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Elite archers in the studies: what we know about the best

What studies of national-team and top archers have measured, one subject at a time: a shot that differs from archer to archer, nine points per arrow that do not mean tens on demand, breathing named among the last strategies, draw weights that split, little nutritional support. And where small samples and one-off comparisons stop being enough.

Studies in the registry
82
Years
1986-2026

Whom the studies call elite

More than eighty studies in the registry measured national-team or top-level archers, and sixty-six claims concern them directly. It helps to know who is inside, because in papers "elite" covers different groups, from the top fifteen men and top fifteen women of the world ranking filmed in competition to four athletes from a single national team. Large samples are few, such as the fifty-seven national-team archers at the 2011 Asian Championships or the fifty-one from twenty-two countries in a 2026 questionnaire, and many of the others have fewer than twenty people.

Here I bring together what they found, subject by subject, and mark where the data run out; practical advice is in the linked articles.

The shot: each archer has their own

One of the firmest results concerns technique, and it runs against the idea of a single model to copy. The claim that elite archers share one correct technique is refuted: in fifteen archers of the United States national team the muscle pattern of the release varies by 16% within the same archer and by 52% between archers, and a model trained only on the paths of shoulders, elbows and wrists recognises which of four national-level athletes is shooting in 98.7% of cases.

The high-speed footage from London 2012 adds further details. In seven archers out of sixteen the arrow's behaviour gives away some torque on the bow, in four the string touches the face, and in only four does the nock leave the string on the bow's median plane, while all of them shot the spine given by the manufacturer's chart. Timing is not fixed either: in seven archers from the German squads the interval between the clicker and the release changes from arrow to arrow, and those who vary least score higher.

On the muscles the picture is still open: whether elite archers activate their muscles less than intermediate archers while aiming is contested, and the reading that holds up best is a shift of work away from the fingers and arms towards the shoulder blades. It is also contested whether they move more after the release, because one comparison of French archers at 70 metres finds it and another at the same distance does not.

Scores at the top

At seventy metres a top archer averages about nine points per arrow: the measured means fall between 8.65 and 9.14, in independent samples. Between a club archer and a national-team archer there are about 150 points on a FITA round. An average of nine, however, does not mean tens on demand: in international head-to-head matches the first two arrows of an end are both tens in only 13% of cases, so even at the top most arrows are not tens and the occasional one lands well away from the centre.

What grows with level is regularity. In the Chinese national team the standard deviation between athletes is 0.5 points per arrow, in the Beijing provincial squad 1.4: as the level rises, scores become more uniform from one athlete to the next, while how much the same archer's score changes from one session to another has hardly been measured. Seven independent samples find tighter groups in the stronger archers, generally better centred too, although centring does not improve in an orderly way from one level to the next.

The mind in competition

Two sets of interviews almost thirty years apart, with the Italian Olympic team before Atlanta and with sixty-five high-level Korean archers in 2025, place breathing among the last strategies mentioned. Among the Koreans imagery ends up there too, and all psychological regulation techniques together make up 11% of the mentions about preparation, behind confidence and a clear head. The same Korean archers, talking about the aim and the release, mention wind above all, 76 mentions out of 157, and say they deal with it by adjusting the strength of the shot more than by calculating drift. These are memories of good shots, not measurements.

Measurements do exist for anxiety and for mistakes. At the 2011 Asian Championships cognitive anxiety rises from 3.67 in the qualification round to 5.21 in the individual matches and stays at 5.05 in the team event. Across 19,122 arrows from international head-to-head matches, after two arrows outside the ten the third is worth about 12% less for everyone, and women recover slightly less than men. On attention the picture is contested, and the more coordinated brain network of Chinese national-team archers while aiming comes from a single research group. As for the coach, finally, in competition French and Korean archers prefer one who steps in rarely and to the point, and after a poor end one of their responses is to look for the fix on their own.

Equipment, training and body

On draw weight the numbers split. At the 2025 Shanghai World Cup stage the recurve mean was 46.8 lb, with values from 37.2 to 58.3, while the small national-team groups measured in 1990, 2010 and 2023 sat between 30 and 40. The two ranges heard on the shooting line, forty to fifty and thirty to forty, sit in the same entry on top-level draw weight, which is contested. On one point the two studies that measured it agree: the bow asks for far less than maximal drawing strength, on average 37% in fifteen elite and sub-elite recurve archers.

On volume, elite groups almost all fall between three and six hours a day, with a mean of 4.27 in the only study designed to measure it, which nonetheless finds one archer in five at two hours and one in five at seven or more. Between distant levels the gap in volume is wide, 34.5 hours a week in the British national squad against 4.4 in a university club, and no study shows which drives which. On the body the data are weaker: the claim that elite archers are taller and heavier is contested, because in groups of teenagers height and age grow together, and the stronger grip of the better archers has never been separated from body size.

Away from the shooting line

The 2026 questionnaire of fifty-one elite archers finds that most have no professional nutritional support: 47% have access to a sports nutritionist and in 73% of cases the federation takes no part in their diet, while 80% consider their own diet healthy. Eight archers of the Turkish national team, over four days of a World Cup in mild weather, stayed hydrated drinking 0.66 litres an hour. On sleep the studies disagree: six Turkish national-team archers followed during a tournament slept between 465 and 529 minutes a night, fifteen Indian teenagers at a sports institute 6 hours 27 minutes on school days. These are descriptive data: they show how these archers are doing, not what that means for the score.

Where the research is thin

Almost everything we know about the best archers comes from one-off comparisons between groups that already differ, with hours and draw weights often reported rather than recorded, and definitions of elite that change from one country to the next. Three things are missing above all: following the same archers for years, to see whether a trait leads to the top or grows out of shooting at the top; keeping men and women apart, since the larger samples almost always mix them; and competition itself, because many measurements of the shot are taken in the laboratory or in training, and those taken in competition concern mostly scores and anxiety. On how much the differences between two archers weigh, see the article on how many points tell two archers apart.

How we came to know it: What predicts the score, and how talent selection tried to use it

  1. 1986OriginLanders et al. 1986 A Psychobiological Study of Archery PerformanceThe first large attempt: 188 American recurve archers, from beginners to an Olympic champion, and 62 variables covering strength, build, vision, reaction time and mental habits. Seven passed the authors' threshold and together explained 53% of the score differences in the 79 archers with complete data, the mental block taking 26%; but they had been picked precisely because they correlated with the score, and when the analysis was rerun on 124 archers the share fell to 39%.
  2. 1994ExtensionSquadrone et al. 1994 Multifactorial analysis of shooting archeryTwelve archers from the Italian federation, five of them above 1,300 FITA points: each repeats a muscle profile of their own from shot to shot, and there is no common profile. Score goes with shorter aiming (r = -0.72) and with less sideways bow movement (r = -0.67), while the centre of pressure on the force plate does not separate the two levels.
  3. 1999ExtensionNorlander et al. 1999 Primary process in competitive archery performance: Effects of flotation RESTCoaches' judgement as a selection tool: four Swedish federation coaches split twenty young archers into three levels and agree closely with one another (R = 0.90). Over the twelve arrows of the control condition the weakest group scores 91.3, the intermediates 105.6 and the elite 105.5, so the judgement separates the weakest from the rest, while intermediates and elite score the same.
  4. 2007ExtensionYi et al. 2007 Evaluation on Motion Features of the World's Second Archer during Back-Tension in ArcheryThe question taken inside a single archer, then second in the FITA world ranking, over 60 arrows at 70 m: shoulder speed and angle after the release explain 15.6% of the differences between his tens, nines and eights, four variables reach 16.3% and the five in the abstract 17.9%. The authors themselves conclude that unmeasured factors are at work.
  5. 2011ExtensionRose et al. 2011 Biomechanical Predictors of Recurve Archery PerformanceFifteen recurve archers from sub-elite to elite, 150 arrows at 18 m: score goes with shoulder-girdle firmness (r² = 0.45) and with vertical tremor transmitted to the bow, while body sway on the force plate predicts nothing. It is a conference paper.
  6. 2014ExtensionHumaid 2014 Influence of Arm Muscle Strength, Draw Length and Archery Technique on Archery Achievement62 male recurve archers at the Indonesian national championship: in a path model, rated technique weighs more on the FITA score than arm strength (coefficient 0.50 against 0.36), with draw length last. The paper does not say how technique was rated, and some of its figures are not consistent with each other.
  7. 2015ExtensionKim et al. 2015 The relative importance of performance factors in Korean archeryA different route: rather than measuring archers, Korean experts were asked how much each performance factor weighs. Through pairwise comparison the mind scores 0.479, technique 0.344 and the physical side 0.177, with self-confidence alone at 0.221. These are weights of opinion, not correlations with score.
  8. 2015ExtensionAsaribab et al. 2015 IDENTIFIKASI BAKAT OLAHRAGA PANAHAN PADA SISWA SEKOLAH DASAR DI KABUPATEN MANOKWARITest batteries for picking talent begin: 160 pupils in their last two years of primary school in Manokwari, Indonesia, measured for strength, endurance and a shooting test. 45% of the boys and 45% of the girls come out as gifted for archery, but the bands are calculated from the group's own average, and no one checked how they went on to shoot.
  9. 2016ExtensionCallaway et al. 2016 Identification of temporal factors related to shot performance for indoor recurve archeryFifteen recurve archers, 450 arrows at 18 m and fourteen timing measures per shot: taken together they explain 7.7% of how far the arrow lands from the centre. Contrary to the common idea, longer aiming goes with arrows closer to the centre.
  10. 2016ExtensionQuan et al. 2016 Relationship between Aiming Patterns and Scores in Archery ShootingFour girls from a Korean middle-school team, 133 arrows at 30 m with nine inertial sensors: movements in the two seconds before the release explain 64, 28, 72 and 46% of the score, each time with different variables (10, 3, 11 and 5). A model on the averages of the four reaches an R² close to 1, with four archers in all.
  11. 2017ExtensionSpratford et al. 2017 Postural stability, clicker reaction time and bow draw force predict performance in elite recurve archery39 international recurve archers measured before a World Cup event, ten arrows at 70 m on a force plate: clicker reaction time, draw weight and maximum sway speed explain 42% of the single-shot score. Sway after the release weighs most, and it is also the measure on which the archers differed most.
  12. 2018MethodTaha et al. 2018 The identification of high potential archers based on fitness and motor ability variables: A Support Vector Machine approachMachine learning arrives: 50 young Malaysian archers are split into high and low potential using physical tests and score, then recognised from the physical tests alone with accuracy up to 97.5%. The groups come from the same measures that then recognise them, the same sample returns in about ten papers by the same team, and the only test on archers kept out of training involves ten young people.
  13. 2019ExtensionMusa et al. 2019 A machine learning approach of predicting high potential archers by means of physical fitness indicatorsOn the same fifty, the version published in PLOS ONE: of the six physical tests only the vertical jump and sit-ups are associated with score, and the best classifier reaches 82.5% accuracy but 50% precision, meaning half of those it calls high potential are not, according to the label.
  14. 2022ReviewVendrame et al. 2022 Performance assessment in archery: a systematic reviewA systematic review of 41 biomechanical studies published between 1986 and 2021: body sway behaves as a performance indicator in nine studies out of ten, the four studies on aiming time disagree, and the most promising candidate becomes the repeatability of the shot from one arrow to the next.
  15. 2022MethodNugroho et al. 2022 Validity and Reliability of Talent Identification Instrument in ArcheryAn Indonesian battery of nine tests for spotting talent, judged adequate by seven experts (Aiken's V between 0.809 and 0.952) and tried on 61 club archers with a Cronbach's alpha of 0.635. Whether it picks the right young archers is not checked: there is no comparison at all with what those archers do on the range.
  16. 2024ExtensionRusdiawan et al. 2024 Physical capacity and performance correlation in sub-elite Indonesian archery athletesEighteen young Indonesian recurve archers with a 72-arrow qualification round at 70 m: of the whole physical battery only finger draw-holding endurance goes with score (rho 0.748 right, 0.632 left), while sit-ups, plank, balance and estimated aerobic capacity show no link.
  17. 2025ExtensionGuru et al. 2025 Can we predict archery performance using shooting heart rate and other biophysical parameters? A machine learning approach32 Indian archers, 35 variables including heart rate at eleven points of each shot, and twelve machine-learning models: the best, tested on the following session, has an error of about six points out of 300 (R² 0.575). Years of practice top the predictors, followed by resting blood pressure and, third, previous competition score; heart rate before and after the release comes seventh and tenth.
  18. 2025ExtensionFan et al. 2025 Associations of Scoring Accuracy with Postural Stability and Strength Measures in Archers on a Standard Archery Site37 national-level Taiwanese archers, recurve and compound, at their own competition distance: the predictors of score change with the bow. In recurve what counts is the centre of pressure and the bow-side wrist in the tenth of a second after the release; in compound, forward and backward sway and the drawing-side wrist in the half second before it.
  19. 2025ExtensionJacquot et al. 2025 A multi-parameter investigation of elite archery: distinguishing individual and shared performance strategies during the aiming and follow-through phasesEight top French archers, 549 arrows at 70 m with electromyography, a force plate and sensors: some parameters separate the good arrows across the whole group, many others only in one archer at a time. Aiming time matters in two archers, in opposite directions.
  20. 2026ExtensionJacquot 2026 Analyse multidimensionnelle de la performance en tir à l'arcThe thesis that contains the previous study compares those eight with seven regional archers: the elite use less muscle while aiming and are more consistent, with a score standard deviation of 0.91 against 2.02. The elite group is the same one, so this is not an independent confirmation.
  21. 2026ExtensionPutra et al. 2026 The Utilization of VO₂Max Data as Archery Athlete Selection and Monitoring InstrumentTwenty-one secondary-school students in Bali: estimated maximal oxygen uptake is put forward as a criterion for choosing the team, with no shooting measure and no link to performance calculated.

The studies

Related claims

Claims in the registry with at least one of these studies among their evidence.

283 claims · 91% with evidence on archers

Articles

Research lines

Cite
APA

Campagna, M. (2026). Elite archers in the studies: what we know about the best. In Research. matteocampagna.com. Retrieved 16 October 2026, from https://matteocampagna.com/en/research/populations/elite-archers

BibTeX
@misc{campagna2026_enresearchpopulationselitearchers,
  author = {Campagna, Matteo},
  title = {Elite archers in the studies: what we know about the best},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {Research, matteocampagna.com},
  url = {https://matteocampagna.com/en/research/populations/elite-archers},
  note = {accessed 2026-10-16}
}