Barebow / instinctive vs Olympic recurve vs compound: differences in the shot, the equipment and the score

Archery covers at least three different ways of shooting. Olympic recurve has a sight, a clicker and stabilisers, and the string is released off the fingers. Compound has cams, a mechanical release aid, a peep in the string and a scope with a lens. Shooting without a sight, instinctive or barebow, is done with traditional bows such as the longbow or with a recurve stripped of sight and stabilisers, and the string still leaves the fingers.

Research has compared these styles very unevenly. Almost all the data concern recurve and compound, and the findings on equipment and scoring are clearer than those on the body: elite compound archers draw more pounds, their arrows leave the bow much faster and, as far as the only bow studied in depth shows, barely flex; and in the most direct comparison, with each archer at their own competition distance, compound scored higher. On how the body works, by contrast, the two studies that measured balance reach opposite conclusions, and the idea that recurve archers get injured more often comes from a single sample, while a second study, on shoulder pain, found no difference between the two bows. On shooting without a sight the data are few, and almost none compare it with the other two styles, so the comparison that follows is mostly between recurve and compound, and I say so whenever I turn to instinctive shooting.

How each style aims

The first difference you notice is the aiming system. In Olympic recurve the archer lines up the sight pin with the centre of the target and sets the sight for each distance, while the clicker gives a fixed reference for draw length. In compound there are two references: the peep, a small hole in the string that the archer looks through, fixes the position of the eye, and the scope, a lens with a dot or ring at its centre, gives the aiming point. The combination leaves the eye little room to wander, and in return it asks for a longer setup.

Shooting without a sight has two schools. In instinctive shooting the archer looks at the target rather than at the bow or the arrow, and the aim is built through repetition, until the body finds the right elevation for the distance on its own. In target barebow the aim is almost always conscious: the arrow point serves as the reference and, depending on the distance, the archer moves their fingers down the string (string walking) or moves the anchor on the face (face walking), or estimates the gap between point and centre (gap shooting). So-called gun barrelling, looking down the shaft to line it up with the target, belongs to this second family too. The times quoted for reaching a reliable level in each style are estimates from the range rather than measurements, and they vary a great deal from person to person.

The equipment in figures

On equipment, the comparison between recurve and compound comes with precise figures, even if almost every one comes from a single study. The broadest is a snapshot of the setups of 61 archers at the Shanghai stage of the 2025 World Cup: in compound the mean draw weight is 56.6 lb against 46.8 lb in recurve, and it varies far less from archer to archer, with a standard deviation of 3.0 lb against 6.0. Arrows come out shorter in compound, 71.1 cm against 75.6, but the mean is pulled down by a length of 28.9 cm that looks as if it was entered in inches, and the archers' draw lengths are not reported. On arrow weight the two disciplines do not separate clearly, which is not enough to say the weights are the same.

In the same archers the compound arrow leaves much faster, at about 89 metres per second against 66, once the study's figures are converted, since they are given in metres per second but only make sense in feet per second. Every measurement available points the same way, from compounds tested in the laboratory, at 70 to 82 metres per second, to the pair of bows with the same draw length measured in 2020 in a study on wind, 78.9 against 57.2. No comparison, however, has been made at the same draw weight and with the same arrow, so how much of the difference comes from the cams and how much from the extra pounds cannot be said.

The way the arrow bends as it leaves the bow also changes. On a single-cam compound mounted on a shooting machine, photographs and a model of the arrow give a greatest vertical flex of a few millimetres, while for the recurve the author, drawing on other work, expects 10 to 15; the arrow enters the airstream almost aligned, with an angle of attack of -0.4 degrees vertically. That is one bow, and the same author writes that compound designs differ so much that a general rule is hard to give. The same work offers a finding of interest to anyone choosing arrows: with a release aid, two spines stiffer than recommended, 420 and 380 instead of 470, grouped like the recommended one, well within a 40 mm circle at 35 m, with only the sight setting changed. The arrows were only ever stiffer, never weaker, and the idea that with a recurve and a finger release the choice of spine is narrower is the author's inference, not a measurement.

The last difference is the best known, but how much it amounts to at the same peak force nobody has measured on a real recurve and a real compound. On a compound, once past the peak, the cams make the force to be held drop sharply: on a production compound measured in the laboratory in 2015, with a peak of about 200 newtons, the let-off at full draw was about 65%, so about a third of the peak was held while aiming, and across the three compounds measured so far the stored energy ranges from 73.7 to 96.5 joules, one bow at a time. Recurves and traditional bows have no let-off, and at full draw the archer holds the whole draw weight; on the three replica traditional bows put on a dynamometer, the force rises almost in a straight line up to 50 cm of draw. How large the advantage is at the same peak force only a 2012 model says, with a recurve that exists only in the calculation: the compound stores 75% more energy and, at the same energy, is held at full draw with 2.3 times less force.

For shooting without a sight there are fewer figures, and none comes from a comparison with the other two styles. The two samples of experienced traditional archers measured so far, ten Malaysians shooting the Mamluk technique and ten Turks with composite recurve bows, use bows of around 41 to 42 lb, 41.5 and 42.25 on average; these are two specific schools, and the figure does not hold for every tradition. Anyone choosing their own draw weight will find the rest in the article on choosing draw weight.

The release: fingers or release aid

Off the fingers, the string slides across the fingertips as the grip relaxes, and that slide is what starts the arrow flexing. The only experiment to compare the two releases on the same arrows, with a recurve mounted on a robot, measured an oscillation of 1.22 mm with a mechanical release and 6.86 mm on the shots of two national-level archers, more than five times as much, at the same frequency of around 86 hertz. That is 72 shots and two archers, and the study does not say whether the extra flex widens the group; on a recurve, after all, the flex is exactly what lets the rear of the arrow clear the riser, the archer's paradox.

In Olympic recurve the moment of release is marked by the clicker: the archer keeps expanding until the point passes the blade, and the snap sets the shot off. It is usually taught as a reaction to that sound, but in nine archers from the German national squads the interval between the snap and the string leaving was shorter than their reaction time to a sound, as if the movement were already under way when the click arrived; it is a single study, and the result holds only against the reaction task most similar to shooting. In compound the command passes to the release aid, with a trigger under the thumb or the index finger or a back-tension release, and the question of what sets the shot off becomes a question of how the archer operates the mechanism. Without a sight the release stays with the fingers, and the archer usually decides when to let go, with no external signal.

Stance, balance and muscles

The two bows also differ in how the feet are placed. In eleven qualified young Russian archers, five recurve and six compound, the most visible difference in their usual stance was how far the rear foot opened towards the target, 16 degrees in recurve and 6 in compound. In that stance the weight leaned towards the front leg with both bows, but far more in recurve, with an asymmetry of 29.5% against 7.8% in compound; studies disagree on this, however, and the same paper shows that turning the front foot into a T stance moves the load onto the back leg.

It is on balance that the data contradict each other. The Russian study finds the compound archers far steadier in the two seconds before the release, with a balance quality index of 69.9% against 40.3% in the recurve archers, and in the T stance balance worsens far more in recurve, by 64.8% against 38.6%. The paper, however, gives the two means without a test between the groups, and the groups are five and six people. The larger comparison, of 19 recurve and 18 compound pre-elite archers in Taiwan measured on a regulation field, says almost the opposite for the half-second before the release: the centre of pressure travels 51.9 mm in recurve and 61.6 in compound, and sideways sway is 1.1 mm against 1.5. After the release the roles reverse, because the compound archers sway less forwards and backwards, 3.2 mm against 5.4, while seven of the fourteen measures compared do not change between the two bows. The two readings can be reconciled only in part: the Russians used a summary index on two platforms, the Taiwanese the displacement of the centre of pressure, and in Taiwan the two bows were shot at different distances, 70 and 50 m. That is why the registry holds the first claim as reported and the second, that the body moves the same way with both bows, as contested.

The muscles also work differently, but the data are few. In recurve, the higher the level, the more the draw is held with the back: in thirty Japanese archers, in the second before the clicker went off, the lower trapezius worked at 54.0% of maximal contraction in the elite against 34.0% in the beginners, while in 24 compound archers shoulder-girdle activation did not separate the levels, most likely because the mechanical release carries the load at full draw. The direct comparison between the two bows comes from two master's theses from the same laboratory, on seven and six experienced archers with a recurve and a compound of 55 lb each, with no statistical tests: with the compound the muscles work harder in the first part of the draw, when the force is at its peak, and less after the let-off. The picture is contested. On strength there is a single comparison: in the 37 Taiwanese archers the recurve archers were stronger in the muscles that hold the draw open, for example the horizontal abductors on the drawing side, 19.0 against 15.4 kgf, although the recurve group had more men and a higher mean body weight.

One last finding concerns archers who shoot without support from their legs. The only study of shot timing in para-archers, on seven elite Korean recurve archers, found that the four in a wheelchair took 2.23 seconds to draw and 4.41 to aim, against 0.99 and 3.04 for the three who shot standing, with almost the same score, 57 against 56 over six arrows. Those who shoot standing in the ARST class still have a disability, and compound was not part of the study: the idea, often heard, that compound suits archers with physical limitations better remains an opinion from the range.

Scoring

In the rankings compound scores higher than recurve, but the two divisions do not shoot at the same target: compound shoots at 50 m on an 80 cm face with an 8 cm ten, recurve at 70 m on a 122 cm face with a 12.2 cm ten. The most direct comparison has each archer shoot their own event, and in 37 pre-elite archers in Taiwan the mean score per arrow was 9.1 in compound and 8.3 in recurve, a large difference, with less than half the spread between athletes in compound. A smaller Indian sample and a smaller Croatian one point the same way, while a 1999 Swedish study of twenty young archers found no difference, and how much of the gap comes from the bow and how much from the target face and distance has not been separated. Groups also seem tighter in compound, but the only direct comparison, eleven compound and eight recurve archers at 18 m, reports the result only in words, with no values by style.

At the top, compound comes very close to the maximum. At the first World Cup stage of 2013 sixteen men scored 350 or more out of 360 over their first 36 arrows, and the top twenty-two in the ranking lost six points between them through groups not centred on the target face. Hence the idea that in compound the differences between archers nearly vanish, which a proportional count cuts down to size: in the same analysis one ranking place is worth about 0.7 points out of 720 in compound and 1.4 out of 1440 in recurve, that is 0.1% of the maximum in both, and the claim remains contested. In recurve, on the other hand, even at the highest level most arrows are not tens: in Chinese professional competitions one arrow in five lands in the ten, and in eight high-level French archers at 70 m 30.2% do.

Injuries

The idea that recurve carries more risk of injury comes from a single study, from 2016: among 239 archers in Florida, surveyed at competitions and in clubs, 53.9% of recurve users had had a shooting-related injury against 35.3% of compound users. The same paper finds, however, that bow type explains little, with a correlation of 0.186, and it does not separate the effect of the bow from that of sex, since women were injured more often than men and women shooting recurve most of all, at 70.7%. A year later, among 156 Indian competitive archers, shoulder pain did not vary with the bow: 24 of 40 compound archers and 22 of 37 recurve archers had it. Neither study compares archers with the same shooting volume and draw weight, and with two results pointing in different directions the claim is contested. I cover the most common complaints, and what is known about them, in the article on injuries in archery.

Who shoots which bow

Among young competitive archers in the international divisions, recurve is the most common bow: at the European Youth Championships, among 200 archers aged 13 to 20 from 34 countries, 72.5% shot recurve and 27.5% compound, and among 251 Turkish archers aged 17 to 20 with national competitions behind them the shares were 61.0% and 39.0%. The ranking holds, while the proportion changes a good deal from one sample to another. On physique, among 160 Indian university archers the recurve archers were on average 13 to 16 cm taller than the compound archers and those shooting the Indian traditional bow, but with no statistical test and in a journal with questionable editorial standards, while in seven elite archers the difference was not significant. The picture is contested, and neither study says whether taller people choose the recurve or whether teams select them.

What I take from this when choosing

Put side by side, these data say far more about what changes in the equipment and the score than about which style suits a beginner. The suggestions that follow therefore come from my experience as a coach, resting on the figures where there are any.

Anyone thinking of competing will find a division for each of the three styles, and between recurve and compound the figures help to show what you are choosing. Compound asks for more peak pounds but, thanks to the let-off, has you hold only part of them while aiming, and it shifts a lot of work onto equipment setup; recurve has you hold the whole draw weight at full draw and leaves the release to the fingers, with an arrow that flexes more. Shooting without a sight asks you to build the aim through repetition rather than through a reference mounted on the bow, and in instinctive shooting that takes a lot of arrows before the shot becomes reliable.

Switching from one style to another is possible, and many archers do it over the years, but not everything carries over. Between recurve and compound the part to rebuild is above all the release, because you move from the fingers to a mechanism; between sighted recurve and instinctive shooting it is the way of aiming that changes, and archers who come from a sight find it hard to trust a reference they cannot see. In my experience, keeping two styles going in the same period slows progress in both, and I advise competitive archers to choose a main one and keep the other as a variation, at low volume.

@misc{campagna2026_tiroistintivovsricurvoolimpicovscompound,
  author = {Campagna, Matteo},
  title = {Barebow / instinctive vs Olympic recurve vs compound: differences in the shot, the equipment and the score},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {matteocampagna.com},
  url = {https://matteocampagna.com/en/articoli/barebow-instinctive-vs-olympic-recurve-vs-compound},
  note = {accessed 2026-10-16}
}