Sleep quality and accuracy in female archers: Daiyrova 2026

Twenty-six female recurve archers aged 18 to 25, 21.2 on average and with 3 to 7 years in the sport, completed the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, the questionnaire that sums up the previous month's sleep in a score from 0 to 21, where a higher value means poorer sleep. Over the following week they shot four training sessions at 18 metres indoors, in ends of six arrows, and accuracy was expressed as the share of the highest score obtainable from the arrows shot, between 150 and 243 each.

The mean questionnaire score is 6.15 (range 2 to 9, median 6): ten archers score 5 or less, the usual threshold for good sleep, and sixteen above. They slept 6.8 hours a night on average. Mean accuracy is 77.7 per cent, ranging from 43.2 to 94.5. No link appears between the two measures: the Pearson correlation is 0.168 (p = 0.413), the Spearman rank correlation 0.043 (p = 0.835), and after allowing for age and years of experience the questionnaire coefficient stays far from significance (B = 1.11 percentage points per point, p = 0.447), in a model that explains 3 per cent of the differences in accuracy. The sign even runs opposite to expectation, since those reporting poorer sleep had slightly higher accuracy, but it stays within the margin of error. Leaving out the archer with the lowest accuracy changes nothing (r = 0.188, p = 0.369).

The study is cross-sectional. The archers were licensed competitors from university teams and local clubs, with at least a year in the sport and regular training. The country is not stated, but ethics approval came from Kyrgyzstan's State Academy of Physical Culture and Sport and the questionnaire was the Russian version of the PSQI. The authors explain that only women met the inclusion criteria during data collection, which is why the sample is female. The questionnaire was filled in at the start of the monitoring week, before any shooting. Each session began with 12 to 18 warm-up arrows at 3 to 5 metres without a target and went on with scored arrows under competition-like conditions, with scores recorded by experienced coaches.

The analysis uses Pearson and Spearman correlations with bootstrap confidence intervals from 5,000 resamples, a simple regression and one adjusted for age and years of experience. The authors also report the power: with 26 people the study detects, with 80 per cent power, only correlations above about 0.53. Two sensitivity analyses drop five questionnaires in which reported sleep exceeded time in bed and change how exactly six hours of sleep are scored; the text says the result does not change, but gives no figures for these two.

The confidence intervals are wide: for the Pearson correlation they run from -0.22 to 0.51, taking in both a moderate link in the expected direction and one in the opposite direction. The authors say so plainly: the null result does not show that there is no link, and the study only had the power to find strong ones.

The sample is narrow in several ways. Questionnaire scores lie between 2 and 9 on a scale that goes up to 21, with a standard deviation of 1.95: none of the archers slept very badly, and over such a short range a moderate link is hard to see even if it exists. The group is not all in one band, though, since ten archers fall below the good-sleep threshold and sixteen above it. They are all women, their competitive level was not measured, and they all shot at 18 metres indoors.

Then there is timing. The questionnaire covers the month before, the shooting the week after, and sleep on the nights before the sessions was not recorded, nor were training load, menstrual cycle, caffeine or fatigue. In five questionnaires out of twenty-six, hours of sleep exceed hours in bed, a sign of how imprecise recall can be. Accuracy pools archers with different numbers of arrows, from 150 to 243, and the lowest value, 43 per cent, is well away from all the others.

For a female archer who usually sleeps reasonably well or with some disturbance, like those in this group, the study finds no trace in her training score at 18 metres. That does not mean sleep does not matter: it means that, within a fairly ordinary range of sleep, differences in accuracy between one archer and another depend on other things, and that a questionnaire about the past month is a crude tool for predicting how the following week will go.

The authors draw a pointer for coaches from this: habitual sleep and the night before a competition are two different things, and ahead of a competition it makes more sense to look at the nights just before, with a diary or a sensor, than at a questionnaire filled in once. The study does not show this, since it did not measure those nights; the distinction, though, is the one its result makes necessary.