Women and archery: score, strength, the menstrual cycle and competition anxiety

At the top level, men's and women's scores sit close together. Across World Archery's world and Olympic records the mean female shortfall is 1.46%, against 11 to 13% in running, rowing and swimming, and in international matches decided by a shoot-off between 2013 and 2019 men shot the first set at 9.25 points per arrow and women at 9.00. The body is a different story, and the differences do not all run the same way: in a group of Turkish traditional archers the women's back strength was half the men's, while on the flexibility test and the finger dexterity test the women did better. On the mental side the clearest difference is higher anxiety in women before competition, measured in a single study of national teams, and on days of period pain the average score did not drop significantly.

These figures need reading with the weight they carry, which is usually small. Almost all of them come from one-off comparisons between different people, often in groups of ten or twenty archers, and hardly any match men and women for years of practice, draw weight and training. That is why each point links to its entry in the registry, where you can see how many studies stand behind it and which way they point.

The scoring gap

The gap exists, but it changes with the division. Across the records it runs from 4.21% in barebow to a women's record 0.86% higher than the men's in the 144-arrow compound round; records, though, show the best ever shot, not what happens at an ordinary tournament. Closer to competition are the archives of elite recurve head-to-head matches: over 3,380 men's sets and 2,994 women's, the third arrow of the set scores the same on average for men and women.

Away from the top, the comparisons are small and nearly all find no difference. Among 42 recurve archers aged 9 to 12 with at least a year of membership, girls scored 242 points over 30 arrows at 18 metres and boys 222, a difference that cannot be told apart from chance; in an Indonesian university club, 19 women and 16 men, each at the distance of their own category, scored 271 and 255 over 36 arrows. In that club the number that matters is a different one: individual scores ran from 116 to 335, with standard deviations of around 51 to 54 points, so the spread within each sex was many times larger than the sixteen points between the two means.

The groups that put men ahead nearly always differ in something besides sex. Among ten students in Jakarta, in a simulated competition, the men scored 7.97 points per arrow against 6.47, but they had been shooting for 6.2 years against 3.5; among 80 Indian junior recurve archers the boys scored 641 against 597 out of 720 in the 70-metre qualification round, but they were older and more experienced, and the journal has questionable editorial standards. Since expert archers repeat the shot with less variability than beginners, a comparison in which one sex has nearly twice the years of practice is measuring experience as well.

Among people just starting out, the studies point in opposite directions. The only one to put the difference to a statistical test, in 96 Kansas pupils aged 12 to 14 shooting school bows, had boys on 40.6 points out of 100 and girls on 23.8; three later studies of children and teenagers find similar scores, but without a test, and a small Turkish group of seventeen beginners puts the boys ahead again, with no p value. Among 104 Malaysian university students who had never shot, men scored 16.0 points against 9.3, with a wide spread in both sexes. Age may explain part of the conflict, but nobody has measured whether the difference comes from strength, from the draw weight of the bows or from experience.

Under pressure: arrows after a miss, and the shoot-off

When an arrow carries more weight, the gap moves, and not always in the same direction. In elite recurve head-to-head matches, after two arrows of the set outside the 10, the third drops for everybody, by about 12%; in that same situation, though, the men's third arrow is worth 3.5% more than the women's, and the gap also widens by 2.4% when losing the set means leaving the tournament. The finding comes from a single study of 19,122 arrows from the London, Rio and Tokyo Olympics, the 2021 World Championships and a European Grand Prix: it says that in the competition archives women recover less after two arrows outside the 10, not why.

At the shoot-off the picture turns round. Across 2,210 international matches decided by a shoot-off between 2013 and 2019, with each archer compared with themselves, the men's shoot-off arrow averaged 9.167 against 9.25 in the first set, while the women's went from 9.002 to 8.982, a difference that cannot be told apart from chance. The drop therefore shows up in men and not in women; the test that compares the two drops directly falls short of significance, though, so it cannot be said that men drop more than women. In women the same study finds effects of their own: shooting the shoot-off in their own country was worth about 2.7% more, reaching it after winning the fifth set 1.8% more, while at world-level events their shoot-off arrow was worth 2.3% less than at other competitions. What a single arrow decides, and how to prepare for it, is the subject of the article on the shoot-off.

Strength, flexibility and dexterity

In the body the differences are large and run in different directions. The only sample that measures them all together is a group of 45 Turkish traditional archers aged 20 to 35, 25 men and 20 women, and there the strength gap is large, while on flexibility and dexterity the advantage reverses.

The women's back strength was therefore about half the men's and their grip about four fifths, while on the sit and reach they reached five centimetres further and on the nine-hole peg test they were quicker with both hands; on one-leg balance there was no difference. For strength there is more than one result pointing the same way, since among seventeen teenage beginners the boys had about a third more muscle mass in their arms. The reversal on flexibility and dexterity, by contrast, rests on this one group, and nobody has measured how much of these differences reaches the score at the same draw weight.

The measure closest to shooting is drawing strength. Among 49 novice university students on a 1967 course, the men's maximal drawing strength was almost twice the women's, 69.5 against 40.1 lbs, and the draw they rated comfortable was 44.8 against 22.6; the bows they used were 30.6 and 21.2 lbs. Worked out on the means, the men were drawing 44% of their own maximal strength and the women 53%, so in proportion the women were shooting heavier bows. In experienced archers the bow asks far less than the arm can give: in fifteen elite and sub-elite recurve archers it averaged 37% of the maximal strength measured at full draw, and when it went above 40% the score tended to fall, with a result just short of significance.

For a woman archer the practical question is therefore how heavy the bow is relative to her own strength, not relative to a man's bow. Draw weight also follows build: among 33 Indian archers of national and international standard, those with a sturdier build for their height shot heavier draw weights, although the sample mixed recurve and compound. Whether girls and boys among elite juniors shoot similar draw weights, on the other hand, cannot be said: the only published figure, from a questionnaire at the European Youth Championships, gives 15.44 lbs for girls and 16.99 for boys, beginner values which in the same table match the boys' mean age and the girls' weekly training hours. How to choose a draw weight starting from your own strength is covered in the article on choosing draw weight.

Isometric endurance, the ability to hold the draw for a long time, is often cited alongside maximal strength as the quality that matters most in archery. In the little evidence there is, holding endurance does not come out as more important than strength: among 31 young Malaysian archers both went with the score, but maximal drawing strength slightly more so, and among 60 Indian archers of national standard twelve weeks of general strength work in the gym raised the score more than twelve weeks of specific work with holds and resistance bands. Fatigue does not clearly separate the sexes either. In the only study to compare men's and women's shoulder muscles after a hundred arrows, fourteen men and six women, the authors conclude that the response is similar, but their own tables show the peak of the middle trapezius tripling in the women and barely moving in the men, so for now it cannot be said either that the response is the same or that it differs.

Technique: angles, the lower back and style

Whether men and women shoot with different angles is a question the measurements do not settle. In the most studied sample, thirteen university archers measured with inertial sensors while shooting barebow recurves of 20, 25 and 32 lbs, with the 25 lb bow the bow-arm shoulder was abducted by about 74 to 75 degrees in women against 82 to 83 in men, and with 32 lbs the string-arm shoulder and the trunk separated as well. In seven Malaysian university recurve archers, on the other hand, the force-line angle did not differ significantly between the sexes, 39.2 against 42.1 degrees, although with seven people the comparison says little. In the thirteen, though, everyone used the same bows, so 32 lbs was a different load for a man and for a woman, and what looks like a sex difference may be a difference in load.

The same sample shows how the women adapted to the heavier bow. At 32 lbs they leaned the trunk back by about 18 degrees against the men's 6 to 8, rotated it to the right and tended to lock the bow-arm elbow in hyperextension, an angle that changed from one bow to the next only in them. As a result, with the same bow men and women load the lower back differently: at 32 lbs and 10 yards the estimated compression between the fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae was 773 newtons in the men and 488 in the women. Every value stayed far below the 3,400-newton safety threshold the authors used, and with thirteen people sex cannot be separated from body weight, which went with compression at r = 0.62. For a coach, a trunk leaning back and a locked bow-arm elbow are signs to watch when a woman archer moves up in draw weight.

On style, by contrast, the registry has a solid result: elite archers do not share one correct technique. In competition footage of the top fifteen men and top fifteen women in the recurve world rankings, every phase of the shot had at least two styles, and cluster analysis separated a common style, in 23 archers, from a more complex one, in 7, all of them women. With seven people and sex dividing them exactly, though, it cannot be told whether these are two recurve styles or a difference between men and women.

The menstrual cycle and the score

On the cycle the data are few and small, and none of them finds a significant drop in the average score. In the study that carries most weight, twenty women in a Jakarta university club shot 36 arrows on a normal day and 36 on a day of period pain: 283.5 points against 272.1 out of 360, eleven points fewer, which with twenty athletes cannot be told apart from chance. That is why the registry says that on days of period pain the average score does not drop significantly. The same study shows where to look, though: the best score in the group stayed almost the same, from 335 to 330, while the worst fell from 213 to 176, so on days with pain the mean barely moved and the lowest scores fell further away.

The rest comes from a small Turkish study of ten compound archers, published in a journal with questionable editorial standards, which in the registry does not decide a status. On the third day of menstruation the score at 50 metres was 8.79 points per arrow against 9.04 on a day outside the period, with no significant difference, and state anxiety did not change either; right-hand grip strength, on the other hand, fell from 30.3 to 28.3 kg, back and leg strength a little too, and errors on the one-leg balance test rose from 1.3 to 3.5. These are ten people, and in neither study was the comparison day placed in a defined phase of the cycle, so nothing can be said phase by phase.

Asked directly, women archers see it differently. In a questionnaire given to 142 women at the 2019 Turkish championships, eight in ten said that on the days of their period competition and training are affected always or sometimes, and only 5.6% named those days as the ones when they perform best. It is a perception rather than a score, again in a journal with questionable editorial standards, but it is a widespread one, and the distance between what archers feel and what the average measures is a good reason to look at your own numbers rather than a group's. The simplest way is to note, for a few months, the day of the cycle and any pain alongside training and competition scores, to see whether your own pattern resembles the average or whether the worst days always fall at the same point. For pain, and for anything involving medication or hormonal treatment, the person to see is a gynaecologist or a sports physician.

For girls who grow up shooting there is one more result. At a Korean sports high school, menarche in athletes from thirteen sports came at 13.6 years on average, against 12.4 in classmates who did no sport, but in the eight archers the delay was not seen, and none of the four girls still without a period was an archer. Eight girls are too few to say that archery protects, because a small delay would not have shown up.

Anxiety and mental profile

The clearest difference comes from the field. At the 2011 Asian Championships, five to ten minutes before shooting, 29 women recurve archers from the national teams reported more worry than the 28 men, 5.61 against 3.64 on a nine-point scale, and slightly more arousal, 7.61 against 6.85, with the same gap in qualification, in the individual matches and in the team event. Age, years of practice and international appearances were the same in both groups, so experience was not the explanation. It is a single study, and the effect sizes it reports are larger than those that can be worked out from its own table; the three comparisons that find no difference all appeared in journals with questionable editorial standards and involve archers of a lower standard. That women archers report more pre-competition anxiety than men therefore rests on limited evidence.

Beyond pre-competition anxiety the studies do not agree. Around ten papers have compared the mental profiles of male and female archers, and those that find a difference find it on a different scale each time: among Italian competitive archers the women reported more worry and less ability to step back from their own thoughts, among young Turkish archers the boys made more use of imagery of the shot, among young Russian archers they worked faster on attention tests; seventy elite Greek archers, by contrast, did not differ on any of the seven mental skills measured. The same goes for the heart: among ten students in Jakarta the women had about fourteen more beats per minute than the men while aiming, but also nearly half the years of practice, while among twenty-two archers aged 11 to 14 heart rate did not differ significantly between boys and girls.

A functional MRI study carried out only on women adds a different piece. Twenty elite Korean women archers, performing as well as the others on a visuospatial memory task, activated the frontal attention areas more than twenty-three women who do not shoot. It is not a comparison between the sexes, the task was on a computer rather than on the shooting line, and no region survived statistical correction across the whole brain, but it is one of the results that concern women archers directly.

In practice, the fact that women on a national team arrive at the line more worried than the men on average suggests that work on cognitive anxiety deserves room in their preparation. Which work helps is a separate question, and in archers the studies of mental training against pre-competition anxiety do not agree, with the largest drops coming from studies without a comparison group. The tools, and how to try them, are in the article on mental skills training.

The shoulder and injuries

In archery the shoulder is the most common site of overuse injury, and the studies that show it do not break it down by sex. On differences between men and women there is only one direct figure, and a weak one: among 239 archers in Florida, interviewed at competitions and in clubs, 57.6% of the women reported an archery-related injury against 35.3% of the men, and 70.7% of the women who shot recurve. These are self-reported injuries, gathered in a conference abstract, and the analysis does not separate sex from bow type, so the comparison between recurve and compound remains contested as well. Rotator cuff strengthening is a sensible recommendation for everyone, but in archers its preventive effect has not been put to the test. The full picture is in the article on injuries.

What to do with this in training

Taken together, these results say more about the differences within each sex than about those between the sexes. In the Indonesian club almost two hundred points out of 360 separated the best and worst of the women, and sixteen separated the two means; in the score comparisons the spread within each group nearly always exceeds the distance between the groups. Strength is the exception, because there the gap between the sexes is larger than the differences from one person to the next. A programme built around sex therefore starts from an average that says little about any one archer.

A few concrete points remain. Draw weight is chosen on your own drawing strength, not on what the men at the club shoot, bearing in mind that among the 1967 novices the women were shooting proportionally heavier bows. When draw weight goes up, watch the trunk and the bow-arm elbow, because in the only sample that measured them, leaning back and hyperextension appeared in the women with the heavier bow. And your own scores, logged alongside the day of the cycle, how anxious you felt and how the arrows go after a miss, say more about an individual archer than any group average.

@misc{campagna2026_donnetiroconarco,
  author = {Campagna, Matteo},
  title = {Women and archery: score, strength, the menstrual cycle and competition anxiety},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {matteocampagna.com},
  url = {https://matteocampagna.com/en/articoli/women-and-archery},
  note = {accessed 2026-10-16}
}