Archers ask two main questions about sleep. The first comes on the morning of a competition, after a restless night, and it is how many points that night will cost. The second is about ordinary weeks: whether they sleep enough to train and recover. The studies that have measured archers' sleep are few and small, but they answer the two questions in different ways. In the few archers measured, a single short night did not show on the target, whereas everyday sleep in some groups falls well short of what is recommended, especially among the youngest.
The night before a competition
Two studies have set the previous night's sleep against the score. In the first, published in 2017, six Korean middle-school archers, aged 14 and a half on average with almost five years of practice, shot 36 arrows at 30 metres on three days a week apart. The first session followed a normal night; the other two followed a night spent entirely awake, checked every hour, with a placebo capsule the first time and a caffeine capsule the second. After the normal night they scored 336.8 points and after the sleepless night with the placebo 334.8, a difference the analysis cannot tell apart from chance. With caffeine they reached 339.2, which could not be told apart from the others either: it is one of the two studies on archers that leave the registry's claim that caffeine improves accuracy contested.
The second study, from 2024, comes at the question from another side. Fifteen university kyudo archers shot twenty arrows at 28 metres in the morning on two or three days, with their sleep measured by a sensor under the mattress. For each archer the day with the most hits was compared with the day with the fewest, 83.7% against 61.7%: the night before the better day had been shorter, 287 minutes against 350, and had a lower sleep efficiency, 88.7% against 94.1%. The time taken to fall asleep, night waking and perceived sleep quality did not separate the two days.
Neither study shows that sleeping less makes anyone shoot better. The first has six boys and a single night per condition, with the sessions always in the same order; the second compares the best and worst days of the same archers after the event, in a discipline whose bow and shot differ from Olympic recurve, and in a secondary analysis sleep on the night after the better days even goes the other way, with fewer awakenings. That is why the registry's claim that little sleep the night before does not worsen accuracy is reported and no more: two small studies pointing the same way, and none against.
For an archer who wakes on competition day knowing the night was short, this is still useful, because in the few archers measured that night did not show in the score. The tests were short, though, 36 arrows in one case and twenty in the other, and neither lasted as long as a qualification round: over a full day of competition the question remains open.
How much archers sleep
The second question concerns everyday sleep, and here the studies disagree. There are four, each with a different instrument, and their figures sit partly within and partly below the seven to nine hours a night usually recommended.
The first, from 2019, covers fifteen Indian archers aged 14 to 18, of at least national level, who lived and trained at an army sports institute. In a questionnaire on the previous two weeks they reported 6 hours 27 minutes of sleep on school days, with the alarm at 05:28, and 8 hours 39 at weekends: for their age, the authors write, well short of the recommended minimum. At the other end are six archers from the Turkish national team, three of them Olympic, world or European medallists, tracked with a wrist actigraph over the four competition days of a European Grand Prix. They slept between 465 and 529 minutes a night, that is from seven and three-quarter hours to almost nine, with no significant difference between the first night and the last, and according to their sleep diaries they fell asleep within 6-9 minutes. In the morning, however, they rated themselves very sleepy, 8 or 9 on a 10-point scale.
Seventeen Turkish national-level archers, within a study of 115 athletes from five sports, reported 7.58 hours of sleep and scored highest of the five sports on the sleep quality item, but the questionnaire asked only about the previous night. Finally, fifteen university kyudo archers, measured with the under-mattress sensor over seven nights, slept 5.7 hours on average, with a Pittsburgh sleep quality score of 6.0, right on the threshold at which the authors speak of disturbed sleep.
On one side are national and international-level athletes, six of them followed at a tournament with their day organised by the team; on the other are students, teenagers whose alarm goes off before six and Japanese undergraduates, who may sleep little for reasons that have nothing to do with archery. That is why the registry's claim that archers get enough sleep is contested: the studies on archers point in opposite directions, and the difference seems to follow the setting and the instrument more than archery itself. For anyone coaching young archers, the figure that matters most is the Indian teenagers': a group shooting at a good level that, on school days, sleeps far less than is recommended for their age.
Measuring your own sleep
The four studies cannot be compared like for like partly because they measure different things. An actigraph is a wrist accelerometer that estimates sleep from movement, and the bands and rings on sale work on a similar principle, often adding heart rate; the under-mattress sensor does the same job with nothing worn; questionnaires ask about one night, two weeks or a month. Different instruments can give different answers about the same nights: in the kyudo archers the sensor recorded 344.2 minutes of sleep a night and the questionnaire filled in each morning 365.6, and in the Turkish national team archers the actigraph showed normal sleep while the scale filled in on waking showed marked sleepiness. For sleep quality, the authors of the kyudo study write, polysomnography would be needed, the laboratory test that records the stages of sleep, and none of these studies used it.
The practical consequence for an archer is that a tracker is more useful for following the trend of your nights over time than for reading the figure for a single night, and that it is best paired with a couple of lines written each morning, noting how long you think you slept and how you feel. Set against your training scores for a few weeks, they give a personal indication that study averages cannot. The instruments, their limits and the figures from each study are gathered in the section "How it is measured" at the foot of the page.
Sleep and diet
The study of 115 Turkish athletes had a second question: whether people who sleep well eat differently from those who sleep poorly. On the questionnaire about the previous night, 86 athletes slept well and 29 poorly, and the first group took in more energy, 2,171 against 1,746 kcal a day, more protein and more tryptophan. Nothing else separated the two groups: not caffeine, not the glycaemic index of the last meal, not carbohydrate, fat, magnesium or water, and not even energy relative to body weight. Poor sleepers, moreover, did not sleep fewer hours and did not train more.
The archers were 17 of the 115, analysed together with the other sports and never on their own. The study is labelled a pilot, the diet comes from a single 24-hour recall and the design is cross-sectional, so it cannot say whether people sleep better because they eat more or eat more because they sleep better. The registry's claim that what an archer eats shows up in the quality of their sleep is therefore transferred, taken from a mixed sample in which fewer than one athlete in six shoots.
On supplements there is one randomised, double-blind study of archers in Singapore, nine months of carotenoids with omega-3 against a placebo: in the archers a sleep health score rose with the supplement and fell with the placebo, but the groups numbered eleven and ten, sleep was a secondary outcome, and in the target shooters of the same study it did not move. The claim that a carotenoid and omega-3 supplement improves the archer's sleep is reported. What to eat and drink on competition days is covered in the article on hydration and nutrition on competition day.
Sleep and technique
There is also a reason to sleep well that has little to do with the next day's competition. Sleep studies outside archery indicate that part of what is learned during the day is consolidated in the sleep that follows. These results come from laboratory motor tasks, not from shooting, and the archery studies described here measure sleep alongside the score, not how much of a technical correction survives a night. For anyone changing something in their shot it is one more reason not to neglect sleep, but it is an argument by analogy rather than a finding in archery; the rest of what is known about how the shot is learned is in the article on motor learning.
Evening habits put to the test
Advice on sleeping better is much the same everywhere: regular hours, a dark and quiet bedroom, the phone away from the bed, no hard training late in the evening, and care with caffeine in the afternoon and with alcohol. In young archers it has been put to the test once, at the same Indian sports institute as the fifteen teenagers. For a year the programme combined sleep hygiene sessions for athletes and coaches, training that no longer ran into the evening, phones handed in in the evening and darker, quieter rooms.
The thirteen boys who repeated the questionnaire fell asleep on school days in 15 minutes instead of 28, which was the study's main outcome. Hours of sleep barely moved, though: on school days from 6 hours 27 to 6 hours 37, a difference the analysis cannot tell apart from chance, partly because over the same year the alarm moved half an hour earlier, to 04:59, while bedtime stayed the same. Daytime sleepiness did not change. The study had no control group and points in two directions within itself, so the registry's claim that a sleep education programme helps young archers sleep better is contested.
In the ten archers who shot both before and after, the training score rose from 1,268 to 1,291 out of 1,440. Over a year, however, a teenager who trains improves even without any intervention, and the comparison was with eight archers from the previous year, who had improved slightly more in proportion. The claim that a sleep education programme raises young archers' scores is reported, on a single study and with a link to sleep that has yet to be shown.
After a year of the programme, then, those boys fell asleep sooner, but hours of sleep also depend on when the alarm goes off, and with the alarm before five a dark bedroom is not enough on its own. Anyone coaching young archers can look at the timetable first; caffeine and alcohol, which affect sleep and shooting in different ways, have their own article on caffeine and alcohol in archery.
If sleep stays difficult for weeks despite these habits, see a doctor: insomnia and sleep apnoea are disorders that are diagnosed and treated, and no evening habit takes their place.