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On a stress tolerance test, young archers do no better than peers from other sports

1 study · 180 archers measured

ForContextAgainst2022202420262022, for, n = 1802022, context, n = 60
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.

There is a single study, and what it shows clearly is that young archers do not stand out from peers in other sports. In India, 180 boys aged 11 to 13, thirty from each of six individual sports and all with at least two years of training, took the reactive stress tolerance test of the Vienna Test System, about six minutes of visual and sound stimuli to be answered quickly. On correct responses, omitted stimuli and reaction times the six sports were the same; on incorrect responses the archers sat with shooting, cycling and weightlifting, and the only difference was with swimming, percentile rank 40.2 against 15.9. Which way that difference runs, though, the paper does not make clear: the authors read a high rank as more errors, but the test usually orients its ranks on performance, and in that case the archers would have made fewer errors than the swimmers. Since this is a laboratory test on preadolescents, it says that archery gives these boys no visible advantage, and nothing about holding up through a qualification round.

Also phrased as: "archery teaches stress management"; "archers handle pressure better"; "stress tolerance in young archers"; "archery calms young people down"

In practice

It is often said that archery teaches young people to stay calm under pressure, more than other sports do, because it makes them stop and control their breathing before every arrow.

Evidence

Status history

  1. 1984 Not studied No one in the registry's bibliography had yet compared the stress tolerance of young archers with that of peers who play other sports.
  2. 2022 Reported The first and only comparison arrives. A hundred and eighty Indian boys aged 11 to 13 from six individual sports take a stress tolerance test from the Vienna Test System: on correct responses, omitted stimuli and reaction times the archers did not differ from the others, and on incorrect responses they sat with shooting, cycling and weightlifting. The only difference was with swimming, 40.2 against 15.9 in percentile rank, but the paper does not make clear whether a high rank means more errors or fewer. A single study, on preadolescents and in the laboratory, in which the archers come out better than nobody: reported.

Related

Related articles

Research lines

Cite
APA

Campagna, M. (2026). On a stress tolerance test, young archers do no better than peers from other sports (Version 2). In Evidence Registry. Retrieved 16 October 2026, from https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/mind/young-archers-stress-tolerance

BibTeX
@misc{campagna2026_arcieritolleranzapressione,
  author = {Campagna, Matteo},
  title = {On a stress tolerance test, young archers do no better than peers from other sports},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {Evidence Registry, matteocampagna.com},
  url = {https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/mind/young-archers-stress-tolerance},
  note = {Version 2; accessed 2026-10-16}
}

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