Nutrition in elite archers: Ursulin 2026 study

An online questionnaire, completed between March and May 2024 by 51 archers who compete at World Cups, World Championships and European events (28 women and 23 men from 22 countries, mostly Turkey and Croatia), collected weight, height, waist circumference, eating habits and training frequency. BMI calculated from the reported figures ranged from 18.37 to 32.69, with a mean of 24.59: 52.94% were in the normal range, 45.1% above it and 1.96% below. The largest group trained 6 days a week (41.2%), and most trained between 2 and 4 hours a day.

More training days per week went with lower weight, BMI and waist circumference, with weak correlations: r = -0.306 for weight, -0.291 for BMI and -0.363 for waist. Those who trained on more days also trained more hours a day (r = 0.440). On nutrition, 47.1% reported access to a sports nutritionist, 37.3% received advice from a qualified professional, 27% had someone monitoring their diet, and 73% said their national federation took no part in it.

Those with this kind of support trained many more hours a day on average. Where the federation looked after nutrition, mean weight was 65.214 kg against 75.900 and BMI 22.039 against 25.520. Even so, 80.4% considered their own diet healthy.

The questionnaire, written for this study, had 36 questions in four blocks: personal details, anthropometry, nutrition and training; the authors report a Cronbach's alpha of 0.83. Weight and height were self-reported, and waist circumference was self-measured following written instructions (midway between the lowest rib and the iliac crest, in front of a mirror, two readings averaged). The nutrition questions also asked respondents to estimate their daily protein intake per kilogram of body weight, and their carbohydrate and fat intake, during the preparation period.

The analysis uses correlations between continuous variables and t-tests between those who answered yes or no to the questions on nutritional support. Recruitment is described only as taking place through the international federation. Discipline (recurve or compound), age and scores are not reported, although age was among the questions.

Everything is self-reported, including a waist measurement taken in front of a mirror, and archers who choose to answer a nutrition survey may not represent elite archers in general; a single country, Turkey, supplies more than a fifth of the responses. The correlations are weak and cross-sectional, so they cannot say whether training more makes people lighter or lighter people train more. There is no adjustment for sex or age, both of which strongly affect BMI and waist, and BMI, as the authors themselves note, is not enough on its own to define excess fat. Estimates of grams of protein or carbohydrate per day are hard to give from memory and are not checked against a food diary.

The text has several inconsistencies: 47.1% with access to a nutritionist corresponds to 24 people out of 51 but is given as 21; the waist correlation has p = 0.000 in the text and 0.008 in the table; some rows of the t-test table give identical values for different variables. With 51 responses these details matter. The version read here is the accepted manuscript, before the publisher's editing.

The study gives a snapshot rather than measuring an effect: among archers competing internationally, almost half have a BMI above the normal range and most have nobody overseeing their nutrition. For archers, the most concrete point is exactly that: even at this level, eating is often left to the individual.

The link between more training days and lower weight is weak and says nothing about score, which was not collected: it cannot be read as evidence that losing weight improves shooting, or that weight harms it. In the same way, the fact that archers with a nutritionist train more hours probably goes with more structured and better funded programmes, and the study does not separate the two.