The body feels different on competition day: you wake up earlier, eat breakfast in a hurry, your heart is already racing in the car park, and by the evening you are as tired as after a hard day's work. Hence the question many archers ask me: does this stress show up in the body's numbers, or is it just a feeling?
Some researchers have gone and measured it: in Brazil with saliva and blood, in Ukraine with urine, in Turkey by recording what the national team ate and drank over four days of a tournament. Put side by side, these measurements give a sharper answer than the question asks for: the tension of competition leaves a trace in the saliva, while the values usually read as load or health show no clear, consistent sign of it. These are small studies, though, often from the same research group, and that weighs on everything that follows.
Tension in the saliva
The first part of the answer concerns the feeling itself. Saliva carries two markers that research uses to track arousal: alpha-amylase, which rises within minutes, and cortisol, which comes later. In nineteen Korean female university archers, alpha-amylase went from 43.8 units per millilitre ten minutes before the start to 87.4 one minute before. At the Brazilian championship forty archers gave saliva on waking on the free practice day and on the first day of competition, and cortisol on competition day was higher, with a large difference (Cohen's d 1.20). This is why the claim that before competition the stress markers in archers' saliva rise, and stay higher in those who do worse is reported: five studies point the same way, but they come from only two research groups and from samples of eight to forty archers.
Whether competition feels heavier than training, on the other hand, is not settled. The same Brazilian archers were much more anxious on the first day of competition than the day before, while eighteen elite Turkish archers gave the same answers to an anxiety questionnaire before a training session and before the indoor championship, even though their hearts were beating eight more times a minute on average before the competition. This is why the claim that archers arrive more tense on competition day than in training is contested. The rest of this article looks at the values usually read as fatigue, energy or defences.
Mucosal defences
In archery there is a common idea that people fall ill more easily after major competitions, because stress lowers the defences. The marker used to test it is salivary IgA, the antibody that guards the nose and throat, which in endurance sports is expected to drop after long efforts. In archers it was measured by two master's theses from the same Brazilian research group.
In the first, eight national team archers, four men and four women, shot a simulated competition of 144 arrows at 90, 70, 50 and 30 metres, and their IgA was compared with the same time of day on a rest day, in four samples taken between 8 am and 5 pm: at none of the four could the two be told apart, even though cortisol was higher after every distance. In the second, on the forty archers at the championship, IgA on competition day was not lower than on the free practice day: it was in fact higher, with a medium effect (d=0.50), and it did not go with score (r=0.1). The waking sample, after all, comes hours before shooting, and a value taken at that time may reflect the anticipation of competition more than the competition itself.
This is why the claim that a day of competition does not lower an archer's salivary IgA is reported, and no more. These are two theses from the same group, the first has its figures only in charts, and both say one thing in the abstract and another in the results. It can be said that the drop expected in endurance sports was not seen here. It cannot be said that competition leaves immune defences untouched, because nobody has counted archers' days of illness after a competition.
Blood glucose
The second measurement comes from the blood. It is said that archery burns so little energy that blood glucose is never an issue, and that breakfast is enough to get through the day. The first measurements point that way. In six Korean middle-school boys, measured before, during and after a 30-metre test, blood glucose stayed between 84 and 92 milligrams per decilitre, even after a night without sleep; in two Brazilian sixteen-year-olds, one from the national youth team and one beginner, it stayed between 87 and 107 through a simulated competition of 72 arrows at 70 metres.
The thesis on the eight Brazilian national team archers looked at a whole day, and there the picture changes. In the first ends blood glucose did not move, but after the morning block, that is after 72 arrows at 90 and 70 metres, it departed from the same time of day on the rest day; in the simulated half-length competition from the same thesis, it then fell for the whole of the event. No value reached the hypoglycaemia threshold the authors give, and at that same point of the day cortisol peaked. The studies on archers therefore point two ways, and the claim that an archer's blood glucose stays stable during a competition is contested.
There is one detail, though, that matters more than the number of arrows. The two sixteen-year-olds shot their 72 arrows after lunch, with plenty of carbohydrate available, and the authors themselves urge caution on that account; the arrows in the thesis, by contrast, covered the morning up to the noon sample. Nobody recorded precisely what the archers ate and when, so the difference may depend on the meal more than on the shooting. A hint comes from the same thesis: after six nutrition education sessions, the eight archers repeated the half-length competition with higher blood glucose at every point measured. With no control group and values only in charts, the claim that a few nutrition education sessions change how archers eat and raise their blood glucose in competition also stops at reported.
Lactate in the urine
A research group in Lviv followed sixteen Ukrainian archers aged nineteen to twenty-two, masters and candidate masters of sport, collecting urine before and after shooting, in training and in competition, to measure lactate, usually read as a sign of muscular work, and urea.
In the first analysis, published in 2024, the authors split the variation in lactate between the factors in the study: the physical load, that is the comparison between before and after shooting, explained 80% of it, while the psychological load, that is whether the day was training or competition, explained 3.5%. Urea depended for almost 90% on factors the study had not measured, and lactate and urea did not move together. Read this way, an archer's urinary lactate shows how hard the body has worked and almost nothing about the tension of the day.
In 2025 the same authors, with the same sixteen archers, looked at the data from another side. Half of the sample had done two months of autogenic training, a relaxation technique followed by mental rehearsal of the shot, and in competition their lactate was 9.7% lower than the other half's; in competition the technique explained 21.4% of the variation in lactate, and in training 12.2%, which was not significant. The authors conclude that urinary lactate can be used to track the psychological state in competition. The same sample, read by the same authors, therefore points two ways, and this is why the claim that in an archer's urine, lactate mostly follows the physical load and far less the tension of competition is contested.
Neither reading is a tool to be used: the groups had eight archers each, and tension was defined by the type of day, never measured with a questionnaire. The effect of autogenic training, which the registry keeps in a separate entry, also stops at reported: the claim that eight weeks of autogenic training lower archers' urinary lactate in competition rests on two papers from the same experiment, which count as a single study, and neither publishes shooting scores.
Energy and carbohydrate
The last two measurements are not about what the body produces but about what it receives. A research group at Northumbria University, in Newcastle, followed the Turkish recurve national team at two tournaments in the spring of 2023, with meals set by the team nutritionist and recorded with diaries and photographs. At the first, a European Grand Prix, six archers were followed over four very different days: the first with about 180 arrows and more than five hours of competition, the second with about 38 arrows in under half an hour.
What they ate followed the load. On the longest day they took in 3,985 kilocalories and 7.1 grams of carbohydrate per kilo of body mass, on the lightest 2,564 kilocalories and 4.0 grams, and from day to day intake stayed close to estimated expenditure. Expenditure, however, is calculated with an equation from resting metabolism and type of activity, not measured.
A month later, at a World Cup stage, the same group followed four men and four women from the same national team. Energy intake went with the day's estimated expenditure (r=0.77) and so did carbohydrate (r=0.76), while expenditure fell from 3,131 to 2,262 kilocalories between the first and fourth days; during shooting the archers took about 43 grams of carbohydrate an hour on the long days and about 20 on the others. The claim that in competition, archers match energy and carbohydrate intake to the day's load is reported, and the same reading applies to the claim that a tournament day costs an elite archer between 2,000 and 4,100 calories, and their diet covers it: two supporting studies, but from the same team a month apart, with the men probably partly the same people.
It was the team nutritionist, however, who matched intake to load, not the archers on their own; whether an archer with nobody alongside would do the same, and whether matching intake changes the score, has not been tested. The adjustment also concerned energy and carbohydrate, not the rest of the diet: at the first tournament protein stayed between 2.2 and 3.6 grams per kilo a day, above the range recommended for athletes.
How much is drunk and how much is lost
The same two tournaments also provide the hydration data. At the World Cup, with an average of 23.7 degrees, the eight archers drank 0.66 litres an hour while competing, with no difference between men and women, lost 0.58% of their body mass on average, and kept their urine specific gravity below 1.020 throughout, the threshold above which dehydration is usually said to begin. At the Grand Prix a month earlier, at 14.5 degrees, the six archers were hydrated before and after shooting and slightly dehydrated only on waking. At both tournaments the driest moment of the day was first thing in the morning, not the end of competition.
The claim that in competition, archers stay hydrated on less than a litre an hour is reported, with the same limits as the part on food: few archers, probably partly the same people, a nutritionist-led diet and mild weather. A 2026 measurement adds one element: eleven archers from a university club in Jakarta, weighed before and after one outdoor qualification round, lost between 200 and 700 millilitres each, 391 on average. That study does not record how much they drank, but it shows that fluid needs vary a great deal from one archer to the next. I have written at greater length about handling food and water on competition day in a separate article.
The five measurements together
Taken one at a time, these five entries are weak: three are reported and two contested. Put side by side, though, they answer the opening question better than any of them alone. In the studies, the tension of competition shows in the saliva and in the heart. The values usually read as load or health, by contrast, show no clear, consistent sign of it: IgA did not fall in the two samples measured, urinary lactate has been read in two opposite ways by the same authors, blood glucose stays stable in some tests and moves in others, perhaps because of the meal more than the arrows, and food and fluids, in athletes supported by a nutritionist, tracked the number of arrows shot that day.
Fatigue gives a divided picture too: the claim that shooting a full competition places little physical load on a trained archer is contested, because in the Brazilian thesis the whole day was rated as tiring as a rest day but every single end felt harder than the same moment of that rest day. And something that seems obvious has not really been put to the test: the Ukrainian work measures the same archers in competition and in training, but on the load of the two days it reaches no answer, because it says one thing in the results and another in the discussion, so for the registry the claim that a competition day loads an archer more than a training day is a question not yet studied.
Where the research stops
The limits are common to all these measurements. The samples range from two to forty archers, and the fullest work comes from three research groups: one Brazilian, one Ukrainian and one following the Turkish national team. The link with score has rarely been examined: IgA does not go with it (r=0.1), cortisol on waking goes with a lower score (r=-0.5), and for blood glucose, urinary lactate, food and fluids the question of whether they change the arrows has not been asked. Nobody, moreover, has followed archers in the days after a competition, and what happens to a club archer on a midsummer competition day has not been measured.
What I take to the range
My answer to the opening question is this: the stress of competition is not just a feeling, because in the studies it shows in the saliva and in the heart, but in the data we have it does not turn into a body giving way. Salivary IgA did not fall in the two samples studied, the blood glucose of the archers measured never reached hypoglycaemia, and the Turkish archers, with a nutritionist alongside, finished four days of competition hydrated. None of this is medical advice, and anyone with a condition that requires them to watch their blood glucose or fluids follows what their doctor tells them. Beyond that, I take three things from it, and I treat them for what they are, inferences from a handful of studies.
The first concerns how to read your own sensations. A heart that speeds up before the start is a sign of arousal that studies have measured in many archers, including those at the top, and on its own it does not mean the body is struggling.
The second concerns the long day. The differences in blood glucose that appeared after a morning of shooting may depend on when the archers had eaten more than on the arrows, and on the long days the Turkish archers ate while they were shooting too. So on days with qualification and matches I pay as much attention to meal times as to quantities, and I do not treat a 180-arrow day the same way as a 38-arrow one.
The third concerns the morning. At both Turkish tournaments the driest moment of the day was on waking, not at the end of competition, and the archers stayed hydrated on less than a litre an hour, in mild weather. So I pay as much attention to the morning as to the ends, knowing that how much is lost varies a great deal from one archer to the next and that nobody has measured a hot day.