An outdoor qualification round is seventy-two arrows in two halves of thirty-six, and a good deal of time passes between one end and the next: you walk to the target, score, walk back and wait for your turn. It is natural to wonder how anyone stays focused for the whole day, and whether concentration is something you either have or a skill you can train. Archers with a few seasons behind them also have a clear impression: towards the end of the round the head tires, and the arrows suffer for it.
Studies on archers answer these questions less directly than you might expect, because hardly any of them measure concentration while the archer is shooting: it is measured before or after, then compared with the score or measured again after a few weeks of training. Where to put your attention during the shot is the subject of the article on attentional focus; the question here is how to hold it for a whole competition.
What studies measure when they say concentration
The word covers at least three different things. The first is the concentration archers attribute to themselves: in a questionnaire they answer questions about staying focused when something goes awry, and the score says how focused they feel. The second is an attention test, a task done against the clock, such as finding scattered numbers on a grid in order or crossing out certain letters on a sheet full of similar ones. The third is a brain signal picked up by electrodes. The three measures do not overlap, and many disagreements in the literature arise because two studies use the same name for two different things.
The idea that concentration is the archer's weak spot also depends on the instrument. In sixteen archers from an Indonesian regional squad it was the lowest of the three skills measured, at 68.3% of the possible score, below anxiety control and mental preparation. In eleven elite Turkish archers, measured on twelve skills, focusing itself came ninth, at 19.6 on a scale that goes up to 28, while the lowest of all was the ability to refocus after a distraction, at 13.1. That is why the claim that concentration is the mental skill archers are weakest at is contested. The difference between holding concentration and getting it back is still the most useful thing these two small studies leave behind, and I come back to it at the end.
Concentration and score
The largest and oldest study of the question dates from the mid-1980s: over a hundred American archers, from beginners to world level, rated how concentrated they felt and filled in a standard questionnaire on attentional style. Neither measure went with the score, and self-rated concentration reached a correlation of only 0.16. Studies that use an attention test nearly always find a positive link. The firmest result comes from sixty-one archers in the Chinese national squad, where a pencil-and-paper test taken a week before a competition was linked to performance in that competition with a correlation of 0.43; three Indonesian studies from 2026 using a grid test reach correlations between 0.62 and 0.79, in groups of fifteen to forty-five archers.
The tests have their cracks too. In forty-five traditional Turkish archers only two indices of the d2 test were linked to the score, while concentration performance, errors and fluctuation on the same sheet were linked to nothing; in the Indonesian study published in the questionable journal, the link disappeared as soon as arm strength was taken into account. That is why the claim that archers who hold concentration better shoot higher scores is contested. These are all associations collected at a single moment, and they cannot say whether attention brings the points or whether years of shooting improve both.
The same happens when different levels are compared. Among sixty-five young Russian archers, those in the youth national squad made fewer errors on an attention test than their regional-level teammates, 2.38 against 3.50, but in the same study sporting grade and years of practice made no difference at all, and the claim that higher-level archers distribute their attention better remains contested. As for years of competition, among seventy Greek archers those who had competed for six years or more rated their concentration higher than those who had competed for one or two, 5.4 against 4.7 out of 6, which is why the claim that with years of competition archers report more confidence, better concentration and fewer worries is reported.
Seventy-two arrows and the second half of the round
The studies that come closest to our starting question are those that read the score of a round half by half, and the result runs against the common impression. In ten Brazilian archers shooting a simulated indoor round of sixty arrows, the first thirty and the second thirty gave similar averages, 218.8 and 216.0 points, while self-rated tiredness rose from 2.3 at the start to 5.8 out of ten at the end. At the 2023 Arab Championship, the only actual competition among these studies, half of the 42 archers dropped in the second 70 m round and the other half did not. The claim that in the second half of a competition the score does not drop, even as tiredness grows is therefore reported, with clear limits: small samples, competitions that are nearly always simulated, and comparisons between the two halves that are nearly always read without a statistical test.
These studies measure score and tiredness, not concentration, but they suggest that feeling more tired does not necessarily mean scoring less. A clue to what sets apart those who hold up comes from an attention test given to a hundred Turkish children, fifty registered with an archery club and fifty who had just arrived: the club members did better, 101.7 against 83.8, and the gap widened in the final part of the test, 33.8 against 25.8, where the newcomers dropped off and became far more erratic. It is a comparison between children, but what separated the two groups was staying power more than the start.
There are also outside conditions that can weigh on concentration. Eleven Malaysian national squad archers, interviewed after Ramadan, described the first two weeks of fasting in terms such as alertness and attention (45% of the archers) and the last two in terms such as distraction and lethargy (73%); six out of eleven named distraction as the main problem. These are recollections gathered afterwards, so the claim that in the second half of Ramadan, fasting archers find it harder to concentrate is reported and no more. In thirteen young Malaysian archers measured during the fast, by contrast, self-rated confusion and score did not change, although it is not known in which week of the month the measurement was taken.
Closer to everyday life is the question of the phone, and the ten Brazilian archers of the simulated round were in fact recruited to answer it. Each shot the sixty arrows twice, in random order, once after forty-five minutes on social media and once after forty-five minutes of a documentary: the score was 435.6 against 433.9, and perceived concentration did not change significantly. The claim that using social media before competing does not worsen the score is therefore reported, though ten people are enough to rule out a large effect, not a small one. Habit is a different question: the only comparison between archers more and less dependent on their smartphone, twenty points apart over thirty-six arrows, was published in a journal with questionable editorial standards, which is why the claim that archers more dependent on their smartphone shoot lower scores is listed as not studied.
Mental training
The most direct studies of training concentration are those that add mental work to training and measure attention before and after. The first is an account of the Taiwanese Olympic team prepared for Athens 2004: six archers, a programme built mainly on breathing and imagery, and on the final questionnaire concentration was the skill that rose most, with no statistics and no comparison group. In 2020 two trials with a control group arrived, both in Indonesian university clubs and both with a grid test. In the first, ten archers following the club's usual mental training went from 11.1 to 15.6 in four weeks, but the other ten, who trained on a computer, rose from 11.2 to 19.7, so no group was left without mental work. In the second, in Medan, six archers who did about ten minutes of progressive muscle relaxation after training rose from 16 to 21.67, while the six in the control group went from 16 to 16.33.
The claim that mental training improves an archer's concentration is reported: three studies point the same way and none against, but the samples are of six and ten people and the outcome is always a paper test, never the target. There is also a 2024 study from the same club in Medan, with twelve archers split into two groups of six, which calls the exercise mindfulness meditation and reports the same mean scores, 16 and 21.67 against 16 and 16.33, with the same p values; until it is clear whether these are two separate experiments, I think it prudent to read them as a single result.
On mindfulness there are six studies on archers, and their answers cannot be reconciled. Twenty-three Taiwanese university archers, after eight sessions in four weeks, became quicker in every condition of the Stroop test, in the hardest one from 33.7 to 29.0 seconds, but without a control group. In the Chinese national archery and shooting squad, looking at the twenty-five archers alone, five to eight weeks of mindfulness did not change reaction time on an attention test, which went from 510 to 509 milliseconds. That is why the claim that a mindfulness programme improves an archer's attentional control is contested. Mental techniques and their effects on score are the subject of the article on mental skills training.
Breathing and yoga also have studies on archers in their favour. Thirty-six Turkish beginners aged 14 to 18, split into three groups, added fifteen minutes of alternate-nostril breathing, or of imagery, or nothing, for eight weeks: on a paper attention test the breathing group improved more than the other two, although those who only trained improved as well and the groups were not formed at random. With this study the claim that training slow breathing improves sustained attention moved to reported; before it, the claim rested only on thirty-nine office workers. The firmest study of the whole set is one on yoga: Indian archers aged 12 to 20 were randomly assigned to eight weeks of yoga or to a waiting list, with assessors blind to the groups and 82 archers in the final analysis. Yoga cut the time lost to distractors on the attention network test by 36.7 milliseconds more than in the control group, while baseline alertness did not change. The claim that yoga improves attention in young archers is reported, and nobody looked at whether those milliseconds change the score.
Shooting more, or further
The idea that shooting itself trains concentration is widespread, and studies support it mostly when they are weakly designed. The most striking gains come from beginners' courses measured before and after, while the two studies in which participants were randomly assigned find nothing: two months of shooting in twenty-two Ukrainian beginners left the attention tables where they were, and in twenty Malaysian adults six weeks of shooting did not shorten reaction times more than doing nothing, because both groups improved. That is why the claim that practising archery improves attention and concentration is contested, and the Malaysian study also explains much of the rest: taking the same test again a few weeks later is enough to improve it.
For those who already shoot, the practical question is whether changing the way you train makes a difference, and a single study has put it to the test. Forty sub-elite archers from East Java, aged 14 to 20, were split into four groups of ten: for twelve weeks three groups trained at 20, 50 or 70 m under a fixed protocol, three sets of 36 arrows a session and no more than ten seconds per arrow, while the fourth carried on with its usual training, also at 70 m. Concentration was measured with the mirror-drawing test, in which you trace a pattern while watching it in a mirror.
The authors find the 70 m group different from the usual-training group and from the 20 m group, and conclude that the longer distances train concentration. Their own tables, though, show something else: the time shortens in every group, and the largest drop is in the usual-training group itself, from 74.5 to 47.0 seconds, against 74.0 and 54.8 at 70 m. That is why the same study supports two entries in the registry. The claim that training at the longer distances improves concentration more than ordinary training is contested, because the study contains both the authors' reading and the numbers that contradict it; the one written in the direction of the numbers, that training at a fixed distance, short or long, does not improve concentration more than ordinary training, is reported, on a single study and with a test that improves with repetition.
Nicotine
One study has also tried a substance. Eleven national-level university recurve archers, all non-smokers, chewed either nicotine gum or an identical gum without nicotine, taking each condition in turn: with nicotine they were quicker on an attention test and completed a fine dexterity test in 48.8 seconds instead of 53.4, while reaction times did not change. The claim that nicotine gum improves archers' concentration and manual dexterity is reported, on eleven people and a single trial. Nicotine is addictive, and the registry records the result without suggesting its use; caffeine, alcohol and nicotine are covered in the article on caffeine and alcohol in archery.
Where the research stops
Taken together, these studies share three limits. The first is the measure: concentration is nearly always read from a test lasting a few minutes on paper or on a computer, and none of these studies followed an archer's concentration arrow by arrow through a whole competition. The second is the outcome, because none of the attention-training studies cited here looked at the score on the target: the studies say that after a few weeks of breathing, relaxation or yoga archers do better on a test, not that they shoot better. The third is that the test is learnt. In many studies the control groups improve as well, and the biggest gains come from the weakest designs; where participants are randomly assigned and assessors do not know the groups, as in the yoga study, the effect remains, but it concerns only the hardest trials and baseline alertness does not move.
What I take from it for the shooting line
The data do not offer a method for staying focused over seventy-two arrows, but they do offer three pointers. The first concerns tiredness. In the studies that read the score half by half, the second part of the round was worth as much as the first even when the archers felt much more tired, so the sense of a less clear head towards the end is not enough to say that the arrows are getting worse. Anyone can check this on their own scorecard: comparing the two halves of 36 in a few competitions and a few long training sessions tells you more than any impression.
The second concerns getting concentration back rather than holding it. In the elite Turkish archers the lowest skill was refocusing after a distraction, and a competition is full of interruptions: collecting arrows, waiting for your turn, a 6 that arrives out of nowhere. So rather than trying to stay focused continuously for hours, I prefer to have a fixed way of getting back into the shot at every end, which is the job of a pre-shot routine. The studies cited here do not measure whether a routine helps you refocus, so I treat this as my own pointer and not as a finding.
The third concerns the exercises. Slow breathing, relaxation, meditation and yoga take little time and, in small studies, improve attention tests, yoga also in one well-built study; none, however, has shown that they bring points. They can be part of the training of anyone who finds them useful, bearing in mind that their effect on the target has not been measured. Moving training to a fixed distance, even 70 m, in order to train concentration finds no support in the data: in the only study that tried it, the group training as usual improved on the test more than the others.