Archers often say that the shot is decided in the fingers: in the feel with which the string is held, in how cleanly the hand opens at the release, in the strength with which the bow is held at full draw. That leads to a question I hear from parents, coaches and adult archers alike: do you need strong, sensitive hands to shoot well, and is it worth training them separately? Archers' hands have been measured with pegboards, with air jets on the fingertip, with a dynamometer and with a stopwatch.
Taken together, these measurements answer two different questions, and they answer them differently. The first is whether archers' hands differ from those of people who do not shoot, or of archers at a lower level: here the comparisons almost all point the same way, with one surprise, because the drawing finger is worse at telling small differences in pressure apart. The second is whether, among archers, those with more skilful or stronger hands score more: here the results contradict each other, or go against the idea.
What is measured when hands are measured
The studies look at four qualities, and they are best kept apart because they measure different things. Fine dexterity is measured with tabletop tests: pegs go into a board with holes as fast as possible, small parts are assembled, and the score is either the number of pieces in a set time or the time taken to finish. Tactile sensitivity is measured by asking when two pressures on the fingertip feel different. Grip strength is what a dynamometer records, a handle squeezed as hard as possible. Hold time, finally, is how long an archer can keep the string at full draw before giving way.
The first two are qualities of control and the other two of strength, and all four are measured away from the shot: that is what makes the step from test to score so difficult.
Archers' fine dexterity
The most careful comparison is a recent one. A Chinese study measured thirty-eight archers of provincial or national level, with an average of more than nine years' practice and about four hours of training a day, thirty-eight basketball players of similar level and thirty-eight sedentary people, all aged between eighteen and twenty-two. There were two tests: the Purdue Pegboard, where pegs are placed with one hand, then the other, then both, before small parts are assembled, and a board into which twenty-five grooved pegs are inserted against the clock.
Compared with the sedentary group, the archers did better on every test, with differences ranging from moderate to very large: on the Purdue the total placement score is 44.8 against 40.8, and on the grooved pegboard with the dominant hand they finish in 52.4 seconds against 59.5. The basketball players show how far the advantage goes. The archers stay ahead of them on every Purdue placement test, with one hand and with two, and on the grooved pegboard with the dominant hand, while with the non-dominant hand on the grooved pegboard the two groups are identical, at 60.3 seconds, and on assembly, the most complex task, they are level.
On this basis the registry states that archers have better fine manual dexterity than people who do not shoot, and the status is reported. There is only one study and, above all, it is a comparison made at a single point in time: it cannot say whether shooting builds more precise hands or whether people whose hands are already skilful come to archery and stay. An older result, on twenty-eight South African archers compared with reference values for elite athletes from other sports, even points another way, because on a board of lights to be touched their eye-hand coordination came out slightly lower than the other athletes'; that test, though, measured how the arm responds to a light coming on, not how precise the fingers are.
Dexterity and the score
Archers having more skilful hands than people who do not shoot does not mean that, among archers, the more skilful hands score more, and that is the question coaches care about. There are few measurements. In forty-five Turkish traditional archers aged twenty to thirty-five, the nine-hole peg test, the simplest dexterity test, is not linked to the score in either men or women, with correlations between 0.03 and 0.27, none of them significant; the score, though, was measured over just five arrows, too few to tell one archer from another.
In the same year a study of thirty-eight Turkish archers aged nine to fifteen found the opposite: total dexterity on the Purdue Pegboard correlates with the score at 0.39 and explains about 15% of it. The same study, however, finds that grip strength in the dominant hand is more closely linked to the score, at 0.49, and that dexterity and grip go together. In children this young, dexterity, strength and score all grow with age, and the link may run through that. On top of this, the journal that published it has questionable editorial standards, so the registry reports it without using it to decide the status. The same goes for a comparison of a hundred Indian recurve archers, in which the more experienced did better than the beginners on the Purdue assembly task, 34.4 against 31.8, but the shooting score does not enter the analysis.
Once what does not count is set aside, one study remains, and it goes against the claim: the claim that fine hand dexterity is linked to the score is contradicted. The picture is weak in both directions, and what can be said is that nobody has yet shown, in adult archers, that a quicker hand on the pegboard goes with better shooting.
The drawing finger feels small differences less
The least expected result concerns sensitivity. A Japanese study from 2007 took eight university archers, with one to three years of practice, and six students who did not shoot, and pressed an air jet onto the centre of the index fingertip of the drawing hand, at forces between 2 and 7 grams. Two pressures came each time, and the subjects had to say when they were different. The smallest difference the archers recognised was larger, 0.63 against 0.50 gram-force, and it was larger in proportion to the stimulus too, with a Weber ratio of 0.15 against 0.12: the archers were worse at telling small differences apart.
The same study offers an explanation. The archers' fingertip skin, measured with a durometer, was harder, 49.3 against 39.8, and the threshold rose with hardness; the authors conclude that the callus left by the string, rather than a change in the nervous system, is what takes the fineness away. In fourteen people, though, this is an association, and it cannot separate the skin from the nerves. Nor is the picture simply one of a less sensitive finger: in the archers the threshold rose very steadily with the reference force, and since each force was measured on a different day, the authors read this regularity as a sensitivity that is more stable from one day to the next. There is a statistical limit as well, because the degrees of freedom of the comparison suggest that the six measurements of each person, rather than the fourteen people, were counted as independent, so the difference is probably less certain than the test makes it look.
The claim that archers tell small differences in pressure on the drawing finger apart less well than non-archers is therefore reported, with one study and few participants, and nobody has checked whether this threshold has anything to do with the quality of the release. The changes in the skin and blood vessels of the fingers that hook the string are kept in a separate registry entry, on how the string hand adapts, which is also reported.
Eye-hand coordination
Close to dexterity sits eye-hand coordination, which studies measure in different ways and which two groups have set beside the score, both in children. The first, on thirty-seven Indonesian archers under twelve, finds a link with the score, with a coefficient of 0.259 and a direct effect of 6.7%; the same model, however, credits just three factors with 97.1% of the differences in score between the children, a share that in thirty-seven people suggests a problem with the data or the method. The second, on twenty archers under thirteen, measures coordination by throwing a ball against a wall and finds nothing. With one result on each side, the claim that eye-hand coordination is linked to score is contested, and nobody has measured it in adults.
Grip strength and level
With grip strength the numbers change, but the design of the studies does not. Compared with people who do no sport, archers grip harder: in the Chinese study 44.0 kilos with the dominant hand against 38.8 in the sedentary group, a moderate effect. The same study, though, finds that the basketball players grip harder still, at 47.0 kilos, without the difference from the archers being significant, which is why the claim that archers are stronger than people who do no sport is reported, with an advantage that shows against people who do not train and disappears against other athletes.
Between archers of different levels the comparisons all point the same way. In twelve young Malaysian recurve archers split in half by score, the better six had a stronger grip in both hands, with medians of 35.2 against 23.8 kilos on the left and 33.8 against 29.3 on the right. The same six, though, were also twelve centimetres taller, 173 against 160, and height and arm span were more closely linked to the score than grip was. In a hundred Indian recurve archers the experienced ones had three or four kilos more grip in both arms, and were also about ten centimetres taller and eight kilos heavier, in a journal with questionable editorial standards. The claim that higher-level archers have a stronger grip than beginners is reported, but grip remains mixed up with body size, and the link between height and level is itself contested, because in groups of young people a few extra centimetres may simply be growth.
The same applies to muscle. In the same twelve Malaysians the better group had 34.9% muscle mass against 29.9, but the difference falls just short of significance; in fifteen Japanese university kyudo archers, those with national placings had a skeletal muscle index of 6.7 against 6.0 kg/m², but they also shot 63 arrows a day against 43, and the stronger group was all male against half of the other. The claim that higher-level archers carry more muscle mass is reported, and nobody can say whether the muscle comes before the level or whether hours of shooting bring both.
When the question is asked within a group of archers of the same level, the link becomes uncertain. In the fifteen control archers of a Turkish study, in a journal with questionable editorial standards, grip is never linked to the score, and in twenty children under thirteen it does not predict it, with a p value of 0.925. The broadest registry entry on the subject, the one asking whether arm strength is linked to shooting accuracy, is contested precisely because the samples disagree: grip measured with a dynamometer does not follow the score across a long run of studies, up to thirty professional compound archers followed for twelve weeks, but in others, such as the twelve young Malaysians, it goes with the score; draw strength, for its part, goes with the score in a few small samples.
Holding the string for a long time
The last measurement sits between the hand and the rest of the body: how long an archer can hold the string at full draw. In eighteen Indonesian recurve archers aged thirteen and fourteen it is the test most closely linked to the score over 72 arrows at 70 m, with correlations of 0.748 drawing with the right hand and 0.632 with the left, while none of the other tests in the battery of nine reaches significance. In eleven Ukrainian beginners aged eighteen to twenty, by contrast, hold time does not follow the score, with correlations of 0.14 and 0.26. The claim that finger hold time at full draw is linked to the score is contested, and none of the studies on the subject accounted for draw weight, even though a heavier bow is likely to be held for less time.
Where the research stops
The figure sums up the picture. Comparisons between groups point the same way: archers have more skilful and stronger hands than people who do not shoot, even if the drawing finger is less fine, and those who shoot at a higher level grip harder and carry more muscle. When the question becomes whether, among archers, the same quality goes with the score, the results split or go against it. The two findings sit together easily, because comparing very different groups brings out differences that, within a similar group, are too small to weigh on the score, and because body size, age and hours of training move together with grip and dexterity.
Nearly all these studies are comparisons made at a single point in time, mostly on samples of a few dozen people or fewer, and several on children who are still growing. Nobody has trained finger dexterity or fingertip sensitivity to see whether the score changes, set the tactile threshold of the drawing finger beside the quality of the release, or followed the same archers over the years to find out whether hands change with shooting or whether shooting selects certain hands. There is more data on grip strength, but the underlying question is the same: unless height, weight and training volume are held constant, a stronger grip in the better archers may only mean that the better archers are bigger and shoot more.
What I take from this for the range
To the question we started from, on what the studies say today, my answer is this: archers' hands differ from those of people who do not shoot, but between two archers a dexterity test or a dynamometer does not tell you who will shoot better. I draw three points from it, with the caution that samples this small call for.
The first concerns testing. A pegboard or a dynamometer measures something real, and repeated over time on the same person it can help to track how that person changes; used to select young archers or to predict results, though, it risks rewarding whoever is bigger or further along in growth. It is the same reasoning I set out in the article on talent identification: a fitness test easily separates a beginner from an expert, but that does not make it a predictor of the score.
The second concerns training the hand. Since nobody has ever trained finger dexterity or sensitivity to see whether the score moves, adding dexterity exercises to an archer's programme is a choice made for other reasons, not on evidence that they bring points. General strength is a different matter, with different studies, and I cover it in the article on specific strength for archers.
The third concerns the string finger. That people who have shot for a few years feel small pressure differences less is a finding on eight archers, and nobody has shown that it changes the release, for better or worse. The regularity of the threshold in archers, which the authors read as a more stable sensitivity, suggests if anything that the string finger does not simply go "deaf". For now I would see this finding neither as a problem to fix nor as an advantage to pursue, because the link between the fingertip threshold and the release has not been measured.