Before a final almost every archer asks the same question in one form or another: am I too tense, or too flat? Two opposite pieces of advice go round the shooting line. The more common is to stay calm, breathe and loosen the shoulders; the other, heard less often, is to get fired up, because an archer who is too relaxed makes careless mistakes. Both take it for granted that there is a right level of arousal, and that moving towards it is enough to shoot better.
Studies of archers have tested this idea on small samples, but the answers all point the same way: no level that suits everyone has emerged, the level that works differs from archer to archer and, within the same archer, from one distance to another, and a relaxation session right before shooting has not moved the score.
One level for everyone
The starting point is the inverted U: with too little arousal attention drops, with too much the body stiffens, and the best shooting sits in between. In archers there are a few hints of it. A Japanese Olympic archer, recorded in competition with a portable device, reported that he had relaxed too much and made trivial mistakes at exactly the moments when his heart rate slowed; in five university kyudo archers, followed through training and competition, the link between heart rate, somatic anxiety and hits took the shape of an inverted U on each archer's plots. But that is one person, and five people read by eye, with no dedicated test.
When a Japanese group went looking for a level that suits everyone, it did not find one. Twenty-eight archers from a university club shot three arrows at 50 m in four conditions, with low or high arousal and in a serious or a playful frame of mind: the means, out of 30, ranged from 18.4 to 19.6 and could not be told apart. With the novices left out, archers whose arousal matched what they preferred at that moment shot only slightly better, 20.9 against 19.0, without reaching statistical significance. With three arrows the study does not settle the question, but pushing everyone to the same level gave no measurable advantage.
From archer to archer
The most direct measurement comes from Brazil. Three top archers, aged 24, 27 and 57, were followed in competition from March to December, and after every series they rated their own arousal on a scale from 1 to 9 while a heart rate monitor recorded their pulse; there are at least forty readings for each archer at each distance. With a probability model the authors worked out each archer's band of arousal for the best series, and at 70 m the three bands do not match: the first runs from 4.7 to 5.9, the second from 5.0 to 6.6, the third from 6.1 to 7.15. The heart rate zones also differed from one archer to the next.
Two further details from the same study matter as much as the bands. The first is that the extreme values, from 1 to 3 and from 8 to 9, never went with the best series in any of the three: the window has two edges, and the best series came neither with the lowest arousal nor with the highest. The second is that the band guarantees nothing, because even inside their own band each of them went on shooting mediocre series, and all three moved in and out of it across the season, sometimes on the same day of competition.
What archers say about themselves points the same way. Interviewed before Atlanta 1996, the eight members of the Italian Olympic team described opposite ideal states: one knew that if he shot aggressively his arrows went everywhere, and looked for calm; another got himself fired up by turning the shot into a duel with the target, and had learnt that he shot better charged than calm. These are self-descriptions, with no score. In fifteen kyudo archers, vigour rated before shooting tended to be lower on the days with more hits, a trend on the edge of significance that only says more charge does not mean better shooting.
That is why in the registry the claim that the ideal level of arousal for shooting well differs from archer to archer is reported, and no more than that. There is a single direct measurement and it covers three people, arousal was rated after every series with the score already known, and the bands are described on the same data they were derived from.
The band shifts with distance
The year before, the same method had been tried on a 25-year-old Brazilian archer ranked second in her country, followed over two competitions. Her best band changed at every distance: 5.0 to 7.7 at 18 m, 5.7 to 7.4 at 30, 3.9 to 5.1 at 50, 4.1 to 4.6 at 60 and 5.0 to 6.6 at 70. Moving away from the target, up to 60 m, the band narrowed from 2.7 points wide to half a point, and at 70 m it widened again. The heart rate that went with her best ends, on the other hand, stayed around 121 beats a minute at 18, 50 and 60 m, and rose to 142 at 30 and 126 at 70.
In the three archers followed for a season the picture repeated itself: the arousal bands that went with the best series were different at 18, 30, 50, 70 and 90 m and in the Olympic Round at 70 m, some wider, others set higher, and the same held for heart rate. On rated pleasure the pattern was not the same for everyone, because for one of the three the best pleasure band stayed almost unchanged from 30 to 90 m and shifted only in the Olympic Round and indoors, where it was wider and set higher.
The claim that the arousal zone in which an archer shoots best changes with distance and with the competition format is reported, with limits that carry weight. The two studies share authors and four archers between them; the comparisons between distances are read off the plots, with no test; and nobody has checked whether the bands predict later competitions or hold for other archers. The format, too, was that of the 2006 competitions, with the outdoor round shot over four distances, whereas the outdoor recurve qualification round today is usually shot at a single distance.
What experts' bodies do
If the right level is personal, one might ask whether experts at least share a way of being in competition. The most direct comparison comes from an indoor competition at 18 m with seventeen adolescent archers, ten experienced and seven novices. In the twenty seconds before each release the experienced archers had higher parasympathetic indices of heart rate variability, and compared with their own resting values pNN50 rose by 10.2 points in the experienced archers and fell by 2.6 in the novices; at rest, before the start, the two groups could not be told apart.
That is why the claim that in competition, experienced archers show more parasympathetic activity than novices is reported, but the finding needs careful reading. The effects are small, the arrows of the seventeen archers are treated as independent observations, and the experienced archers were also older, 16.5 years against 14. Above all, what separated the two groups more than the heart was time: the experienced archers took 28.1 seconds per arrow and the novices 20.2, and it was shot time, not heart rate, that was most closely tied to the score of each arrow. In thirty-nine Turkish novices the parasympathetic index rose from rest to shooting only in the half who shot better, but that sample had no experienced archers to compare them with.
In kyudo the question was asked another way, by measuring how much the body reacts when the archer thinks about the shot. In fifteen university practitioners, with the electrodermal response of the skin recorded while they imagined their own shot, the four experts, from second to fourth dan, showed no clear changes, while among the eleven less experienced practitioners the response was absent, or barely there, in only four. In kendo the same study found the opposite link, which suggests a trait of the discipline more than of experience. The claim that in kyudo, experts react less than beginners when they imagine the shot is reported and stays confined to kyudo, because outside kyudo this measurement has not been made.
Reading tension in the heartbeat
A watch that measures heart rate variability promises to tell you where you are within your own window, but in archers the measurements do not agree. In the same Japanese Olympic archer, the respiratory component of the variability was lower when he reported more tension, yet a deep breath or simply standing up was enough to change it. In eighteen elite Turkish archers variability before a national competition could not be told apart from variability before a training session, but self-rated anxiety had not changed either, so the competition may not have made them any more tense. In six adolescents under competition conditions, on the other hand, a wristband told high stress from low with an accuracy of 68 to 82%, yet of the high-stress moments it picked up, depending on the algorithm, between 40 and 85%. The claim that heart rate variability shows how tense an archer is in competition is therefore contested: for now it is a hint, not a tool for deciding whether to fire yourself up or calm down. I write about how to read it in the article on HRV in archery.
Relaxing right before shooting
If tension is the problem, the obvious fix is a relaxation session before going to the line, and there are two direct tests of it. In the first, twenty young Swedish archers spent forty-five minutes in a flotation tank or in an armchair reading the newspaper, in random order and six weeks apart, and then shot twelve arrows at 18 m: the score did not differ between the two conditions. What changed was how the shooting felt, because after the tank perceived exertion fell, from 11.85 to 10.80 on the Borg scale, mostly in the less skilled archers, and only after the tank did the elite archers shoot more consistent series than the less skilled.
The same experiment measured tension in the finger extensor of the drawing arm, and here the picture splits: after the tank it fell in the less experienced and the elite archers but rose in the intermediate group, across the three groups together the difference was not significant, and in the half second before release tension did not change at all. That is why the claim that a flotation-tank session before shooting lowers forearm tension during the shot is contested; and there is no flotation tank at a competition in any case.
The second test comes from Hong Kong: nineteen experienced archers did ten minutes of Tai Chi or ten minutes of stretching, in random order, before shooting in a simulated competition, and the distance of their arrows from the centre was the same under both conditions. The study appeared in a journal with questionable editorial standards and would decide nothing on its own, but it points the same way as the Swedish one. In the registry the claim is worded in the direction of the result, a relaxation session right before shooting does not improve the score, and it is reported: the Swedish study is a single one, and the Hong Kong study, because of where it was published, cannot decide a status.
One more finding concerns what the relaxation contains. Sitting at rest with a sensor on one finger, seven kyudo archers pictured a calming scene, and the small vessels in their fingers constricted instead of dilating, down to 77.6% of the resting value, more than in kendo practitioners and untrained office workers; only the kendo masters, with some thirty years of practice, dilated. With a tense image the constriction was stronger still, so the effort of imagining may count for more than the content. The claim that picturing a calming scene does not produce a relaxation response in kyudo archers is reported, and for anyone who pictures a quiet place before an end it stands as a warning.
A programme lasting weeks is another matter
A single session and a programme repeated over weeks answer different questions. Thirteen Korean university archers, all women, did progressive muscle relaxation for twelve weeks with no comparison group: at the end their resting diastolic blood pressure had fallen slightly and slow electrical activity in the brain had risen in four areas out of eight, while heart rate, systolic pressure and beta activity had not changed significantly. That is why the claim that a relaxation programme lowers an archer's resting arousal is contested, and none of those measures concerned shooting. A score appears in seventeen novices in Jakarta, who went from 86.8 to 106.2 points over fifteen arrows at 10 m with a programme lasting several weeks; there was no group without a programme, though, and the rise cannot be separated from the weeks of shooting.
Your own heartbeat as a rhythm
A Japanese study tried a different route, which does not try to lower arousal but to bring the shot into step with the archer's own heart. Thirty-six experienced archers shot six arrows at 50 m with and without their own heartbeat in headphones: with the heartbeat the score rose from 42.3 to 44.4 out of 60 and the release fell more often between beats, while a metronome at a fixed rate changed nothing. With two trials of six arrows and no replication, the claim that listening to your own heartbeat while shooting raises the score is reported: there is a single study and nobody has repeated the test.
Where the research stops
Taken together, these measurements say more about what has not worked than about what to do. Individual bands have been described in four archers, and whether deliberately bringing yourself back into your own band raises the score nobody has checked: the bands were described after the event, on the same data, with arousal rated once the result was known, and no archer has been asked to change their level to see what happens to the arrows.
What I take from it for the shooting line
These studies do not produce a number to aim for. I take three pointers from them, bearing in mind that none has been tested in an experiment on the score.
The first is to learn your own band instead of chasing someone else's. The method of the Brazilian studies can be copied with a notebook: after every end in competition, a rating from 1 to 9 of how fired up you feel, next to the score of the end and the distance. It is better to give the rating before walking to the target, because in the studies arousal was rated with the result already known, and the result can colour the memory. After a few competitions you can see whether your good ends cluster in one band, whether that band is the same at 18 and at 70 m, and whether both edges, too flat and too fired up, cost you.
The second concerns relaxing right before shooting. In the two direct tests a relaxation session did not change the score, and in kyudo a calming image did not produce a relaxation response; for an archer who is already below their own band, calming down further goes in the opposite direction from the one they need. A calming technique makes sense when the notebook shows that the worst ends come above your own band, and once it has been tried in training before being taken into competition, like any other part of mental training.
The third is to look at time before the heart. In the adolescents' indoor competition, what separated the experienced archers from the novices more than heart rate, and was more closely tied to the score of each arrow, was the nearly eight extra seconds the experienced archers took over each arrow. Time can be measured with a stopwatch, and keeping it the same between training and competition is the job of a pre-shot routine.