Bow training in young archers: Arfiansyah 2025

Seventeen young archers from a training centre in Malang, Indonesia (7 boys and 10 girls, mean age just over 16, with no national competition experience yet), followed an eight-week "bow training" programme: draws of the bow or of similar devices held on aim for 10 to 15 seconds, three times a week. Before and after, the muscle mass of each arm was measured with a bioimpedance analyser.

Muscle mass rose in all four measurements: in the left arm from 1.19 to 1.24 kg in the boys and from 0.87 to 0.94 kg in the girls, and in the right arm from 1.29 to 1.33 kg in the boys and from 0.98 to 1.12 kg in the girls, with p values between 0.001 and 0.007. The authors report gains of 4.2% (left) and 3.1% (right) in the boys and 8.04% and 9.2% in the girls, and describe the effect as small. The right arm, the drawing arm for most of the sample, was still slightly heavier than the left after the programme.

The design is a single group measured before and after, with no control group. The programme, led by coaches together with the research team, combined three exercises: draws with a bow-shaped fibre device of about 10 kg (2 sets of 10, one extra set each week), draws with a medium resistance band (2 sets of 15, one extra set every two weeks) and draws with the equipment of the archer's competition division, in this case the "standard" bow (2 sets of 20, one extra set every three weeks), with 30 to 60 seconds of rest. The archers were advised to do only exercises without gym machines, such as push-ups and pull-ups, and there was an internal competition once a week; diet was not controlled.

Muscle mass of both upper limbs was measured with a SECA mBCA 525 analyser and compared with a paired t-test, separately for boys and girls.

Without a control group the gain cannot be credited to the programme: over two months these sixteen-year-olds were still growing, competing every week and doing other exercises. The changes range from 40 to 140 grams per arm and were measured by bioimpedance, which is sensitive to hydration and time of day; the paper does not say how these conditions were controlled. One figure does not add up: in the girls the right arm goes from 0.98 to 1.12 kg, which is roughly 14% more, not the 9.2% given in the text.

Neither strength, nor endurance, nor score was measured, so the title and the conclusion, which put the method forward for competition preparation, go beyond the data. The sample is small, and all we know about the load of the fibre device is that it is about 10 kg.

Bow training, drawing and holding the bow without an arrow, is a widely used exercise. This study shows that in young archers doing it three times a week the muscle mass of the arms, measured by bioimpedance, rose slightly over two months; it does not show that the exercise caused the rise, because there was no comparison group, and it says nothing about strength, holding on aim or score. For a teenage archer the picture is unchanged: it is plausible that drawing the bow several times a week trains the arms, but these data do not demonstrate it and do not say by how much.