Sooner or later almost every archer who wears glasses asks me, and now and then so does someone with 20/20 vision who wants to know whether it is enough: is my eyesight holding my score back? It is a fair question, because archery is an aiming sport and at 70 metres the gold is a small disc. The page on the dominant eye explains how to work out which eye to aim with; the question here is a different one, namely whether seeing better makes you shoot better.
The studies that have measured it are few and mostly small, but they point in a direction that surprises the people who ask. The only one that set visual acuity against score found no link at all, and the same study found that the stronger archers had slightly poorer depth perception, not better. The only eye-related measure that goes with good arrows concerns perception: a group of young Korean archers shot better when the target looked bigger to them. Meanwhile, in the only count there is, roughly one archer in eight was shooting with an uncorrected sight defect.
Visual acuity and score
The largest measurement is also the oldest. In the mid-1980s an American laboratory tested a hundred and eighty-eight recurve archers at Olympic preparation camps and national championships, from beginners to world class (the world record holder was in the sample), with a battery of sixty-two physical and psychological variables, and has complete eyesight data for a hundred and two of them. Eyesight came in through a screening instrument that measures near and far acuity, eye by eye and with both eyes together, the phorias, meaning the tendency of the eyes to drift when they stop working as a pair, depth perception and colour vision. Each measure was set against every archer's average score for the season.
None of the acuity measures is related to the score. Far acuity reaches 0.12 for one eye and -0.12 for the other, near acuity and the phorias sit between -0.08 and 0.04, and colour vision touches 0.25, right on the threshold the authors had set in advance for keeping a variable, without passing it. With correlations this close to zero, knowing how well an archer sees tells you almost nothing about their score. In the analysis that looked for the factors able to predict the score, the authors used only the acuity of the sighting eye, near for archers who focused on the sight and far for those who focused on the target, and even then acuity did not make it among those factors.
Before reading this as proof that eyesight does not count, though, it is worth looking at how it was measured. These were screening tests run in one go, within a testing day of about two and a half hours, in a sample aged 12 to 74, and the paper does not say whether the archers took them wearing the glasses or lenses they shoot with. If they did the tests with their usual correction, the study says that among archers who see well enough to shoot, extra acuity makes no difference; in no case does it say that you can shoot well without seeing the target. That is why the registry holds the claim that visual acuity is not related to an archer's score as reported and nothing more: a single cross-sectional study, never replicated.
Depth perception
In the same panel one visual measure stands out, and it is the one nobody expected: depth perception, the ability to judge with both eyes which object is nearer and which is further away. The authors thought the better archers would have better depth perception and found the opposite: the higher the level, the lower the test score, with a correlation of -0.36 across the hundred and two archers. Split into four ability groups, archers below 1,200 FITA points scored 5.80 on the test, those between 1,200 and 1,246 scored 4.37 and those above scored 4.07, and between the last two the difference was not significant: the decline appears in the step from the lower levels to the higher ones and then stops.
The authors offer two explanations. The first concerns shooting itself: at known distances an archer does not need to place the target in space, and several of the top archers in the sample closed or squinted their non-sighting eye, effectively giving up depth vision. The second is age, because the strongest groups were also the oldest, 28 on average against 26 and 22, and depth perception may be affected by age. The registry writes the claim in the direction of the result, better archers do not have better depth perception, and holds it as reported. The study says that shooting well does not call for exceptional depth vision, not that poorer depth vision helps.
The detail about the closed eye leads to another question, whether to aim with one eye or two, on which the two direct comparisons point in opposite directions: in the registry the claim that aiming with one eye closed gives tighter groups is contested.
Archers and athletes from other sports
If eyesight were what made an archer, you would expect to find it better in archers than in other athletes. A South African study from 2010 checked this on twenty-eight compound, recurve and traditional archers, from beginners to experienced shooters and aged 12 to 58, with a full battery of visual tests, and compared the group's norms with those established in 2002 for elite athletes from other sports. On acuity, contrast sensitivity, stereopsis (depth vision measured with a dedicated test) and eye-hand coordination the archers came out lower, although for eye-hand coordination the difference was small; they came out higher only on eye-body coordination on a balance board and on response time with the right hand.
The comparison has an obvious limit, since it sets norms gathered in different years and countries side by side instead of people measured together, and the sample mixes levels and disciplines; for acuity, moreover, the authors themselves note that their test, run at three metres, could not go beyond 1.0 (20/20). That is why the claim that archers do not have better visual skills than athletes from other sports is reported, and it should be read for what it says: the archers measured do not stand out, which does not mean they see worse. As for eye-hand coordination, the only times it has been set against score involve child archers, with two opposite results, and the claim that eye-hand coordination is linked to score is contested.
How many archers shoot without the right correction
The figure that matters most to anyone asking the question comes from Tehran. In a pilot study, inside a paper proposing a protocol for eye examinations in archers, fifty-seven recurve and compound archers aged 18 to 38, thirty-five of them elite and twenty-two not, were examined at an eye hospital: about 13% had an uncorrected refractive error, meaning they were shooting with short sight, long sight or astigmatism without suitable glasses or lenses. That is roughly one archer in eight. The figure is not broken down by level or set against score, and it comes from a single descriptive count, so the claim that some archers shoot with an uncorrected refractive error is reported and the number should be taken as a guide. The same authors estimate that a full, archery-specific examination takes about forty minutes per athlete.
The South African study does not count defects, but it adds a consistent detail: on its acuity test twenty-two archers out of twenty-eight reached 1.0 (the equivalent of 20/20) with both eyes together and six did not, and the study says neither why nor whether they shot in glasses or lenses.
How much you need to see at a given distance was worked out by the Japanese study that compared one and two open eyes, in archers from a university club. At 30 metres the 80-centimetre target face takes up a degree and a half of the visual field, 1.53 degrees, and making out its central ring requires acuity of at least 0.218 logMAR, which on the decimal scale comes to about 0.6, well short of 20/20. The calculation holds for that distance and that face: at 70 metres the 122-centimetre face looks smaller to the eye, and the demand goes up. Of the seven archers whose eyes the study measured while shooting, all with the correction they used in competition, four wore contact lenses, between -1.25 and -7 dioptres.
Compound archers face a further practical question. A 2010 optical calculation, with no measurements on archers, shows that with a lens on the scope alone an uncorrected error adds to the lens: a short-sighted archer with one dioptre of myopia and the lens 80 centimetres from the eye would need a -5 dioptre lens and would see the target made smaller rather than magnified. The authors therefore suggest that anyone significantly short-sighted should correct their eyesight first, and the claim that on a compound bow the scope lens should be chosen for the archer's draw length and eyesight is transferred, because it rests on a calculation and no archer has looked through those lenses.
Perception and attention: where archers differ
If an archer's eye does not see better, the remaining question is whether it is used differently. The cleanest result comes from an aiming task without a bow. Ten Olympic archers from the British team, ten archers from a university club with about two years of shooting and ten students who had never shot did the same computer exercise: hold a button down, raise a sight towards a target with a joystick, keep it in the centre while the program made it shake, and let go of the button to shoot. Both groups of archers erred less than the non-archers, but between the Olympians and the club archers accuracy did not differ at all, even though the Olympians held their gaze still on the target for longer.
The claim that archers aim better than other people even in a task without a bow is reported. The advantage seems to arrive with the first years of shooting and then stop, or else to belong to the people who choose to shoot, and with thirty people seen once there is no telling which. The steady gaze before the shot, the quiet eye, has a page of its own: quiet eye and visual training.
On judging space, the results point in opposite directions. A 2016 Irish master's thesis compared twenty-nine good recurve archers with thirty people who do not shoot: bisecting a line on paper, the archers erred far less, 0.26 millimetres against 1.76 to the left for the non-archers, they picked the target out from distractors better in a computer visual search, and they walked through a narrow doorway without touching it 19.55 times out of 20 against 18.43. Ten years earlier in France, however, ten blind archers feeling for the centre of a small rod erred more than ten men with severe visual impairment who do not shoot, with a mean error of 1.23 against 0.98, and shifted the centre to the left.
These are two different senses and two tasks far removed from aiming, and with one visual study in favour and one tactile study against, the claim that experienced archers judge space more accurately than people who do not shoot is contested. The touch result also has an entry of its own, reported: blind archers are no more accurate than non-archers at finding the middle of a rod by touch.
Even blinking has been looked at, in a Japanese study that set out to understand kendo: in a computer task, eighteen kendo practitioners held back their blink through the whole first second after the stimulus far more often than eighteen university archery and kyudo students, on 18.2% of trials requiring a response against 10.6%, and in the archers blinking showed no link with competitive level. The claim that archers hold back blinking after a stimulus less than kendo practitioners do is reported, and it describes two groups of students in a laboratory, not the way an archer keeps their eyes on the aim.
The target that looks bigger
The only link that runs in the expected direction, more perception and more points, is about how you see rather than how much. A Korean study had nine competitive archers aged sixteen and seventeen shoot twenty-five arrows at 50 metres at target faces of five diameters, from 60 to 100 centimetres, in random order. After each arrow, with a screen hiding where it had landed, the archer picked from a card of eighteen miniatures the one that looked most like the target just shot at.
At every diameter, on average, the target looked bigger than it was. The miniatures matching its apparent size at 50 metres ran from 12 to 20 millimetres, and the ones chosen on average from 15.44 to 24.07, with an overestimate that grew with the diameter. The real point, though, is the link with the arrows: the bigger the target looked, the higher the arrow scored, with a correlation of 0.54, and when actual and perceived diameter were considered together only the perceived one stayed linked to the score. The four archers with the highest averages chose bigger miniatures than the four with the lowest, 20.50 against 18.46 millimetres.
The claim that archers who see the target as bigger shoot better is reported, and two limits keep it there. The first is direction: the judgement came after the shot, so it may be the good arrow that makes the target look big, a feeling anyone who shoots knows well. The second is that the only test that shifted perception, supporting the bow arm, was done on twenty teenagers who had never shot: with the arm supported the target looked bigger by less than a millimetre, and not to everyone, only to eleven out of twenty.
Where the studies stop
These studies share some limits. They are all comparisons made at a single point in time, between different people or between the same archer's arrows, and none follows the same archers over time, so nobody knows whether the differences in perception come from shooting or from the people who take it up. They are small: the largest has eyesight data on a hundred and two archers and is forty years old, the others range from seven to a few dozen people. Above all, nobody has tested the question that matters to anyone who wears glasses, namely whether correcting a sight defect changes the score.
The same goes for eye exercises. The only computer-based perceptual training experiment on archers that reaches the score was published in a journal with questionable editorial standards, and the registry reports it without using it for the status: the claim that computer-based perceptual-cognitive training improves score remains not studied.
What I take from it for the shooting line
From these data I take neither an eye exercise nor a level of eyesight below which you cannot shoot well, because no study on archers supports either. I take three simpler pointers.
The first concerns correction. If, with the glasses or lenses you use, you see the target sharply at your distance, the studies give no reason to chase extra acuity, because in the only study that measured it, among archers who see well enough to shoot, acuity did not separate the stronger ones from the rest. If, on the other hand, you have not had your eyes checked for years, or the gold at the long distances looks less crisp than it used to, an examination by an optometrist or an eye doctor is the simplest check there is, given that in the only count roughly one archer in eight was shooting with an uncorrected defect. Compound archers are better off doing it before choosing a scope lens, as the authors of the optical calculation suggest.
The second concerns glasses themselves. No study has compared glasses and contact lenses on score, and in the small Japanese group four university archers out of seven shot in contact lenses. The choice is therefore a practical one, to be tried in training with your own anchor and your own sight, rather than a matter of documented performance.
The third concerns the feeling of a big target. It is tempting to make it a goal, and I would not: the study does not say whether perception guides the arrow or the arrow guides perception, and the only way found to shift it is worth less than a millimetre in teenagers who do not shoot. If on good days the gold looks wider to you, the data say that this feeling goes with better arrows, not that it can be produced on demand.