Para-archery: what we know about archers with a disability

Who is in the studies

This page brings together fifteen studies in the registry of archers with a disability, and twelve claims rest on them. That is not many, and a 2024 review helps explain why: across Paralympic archery and shooting it found twenty-four studies in all, only seven of them on para-archery alone, and 93.8% of the people who had written on these subjects had done so only once. Hardly anyone comes back for a second time.

The archers studied shoot from a wheelchair or standing, some cannot see, and one was born without arms and shoots with his feet. This page sets out what has been measured in them, always as a difference between groups of athletes, and where the data run out.

Shooting seated

The only study of shot timing used three-dimensional motion analysis to compare four elite Korean recurve archers in a wheelchair with three who shoot standing. The wheelchair archers hold the draw and the aim for longer: the draw lasts 2.23 seconds against 0.99, the aim 4.41 against 3.04. The authors explain it through the trunk, which moves forwards and backwards more than three times faster during the draw, because without support from the legs it needs more time to settle. From the aim onwards the two classes look alike again, and over six arrows the score is almost the same, 57 against 56. The comparison is between two Paralympic classes, though, so it says nothing about where a wheelchair archer stands against a non-disabled one; there is a separate article on aiming time in general.

The muscle comparison is smaller still: one Paralympic archer in the W1 class and one without a disability, measured with electromyography. In both, the shot can be described by three muscle synergies that look alike but carry different weightings: on the string side the Paralympic archer relies mainly on the biceps and the other on the posterior deltoid. The authors present it as a test of the method, with two people and no scores (muscle synergies have an article of their own).

Shooting without sight

In 2013 an audio sight was presented: a 34 gram magnetic sensor on the bow turns the direction into sound in headphones, the side of the target in the right or left ear, up and down with two tones. Six trained, sighted archers, blindfolded, scored 58% at 10 metres of what they scored with their eyes open. Shooting by ear does hit the target, then; no blind archer tested the device, however, and there is no blindfolded trial without the sound, which would show how much the sound helps.

Blind archers do appear in a French study from 2006: ten archers in the B1 class compared with ten men with severe visual impairment who do not shoot, at finding by touch the middle of sticks between 14 and 34 centimetres long. The authors expected the archers to be more accurate and found a mean error of 1.23 against 0.98, although the disadvantage appears in only one of the four combinations of hand and starting point. The task is a long way from the shooting line.

Body, strength and shoulders

The only group comparison with non-disabled archers comes from Turkey, in 2021: ten para-archers and ten non-disabled archers, with scores that do not differ significantly. In seated reach tests the para-archers reach much less far, 22 centimetres against 42 forwards with both arms, while trunk endurance and body perception do not separate significantly. In the quality of life questionnaire the gap lies only in the physical part, with physical functioning at 29.5 against 95. The two groups differ above all in their disability, so the study cannot say how much shooting contributes to this difference.

On strength there are two studies of wheelchair archers. In Istanbul nine archers had much weaker shoulders and elbows than nine wheelchair basketball players, and a grip that varies enormously from one archer to the next. In Ukraine, in 2023, twenty Paralympic wheelchair archers were split into two groups of ten, not at random: twelve weeks of specific exercises, more arrows and recovery with massage took the drawing hand's grip from 37.4 to 45.5 kg in the trained group, and eight of the top ten finishers in the test competition came from that group. It is the only study of physical conditioning in para-archers, but the competition scores are not published and the programme bundles several things together, so the effect belongs to the package.

On shoulders there is a Korean pilot study from 2016, with ultrasound on sixteen wheelchair archers. Tendon changes are frequent on both sides, 2.29 per shoulder in the bow arm and 2.35 in the string arm, and everyday pain does not differ significantly from that of the wheelchair table tennis players examined alongside them. The study cannot separate the load of shooting from that of almost twenty-four years in a wheelchair, which falls on the same shoulders, and a change on ultrasound is not necessarily a problem; archers' injuries in general have a separate article.

That leaves a single case: a Paralympic archer born without arms, who has shot with his feet since the age of sixteen, inserts a peg with his foot in 2.2 seconds against 15.3 for the controls, and in his motor cortex the area for the toes and knee is larger and shifted towards the hand area. He also uses his feet to eat and to drive, so nobody can say how much of this comes from shooting.

The mind, and life away from the line

On the mental side there are two Indonesian interventions, both in regional journals. In the first, ten para-archers registered with the Indonesian Paralympic Committee did two months of 4-7-8 breathing and their competition anxiety fell, from 29.0 to 21.2 in the standard bow and from 27.8 to 19.2 in compound, while in the ten controls it did not; performance was not measured. In the second, twelve para-archers followed five weeks of bow drills and imagery against target panic, and those above the observation sheet's threshold went from 3 to 10 out of 12, with no control group.

Twelve Indonesian wheelchair student-athletes who shoot give their quality of life 13.92 on a scale from 4 to 16, and on the questionnaire they do not differ from their peers in wheelchair tennis, athletics and fencing: the archers report benefits as high as the others, not something particular to archery. On illness at competitions the registry has only a second-hand figure, reported by the review: at the Tokyo Paralympic Games 7.2% of the 139 para-archers followed fell ill. Until the original study joins the sources, the claim on illness at the Games stays among the unstudied questions.

Where the research is thin

Almost every claim on this page rests on a single study, and no study in the registry with its own measurements has more than twenty para-archers. Three things are missing above all. The first is a comparison with non-disabled archers of the same level, which exists in only one group study: without it, nobody can tell whether a difference comes from the wheelchair, the class or the level. The second is keeping the classes apart, because seated and standing archers often end up in the same group. The third is the score: many studies describe the shot, the body or what the athletes report, and very few link any of it to the arrows.

@misc{campagna2026_enresearchpopulationsparaarchery,
  author = {Campagna, Matteo},
  title = {Para-archery: what we know about archers with a disability},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {Research, matteocampagna.com},
  url = {https://matteocampagna.com/en/research/populations/para-archery},
  note = {accessed 2026-10-16}
}