In the week before an important competition almost every programme does the same thing: it cuts arrows, keeps the quality and aims to arrive rested. This is the taper, and it comes from general training theory and from endurance and strength sports. Nobody has put it to the test in archery, either for the dose or for the effect on score, which is why the registry lists the claim that cutting arrow volume in the days before a competition improves performance as not studied.
What has been measured in archers is the competition day itself: how many arrows are shot, how far archers walk, and how heart rate, reported anxiety and stress markers in saliva change. Those figures show what the week has to prepare for, and they are the starting point for decisions on volume, simulation, sleep, food and mental work.
The taper, a principle borrowed from other sports
The logic of the taper is that of the classic fitness-fatigue model: the fitness built over months carries a load of fatigue that hides part of it, and when volume comes down the fatigue clears before the fitness does, so performance can rise. In training theory the taper cuts volume while intensity and session frequency stay the same. Archery has no measurements of its own: no study has established how far to cut arrows, for how many days, or what it is worth in points.
The guidance in this article is therefore practical, to be adjusted to the individual archer. The principle still gives two pointers: you cut arrows, not quality, and you do not skip sessions, because the aim is to arrive with less fatigue without losing the continuity of the shot. How the taper fits into the season is covered in the article on periodisation, and the role of weekly volume in the one on arrows per week.
How heavy a competition day is
To decide what to cut, you need to know what lies ahead. At a World Cup stage in May 2023, eight Turkish national team archers, four men and four women, shot 178 arrows on the first day in about two hours of competition and walked more than five kilometres between the shooting line and the target; over the following days the load fell to 97 arrows and just over two kilometres on the last day. At a European Grand Prix, six world-class recurve archers shot between 38 and 180 arrows a day, with days that, waiting included, ran to 335 minutes of competition.
These are big numbers, but nobody has set them against a training day for the same archers, so the claim that a competition day loads the archer more than a training day remains not studied. The only study that followed the same archers in competition and in training, sixteen Ukrainian archers with lactate measured in urine, states in its results that values in competition exceed the reference limit and in its discussion that they stay within it, and it never compares the two situations with a test.
The physical cost of a full competition also seems to depend on who is shooting. In a sixteen-year-old elite archer shooting 72 arrows at 70 m, blood lactate stays between 1.6 and 1.9 millimoles per litre and grip strength does not fall, while in a beginner of the same age the grip of the dominant hand drops by almost 11%. Eight Brazilian national team archers rate a simulated 144-arrow competition as tiring as a rest day, yet they feel each end as harder than the matching point of the rest day, and their cortisol rises after every distance. That is why the claim that shooting a full competition puts little physical strain on a trained archer is contested.
One thing is corroborated: archers are more aroused in competition than in training. In eighteen Turkish elite archers, half an hour before a national indoor championship, seated heart rate is 75.8 beats a minute, against 67.7 half an hour before a training session. The arousal is there before the first arrow, so it does not come from the effort.
Two consequences follow for planning. The first is that a competition day cannot be counted in arrows alone: besides the arrows there are hours of waiting, the kilometres on foot and higher arousal, and since nobody has measured what they add up to, it is prudent to schedule it as heavier than a training session with the same arrow count, with recovery to match in the days after. The second is that the week's simulation is best modelled on the hardest day of the competition, which at the World Cup stage was the first.
On holding up within a competition, the measurements are reassuring. In the studies that track the score end by end, scores do not fall in the second half of a competition, even though fatigue builds up: in a simulated 60-arrow indoor competition reported fatigue rises from 2.3 to 5.8 out of ten, while the two halves average 218.8 and 216.0 points, a comparison the study reads without a test. The status is reported, because the samples are small and almost all the competitions are simulated.
The week day by day
The plan below is practical guidance. How many arrows to cut on each day depends on your usual volume and on how you respond to the taper, which is exactly what the competition diary, at the end of this article, helps you find out.
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Six and seven days out
Less volume, full quality
Start cutting arrows, not sessions. Any last small adjustments, if they are really needed, belong here; after that technique is left alone, because a change made in the final days has no time to settle before the competition.
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Four and five days out
The competition simulation
One session with the format, the length and, if possible, the venue of the competition, counting the waiting and the walk to the target as well. It is the dress rehearsal for routine, food and timing, and it is the heaviest day of the week.
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Two and three days out
Low volume, routine and mental work
Short sessions built around the pre-shot routine, plus the mental work you already know, with nothing new introduced.
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The day before
A light session
A few arrows at a short distance, for feel and routine, with no technical goals. The session finishes early, and the evening is for packing the kit and resting.
For the most important championships some archers start the taper earlier, while for club events many keep it to the last three or four days.
Competition-day nerves
Almost everyone says they arrive at a competition more wound up than usual, but the two studies that measured the same archers in training and in competition disagree. At the Brazilian championships forty archers, measured half an hour before shooting, were far more anxious on the first day of the ranking round than on the official practice day at the same venue, with a large difference (d = 1.20). Eighteen Turkish elite archers, on the other hand, filled in an anxiety questionnaire before a training session and before the national indoor championships, and their answers did not change: cognitive anxiety was 19.22 and 19.27, even though their hearts were beating eight times a minute faster. That is why the claim that on competition day an archer arrives more anxious than in training is contested: the two studies differ in many ways, from the questionnaire to the level of the archers, and they do not say which result applies to a given archer, nor whether what changes is the tension or only the willingness to admit it.
Saliva gives a more consistent picture. In five studies of archers, in Korea and Brazil, before competition, stress markers in archers' saliva rise, and stay higher in those who shoot worse. In nine Korean women university archers who made up the placebo group of a supplement study, alpha-amylase, which tracks immediate arousal, goes from 28.5 to 102.5 units per millilitre between half an hour and ten minutes before the start, while cortisol arrives later and keeps rising after the competition has finished.
The finding that matters most when preparing for a competition concerns those who place lower. In eighteen Korean women archers grouped by finishing position, the two groups could not be told apart half an hour before the start; three minutes before, those placed between twentieth and thirtieth had more alpha-amylase than the top ten, 67.4 against 51.6 units, and half an hour after the finish they also had more cortisol. These are associations, and the status is reported: they do not say whether a high marker makes the shooting worse or whether a competition going badly is what raises it, and the samples range from 8 to 40 archers, largely Korean women.
For the week the consequence is practical. A faster heartbeat before shooting has been measured in elite archers too, so in itself it is not a sign that something is amiss, and the routine should be rehearsed in simulation in exactly that state, with the clock running and a score to write down.
Phones and social media before shooting
Scrolling through social media while waiting for your detail to be called has an experiment of its own. Ten adult Brazilian archers, each with at least a year of competition, shot sixty arrows at 18 m twice, in random order: once after 45 minutes of social media on their phone, once after 45 minutes of a documentary. They scored 435.6 against 433.9, and neither mood, concentration nor reported tiredness changed significantly. The registry therefore states that using social media before competing does not worsen the score, with the status reported: each archer served as their own control, but ten people in a simulated competition rule out a large effect, not a small one.
An Indonesian comparison of thirty club archers seems to point the other way: the fifteen most dependent on their smartphone scored 168 over thirty-six arrows at 40 m and the fifteen least dependent 188. The two questions are different, though. The Brazilian experiment looks at what you do in the hour before shooting, the Indonesian study at a habit, and a comparison between two groups cannot say which comes first: archers more attached to their phone might train less, sleep worse or be younger, and none of this was controlled. The study also appeared in a journal with questionable editorial standards, and the registry reports it without using it to set the status, so the claim that archers more dependent on their smartphone shoot lower scores is not studied.
In practice, in the measurements available, using a phone before shooting did not change that day's score. If it helps you get through the wait, the data give no reason to put it away.
Mental work during the week
The week before a competition is not the time to learn a new mental technique. Studies of archers with a comparison group split two against two on mental training, and the claim that mental skills training improves the score is contested. The two positive results from reliable venues come from eight- and twelve-week programmes and the two null results from shorter ones, although no study has compared durations directly.
The same applies to imagery: the claim that imagery practice improves the score has been contested since 1991, and the largest gains come from beginners or from studies with the weakest designs. If you have used it for months and it suits you, there is reason to keep it during competition week; if you have never done it, there is no evidence pushing you to start now. A better use of those days is to go back over your competition plan: how to manage your rhythm, and what to do if it rains, if the wind picks up, if you lose an arrow or if the competition runs late. The long-term work is covered in the article on mental skills training.
Sleep and food
Sleep across the week is worth protecting with regular hours and travel planned so that you do not arrive in the middle of the night. The night before, on the other hand, need not cause as much worry as it usually does, because in the few archers measured little sleep the night before did not worsen accuracy. Six young Korean archers shot 36 arrows at 30 m after a normal night and after a whole night without sleep, scoring 336.8 and 334.8, and in fifteen kyudo archers the days with most hits followed the shortest nights. The samples are small and cover a single night: they say that a restless night before a competition is no cause for alarm, not that sleep during the week does not matter. There is more in the article on sleep and recovery.
For food the safest rule is to change nothing: new foods, supplements and meal times are tried in training, not in competition week. On blood glucose during competition the studies do not agree, and the claim that an archer's blood glucose stays stable during a competition is contested. In some archers it holds steady for the whole session; in eight Brazilian national team archers shooting a simulated 144-arrow competition, it departs from rest-day values after the first 72 arrows. No value reaches hypoglycaemia, and nobody recorded exactly what the archers had eaten, so the difference may owe more to the meal than to the shooting. For long days, take food and water you have already tried; the subject is covered in the article on hydration and nutrition on competition day, and for a personal plan the right person is a qualified sports nutritionist.
Competition day
Arriving at the venue well ahead of time leaves room for the warm-up, for setting up your equipment and for fixing a last-minute problem. The kit is packed the night before from a written list: bow and accessories, spare arrows, tools (hex key, tape, string wax), clothing for whatever weather may come, food and water for the whole day, membership card and entry documents. If this is your first important competition, there is all the more reason to see the venue in the days before and read the rules of the event: every surprise avoided leaves attention for the shooting.
The warm-up follows a fixed sequence, the same one rehearsed in the simulation: mobility, activation with a resistance band, a few arrows at a short distance, then at competition distance, and finally the full pre-shot routine. During the competition the routine stays identical for every arrow, whatever the previous one scored. Between ends, sit down when you can, drink regularly, and do not go back over arrows already shot or check other archers' scores.
After the competition, and when competitions are close together
In the days after an important competition volume stays low, because, as noted above, it makes sense to count the competition day among the heavy ones. Within a couple of days it is worth writing up a short debrief: what held up under pressure, technically and mentally, and what did not.
That debrief is more useful if it goes into a competition diary. Record the week's plan and any departures from it, your sleep in the days before, what you ate, the weather and the field, perceived quality end by end, surprises and how you handled them, the result and, kept apart from the score, how satisfied you felt. After a few competitions personal patterns start to show, above all which taper works best for you: since the dose has not been measured in archers, the diary is the only measurement you have.
When two competitions are only a few days apart, a week-long taper is not possible. The answer is to pick the competition that matters most and build the taper around it, accepting that you will reach the others less fresh. In the days between two close competitions volume still stays low, because the first competition already counts as a load.