Archery training before competition: Alekseev 2024

Two authors from the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutia describe how archers prepare in the weeks before a major competition and end with six training recommendations. The data concern 10 male archers aged 16 to 30, eight Masters of Sport and two Candidate Masters, who took three visual-motor reaction tests: simple reaction, reaction to a moving object and complex choice reaction.

Results are given only as shares of the group. On simple reaction, 7 of the 10 showed in the authors' view weak activation of the nervous system and 3 moderate activation; on the moving-object test 6 had average accuracy and 4 lower; on complex reaction 4 had unsatisfactory results, 3 a sluggish response with working capacity below the norm, which the authors link to possible overtraining, and 3 average results. Their conclusion that many of the archers went into competition with the nervous system in a less than optimal state and with too little recovery, however, is already stated in the methods section, as the product of their observations, the literature and the views of experienced coaches, not of the tests.

The study ran in three stages, at the R.M. Dmitriev Republican College of Olympic Reserve and at the championship of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia). In the first, during a training camp, the 10 archers shot technical control arrows at 18 metres in two series of 30; in the second they repeated the same format 10 days before the selection event and 3 days before the final stage; in the third the authors assessed technique during the championship. The three reaction tests come from the Russian psychophysiology tradition and are used here to judge the state of the nervous system, stress and fatigue.

The article does not say at which stage the tests were taken, gives neither the scores of the 18-metre series nor the competition results, does not state the bow division (only the clicker is mentioned) and provides no reaction times in milliseconds and no reference values for what it calls the norm.

The stated aim was to relate the archers' state before competition to their results, but that link never appears: the scores are missing, and so are any test figures beyond the shares of a group of ten. With no comparison group and no reference values, judgements such as weak activation or working capacity below the norm cannot be checked.

The six closing recommendations (involving the archer in the annual plan, autogenic training and breathing, recovery through massage, sauna and stretching, variety of activities, unexpected changes of distance and target, and in the warm-up short holds of no more than 10 seconds plus at least 10 draws through to the clicker) do not come from the study's data. One sentence traces them to papers on mas-wrestling, a Yakut stick-pulling sport with no obvious link to archery.

There is little here for archers to take away. The idea that the weeks before a major competition should be planned with fatigue and recovery in mind is widely shared, but this study does not test it: it does not measure training load, does not measure recovery and does not follow any archer through to a result. The reaction tests capture the group at a single moment and do not show whether those who reacted more slowly went on to shoot worse. The recommendations remain the authors' opinion, and in the registry the study counts as a description of practice, not as evidence that a training method works.