Matteo Campagna
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Archery does not come with quicker reaction times

9 studies · 275 archers measured

ForContextAgainst201220142016201820202022202420262025, for, n = 802025, against, n = 802012, for, n = 362025, context, n = 362021, for, n = 352026, context, n = 252025, for, n = 202012, context, n = 182021, context, n = 182014, for, n = 152014, against, n = 152014, context, n = 152024, context, n = 10
Each circle is a study: its position gives the year, its row whether it is for, against or context, its size how many participants it measured. Light circles are studies on other populations or without archers.

Archers' reaction time beside the comparison group, study by study

Each row is a group and the rows come in blocks, one per study, with the study's name at the front: the tests are not the same, so the values compare within a study and not between studies. Hamaguchi measures the response in a Go/NoGo task (Table 4), Mylchenko simple visual-motor reaction on a computer (Tables 1, 2 and 3), Geçitli the ruler-drop test (Table 1), Erten the Nelson visual hand reaction test (Table 2), Akyürek and Öztürk the reaction to a square appearing on a screen (Table 3). The dot is the mean. The whiskers are the standard deviation for Hamaguchi, Geçitli and Erten, and the ± that Akyürek and Öztürk give without defining it; for Mylchenko the light bar runs from the fastest to the slowest of the five archers in the group, and for the second category the text names 232 ms as the best, while the table gives 229, which is kept here. Geçitli and Erten give times in seconds, written here in milliseconds; Erten uses two decimal places, so 0.13 seconds becomes 130 ms with a rounding margin of 5 ms, and in both studies the standard deviations are also rounded to the hundredth of a second. Akyürek and Öztürk do not state the unit of their times: values between 380 and 499 read as milliseconds. No difference between the archers and the comparison group is significant: t = 0.22 for Hamaguchi, p = 0.471 and 0.268 for Geçitli, p = 0.354 and 0.791 for Erten; among the children, those who only do archery cannot be told apart from those who do another sport or none. The hollow dot marks the two results that point the other way: the twelve children who combine archery with another sport, quicker than the other three groups (p = 0.034), and Mylchenko's second category, the slowest of the three levels, in a study with no statistical tests. Erten compares Paralympic wheelchair archers and basketball players, who have different disabilities, and stays as context, in grey. Data from: Hamaguchi et al. 2012, Mylchenko 2014, Geçitli et al. 2021, Erten et al. 2021 and Akyürek and Öztürk 2025.
The numbers in the figure
Study or groupValue (milliseconds)IntervalnStance
Hamaguchi 2012, archers and kyudo practitioners318.3± 32.9 (mean ± standard deviation)18for
Hamaguchi 2012, kendo320.9± 35.5 (mean ± standard deviation)18for
Mylchenko 2014, candidate masters of sport234198–276 (reported range, minimum to maximum)5for
Mylchenko 2014, first category225212–244 (reported range, minimum to maximum)5for
Mylchenko 2014, second category273229–351 (reported range, minimum to maximum)5against
Geçitli 2021, archers, right hand134± 40 (mean ± standard deviation)16for
Geçitli 2021, archers, left hand127± 40 (mean ± standard deviation)16for
Geçitli 2021, bocce, right hand142± 40 (mean ± standard deviation)19for
Geçitli 2021, bocce, left hand143± 40 (mean ± standard deviation)19for
Erten 2021, wheelchair archers, right hand130± 40 (mean ± standard deviation)9context
Erten 2021, wheelchair archers, left hand190± 140 (mean ± standard deviation)9context
Erten 2021, wheelchair basketball, right hand140± 20 (mean ± standard deviation)9context
Erten 2021, wheelchair basketball, left hand140± 30 (mean ± standard deviation)9context
Akyürek and Öztürk 2025, archery only450.43± 121.52 (± as reported by the study)28for
Akyürek and Öztürk 2025, another sport463.92± 127.05 (± as reported by the study)24for
Akyürek and Öztürk 2025, no sport498.94± 129.89 (± as reported by the study)16for
Akyürek and Öztürk 2025, archery and another sport380.75± 98.02 (± as reported by the study)12against

Five studies, all of them small, measure the reaction time of people who shoot, and none finds the advantage one might expect. Eighteen Japanese university students of archery and kyudo react in 318 milliseconds, eighteen kendo practitioners in 321; sixteen young Turkish Olympic archers cannot be told apart from nineteen bocce players; among eighty Turkish children, those who only do archery react to visual stimuli in 450 milliseconds, the same as those who do another sport (464). The only study with random allocation, twenty adult beginners, finds that six weeks of shooting shorten reaction times no more than simply repeating the test does. There are two cracks, and both sit inside studies that otherwise point the same way: among fifteen young Ukrainian archers the least qualified group is the slowest, by almost forty milliseconds, and among the Turkish children those who combine archery with another sport are the quickest (381 milliseconds), which looks more like the effect of doing two sports than an effect of archery. None of these studies worked out how many people were needed to detect a small difference, and two of them compare archers with other precision sports: what can be said is that a large advantage does not show, not that there is no difference at all.

Also phrased as: "archers' reflexes"; "reaction time in archery"; "does archery make you quicker"; "archery and quick reactions"

In practice

It is often said that archery trains the reflexes, and that an experienced archer must be quicker to respond to a signal than someone who does not shoot.

Evidence

Status history

  1. 2012 Reported The first comparison comes from Japan: eighteen university students of archery and kyudo have the same simple reaction time as eighteen kendo practitioners, 318 against 321 milliseconds, and the archers and kyudo practitioners cannot be told apart from each other either. The trained reflex does not show. It is a single cross-sectional study on a small sample, so the claim, written in the direction of the result, starts as reported.
  2. 2014 Reported In fifteen young Ukrainian archers at three levels, five per group, the most qualified group is not the quickest: 234 milliseconds against 225 for the level just below, and the consistency of the response does not follow the level. The same study also pulls the other way, though, because the least qualified group is clearly the slowest, at 273 milliseconds. It counts once for and once against, and with no statistical test at all it carries little weight in either direction: two supporting studies against one contrary result leave the status at reported.
  3. 2021 Reported Sixteen young Turkish Olympic archers and nineteen bocce players take the ruler-drop test: 0.134 and 0.127 seconds for the archers, 0.142 and 0.143 for the bocce players, with no difference for either hand. It is another null result pointing the same way, but the comparison is with another precision sport, the least informative one for this question, and the journal is regional: the status does not change. The same year nine Paralympic wheelchair archers react no more quickly than nine wheelchair basketball players, 0.13 seconds against 0.14 with the right hand; it compares people with different disabilities and stays as context.
  4. 2024 Reported From a Russian sports school come ten national-level archers tested before competition: on simple reaction seven out of ten show a state of weak nervous activation, and on complex reaction four score unsatisfactorily. No times in milliseconds, no comparison group and a journal with questionable editorial standards: the figure cannot be counted, and the status stays reported.
  5. 2025 Reported The two most informative studies arrive. Twenty adult beginners allocated at random: after six weeks of shooting, reaction times in the attention tests fall as much as in the group that did not shoot, a sign that what improves is mostly familiarity with the test. Among eighty Turkish children, those who only do archery react no more quickly than those who do another sport or none, to visual or auditory stimuli; the quickest are the twelve who combine archery with another sport, 381 milliseconds against 450, and that is the second crack. The same year, in thirty-six young archers, reaction times fall over eight weeks in every group, the control group included, which confirms how sensitive these tests are to repetition. Five supporting studies and two cracks inside studies that point the same way, all of them small: reported.
  6. 2026 Reported Twenty-five young Indian women archers do eight weeks of yoga and their visual reaction time stays at seven tenths of a second, 0.703 before and 0.702 after. With no control group and in a journal with questionable editorial standards it is only a descriptive measure: the five small studies that find no archery advantage remain the picture, and the status does not change.

Related

Related articles

Research lines

Cite
APA

Campagna, M. (2026). Archery does not come with quicker reaction times (Version 2). In Evidence Registry. Retrieved 16 October 2026, from https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/mind/archery-reaction-times

BibTeX
@misc{campagna2026_reazionesemplicearcieri,
  author = {Campagna, Matteo},
  title = {Archery does not come with quicker reaction times},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {Evidence Registry, matteocampagna.com},
  url = {https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/mind/archery-reaction-times},
  note = {Version 2; accessed 2026-10-16}
}

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