"I get nervous in competition and I make mistakes." I hear it a lot, and it nearly always comes with a ready-made conclusion: if the points are there in training and vanish on the day, anxiety is to blame. On the range this is taken for granted, and most of the mental work offered to archers is built on it. Research has taken the idea seriously since the mid-1980s, and its answer is less tidy than people expect: it depends on how anxiety is measured, when it is measured and who is reporting it.
The question also hides three others: whether you arrive at a competition more tense than you are in training, at what point in the competition the tension makes itself felt, and how many points it costs. I take them in that order and say each time how solid the findings are, because this topic is full of small samples and unreliable journals.
What is measured when anxiety is measured
Before the results comes a distinction, because it explains much of the disagreement. State anxiety is what you feel at a given moment, say three minutes before the first end; trait anxiety is your general tendency to feel anxious, the one you carry around well away from the range. They are measured with different questionnaires, and mixing them up makes findings about different things look as if they clash.
In studies of archers the most common tool is a competitive anxiety questionnaire filled in shortly before shooting, and almost all of them separate two components: worry, which lives in your thoughts, and somatic anxiety, the kind you feel in your body, your hands, your breathing. Before competing, archers report slightly more of the first. In 44 Malaysian recurve archers, half an hour before a selection trial, worry stood at 12.6 out of 20 and somatic anxiety at 10.3, and in 207 archers from the national and university games the order was the same. The registry lists the claim that worry weighs more before competition as reported, with caution: the gap is small, nobody has tested it, and the two kinds of anxiety almost always travel together.
Alongside the questionnaires there are measures taken from the body: heart rate and, for about the last ten years, saliva, where researchers look for alpha-amylase, which tracks immediate arousal, and cortisol, which arrives later. They do not depend on what the archer is willing to admit, but they also move for reasons that have nothing to do with competing. How they are collected and read is a question of method in its own right; here what matters is the results.
Training and competition: two studies, two answers
Only two studies have measured the same archers in training and in competition, and they point in opposite directions. At the Brazilian championships forty archers, questioned half an hour before shooting, were far more anxious on the first day of qualification than on the practice day on the same field, and the cortisol in their saliva rose by a similar amount. Eighteen elite archers from the Turkish national squad, on the other hand, gave the same answers before a training session and half an hour before the national indoor championships: cognitive anxiety of 19.22 and 19.27, somatic anxiety of 16.55 and 16.27. Their hearts disagreed, though, because before the competition their mean seated heart rate went from 67.72 to 75.77 beats per minute.
This is why the claim that competition day is more tense than training is contested: the differences between the two studies, from the questionnaire to the level of the archers, make it impossible to say which result applies to a given archer, or whether what stayed flat among the Turkish elite was the tension itself or only their willingness to report it. Heart rate at least gives a consistent signal: every study that has measured it finds heart rate in competition above resting values. By how much is less clear. In eleven recurve archers during a simulated competition, heart rate went from about 82 beats per minute seated to about 95, while in another group going from lying down to standing added around twenty on average: part of the rise put down to tension may come from posture.
When in the competition it arrives
In a Korean study of eighteen university women archers at the national team trials, anxiety was measured on a 1 to 10 scale half an hour before the competition, three minutes before and half an hour after it ended. In both groups the peak came in the three minutes before the start, but the nine archers who finished between first and tenth place reported less anxiety at all three moments, 4.88 against 6.14 just before the start. The clearest difference came afterwards: in the top ten anxiety fell below its level of half an hour before, while in those who finished between 20th and 30th place it stayed almost where it was.
The second finding concerns the stages of an official championship. At the 2011 Asian Championships fifty-seven recurve archers from national squads marked on a 1 to 9 grid, five to ten minutes before each stage, how worried they were: 3.67 before the qualification round, 5.21 before the individual matches and 5.05 before the team event, which the authors expected to be lighter because the pressure is shared three ways. It is a single study, and the two claims drawn from it, that anxiety rises from the qualification round to the matches and that head-to-head matches bring more pressure, are reported: one competition, one question per dimension, and a qualification round that only set the bracket, because everyone went through to the matches, and that always came first, so the stage cannot be told apart from how far into the tournament it fell.
Within the competition itself, tension does not seem to build up. In a simulated indoor competition, sixty arrows at 18 metres, ten Brazilian archers filled in a mood scale before, halfway through and at the end: tension stayed low and flat, from 3.1 at the start to 2.2 at the finish, while fatigue rose from 2.3 to 5.1. The finding is reported with the limits of a reconstructed competition, ten people and no standings that counted.
How many points it costs
That leaves the question people usually start with, and here the registry is clear on one point: the claim that more anxious archers shoot lower scores in competition is contested, meaning that studies of archers point in opposite directions. The figure lines up ten samples that report a simple correlation between reported anxiety and the score of a competition or a shooting test.
For years the split was a tidy one. Where anxiety is measured shortly before shooting, with a competitive anxiety scale, the link appears: −0.55 in the 207 Malaysian archers, the largest sample, −0.45 in another 44 Malaysians, −0.7 in 37 Brazilians measured on championship day. Where anxiety is measured as a trait, away from competition, nothing appears: in the first study in the series, 188 US archers from beginners to Olympic medallists, no scale went above 0.17 among the roughly 120 who completed the questionnaires. The two highest correlations, −0.84 and −0.86, come from the same Korean laboratory and two groups of university women archers, 19 and 18, so they count as a single line of evidence; and in 2016 the lowest of them scored 341 out of 360 and the highest 355, which means the correlation describes differences within fourteen points.
In recent years even that line has started to crack. Eighty Indian juniors measured before a national championship show no link at all, while forty-five Iranian archers measured an hour before the qualification round confirm it, at −0.61, and both studies appear in journals with questionable editorial standards. A partial explanation for the null results comes from the elite Turkish archers who reported the same anxiety in training and in competition: if reported anxiety does not change from one setting to the other, it has no way of showing up in the score, which does change.
There is also a limit that applies even when the link is there. A correlation says that more anxious archers tend to score less, not how many points they lose, nor which of the two comes first: in the 2018 Korean study, the archers who had shot worse were more anxious half an hour after the finish as well. The only two attempts to turn anxiety into points cannot carry the weight. One estimates about fifteen points out of 1440 for each step in the intensity of unpleasant emotions experienced as harmful, but in four archers; the other, in 189 young Indonesian archers, finds 9.58 to 14.47 fewer qualification points per unit of anxiety, but publishes standardised coefficients that are mathematically impossible, so the direction can be kept and the size cannot.
The same goes for saliva. In the Korean women of 2016, alpha-amylase doubled in the minutes before the start, from 43.8 to 87.4 units per millilitre, and more amylase went with lower scores; in the 2018 group the difference between the top ten and the rest appeared three minutes before the start, not half an hour before. The claim on salivary stress markers is reported: these are associations in samples of 8 to 40 archers from just two research groups, and they cannot say whether a high marker worsens the shot or a competition going badly raises the marker.
Who feels it most
If anxiety weighs on some samples and not on others, one possibility is that it weighs on some people and not on others. Two Turkish studies offer a few clues. In the first, thirty-nine beginners shot ten arrows at 18 metres after a competitive anxiety questionnaire and a personality one: across the whole group anxiety was unrelated to the result, but in the half more prone to worry, cognitive anxiety went with poorer performance, with a correlation of −0.62. The claim that in beginners anxiety weighs only on those more prone to worry is reported with a good deal of caution: it rests on subgroups of nineteen and twenty people, on a performance measure the study describes in two different ways, and on a journal with questionable editorial standards.
The second put twenty-two archers aged 11 to 14 through the arithmetic part of a social stress test for children before another ten arrows. Their score did not change, but neither did their heart rate, 104.6 beats per minute before and 105.6 after, and the authors write that they did not manage to produce the stress they were after: this is why, in the registry, the question of whether acute stress just before shooting changes the score remains unstudied: the null result says that the task moved nothing, not that stress before shooting does not matter. More interesting is that the archers most afraid that others would notice their anxiety shot worse, with a correlation of −0.63 after the task and −0.45 even before it, while fear of physical symptoms was unrelated to anything. The idea that fear of other people's judgement matters more than what you feel in your hands is plausible, but it comes from twenty-two youngsters and no study has yet tested it with a suitable design.
What has been tried to bring it down
Studies of archers on ways to bring it down are few and small, and none of the three findings that follow includes a shooting score compared against a control group. The largest sample concerns reappraisal, the habit of reinterpreting your own emotions, for instance experiencing nerves as a charge of energy rather than as a threat. In sixty-one athletes from the Chinese national squad, assessed with a questionnaire a week before a competition, the overall effect on performance, an index that adds up the qualification score, the set points from the matches and the athlete's technical category, was practically zero, −0.007, because two paths cancelled each other out: archers who reappraise more often have more confidence, and through confidence the link becomes positive, 0.20; at the same level of confidence, though, they do slightly worse, −0.27. The claim drawn from it, that reappraising your emotions does not come with better performance, is reported, and that confidence goes with the score is found by nearly every study, always in the weak form of a correlation.
The other two findings come from unexpected directions. In seven kyudo archers sitting at rest with a sensor on one finger, picturing a calming scene narrowed the small blood vessels of the fingers instead of widening them, down to 77.6% of the resting value. These are seven people, with no measurement of shooting, and the narrowing may come from the effort of imagining rather than the content of the image: this is why the claim that picturing a calming scene does not produce a relaxation response stands as a warning, not a rule. Finally, in Lviv sixteen Ukrainian archers were randomly split between two months of ten to twelve minutes of autogenic training a day and their usual training alone: in competition the autogenic training group had 9.7% less lactate in their urine, in training they did not. No scores were published and urinary lactate also depends on how much you have drunk, so the claim on autogenic training and lactate in competition is reported for what it measures. On mental training in general, too, studies with a comparison group split two in favour and two against, and the claim that it improves the score is contested.
What I take to the shooting line
Taken together, the studies do not say that anxiety does not matter, and they do not say how many points it costs. They say that the link shows up mostly when anxiety is measured close to shooting, that before competing archers report more worry than bodily anxiety, though nobody knows which of the two weighs on the score, and that in many samples the link disappears. For work on the range I draw three things from this, and none of them has been tested in an experiment on score.
The first is to measure your own anxiety instead of taking it for granted. The question the studies have not yet tackled is the very one an archer cares about: not whether anxious archers do worse than others, but whether I do worse on the days when I am more tense. A mark from 1 to 10 written in your notebook a few minutes before the first end, in competition and in some training sessions, with the day's score next to it, gives after a season a personal answer that no study can give. If the mark stays the same in training and in competition, as it did for the elite Turkish archers, the points lost in competition need looking for elsewhere too.
The second concerns timing. In the few studies that have tracked it, tension concentrates before the start and before the matches rather than during the ends, and in the archers who had shot worse it stayed high afterwards. Those moments therefore deserve specific preparation, from the routine before the first arrow to the wait for the first match, without assuming that the team event weighs less than the individual one.
The third is to treat techniques that promise instant calm with care. The only data on a calming image point the other way, the only study of reappraisal finds no overall effect, and autogenic training moved a value in the urine without producing a score. Mental work built with a coach and checked over several competitions, with the notebook described above, tells you more than a technique learnt the week before.
What is missing
Above all, the measurement an archer would need is missing: the same person followed over many official competitions, with anxiety recorded shortly before shooting and set against the score of that competition. Large samples are missing too, at different levels and measured with the same scale in several countries, because today the strongest correlations come from a single laboratory and the null results use different measures. And there is no experiment with a control group that lowers competition anxiety and looks at what happens to the points. Until then, "I get nervous in competition and I make mistakes" remains a hypothesis to test in your own notebook, with your own numbers.