on competition days is in the article on hydration and nutrition at competitions. The comparison between competition and training scores, another question people ask after a bad day, has its own page: do archers shoot worse in competition than in training?