Force steadiness in traditional archers: Çilli 2025

The study compares 65 Turkish traditional archers with 65 sport science students who had no experience of precision sports, in a task that has nothing to do with shooting: holding a force steady. Seated at a preacher curl bench with the elbow fixed at 90 degrees, participants first produced their maximal elbow flexor force, then had to hold 50 per cent of that value for 30 seconds while watching the target force and their own force on a screen.

Maximal force was the same in both groups, 71.2 kg in the archers and 71.5 in the non-archers, and relative to body mass it did not differ either. What differed was steadiness. The coefficient of variation of force over the 30 seconds was 6.17 per cent in the archers against 7.20 in the non-archers (p = 0.035), and the time spent in the band between 48 and 52 per cent of maximum was 80 per cent against 74 (p = 0.026). Among the 33 men alone the difference was sharper: coefficient of variation 4.26 against 5.97 per cent (p = 0.001), 85 per cent of the time inside the band against 76 (p = 0.008), a mean force closer to the target (48.6 against 48.2 kg) and a lower standard deviation (2.07 against 2.87). In the 32 women the figures pointed the same way, 9.04 against 10.47 per cent for the coefficient of variation, but no difference reached significance. Over the first five seconds everyone swung above and below the target, with similar amplitude and duration in both groups: the difference appears afterwards, in the holding.

The bench was instrumented: a 200 kg load cell between the handle and the frame, an amplifier for the strain gauge signal and a 16-bit analogue-to-digital converter sampling at 400 hertz, with software written for the study that showed the participant a real-time display of the target force and their own. An 8 mm threaded rod with an adjuster set every participant's elbow to 90 degrees.

The sequence was identical for both groups: five minutes of warm-up with two sets of ten band curls, two minutes' rest, two practice attempts to get used to the rig, the maximal voluntary isometric contraction test (two five-second trials, with the highest value taken as the maximum), four minutes' rest and finally a single 30-second steadiness trial at 50 per cent. From the force-time curve the authors derived the mean, standard deviation and coefficient of variation, the number of peaks, the amplitude and period of the first oscillation, and the percentage of time spent in four one-point bands between 48 and 52 per cent of maximum. The archers were tested at an inter-university competition, before the event; the men had a mean of six years of practice and the women four. As the variables were not normally distributed, comparisons were made with the Mann-Whitney test, for all participants and then separately for men and women.

This is a cross-sectional comparison of two groups, so it cannot say whether the steadiness comes from archery or whether people who have it end up taking up archery. The comparison group was made up of sport science students, that is physically active people: this is the authors' own explanation for the identical maximal force, and it is also why the comparison is between two populations of trained young adults rather than archers against sedentary people.

The task measures the elbow flexors isometrically with visual feedback, so it is a target-tracking job on a screen more than a measure of force, and it resembles drawing a bow neither in the muscles involved nor in duration. Which arm was tested is not stated. There is a single 30-second trial per person, with no reliability data, and the comparisons run to about fifty across variables and subgroups with no correction: the significant p values lie between 0.001 and 0.046, and some may arise from the number of tests. The variables were not normally distributed, yet they are reported as means with standard deviations rather than medians. In the men's table the standard deviation of maximal force for the non-archers is 2.3 kg against 16.8 for the archers, which is hard to reconcile with a mean of 88 kg or with the whole-sample figure. Nothing about shooting was measured: no score, no spread, no draw weight.

The finding speaks to anyone wondering which quality of strength matters in shooting. The archers in this sample were no stronger than their peers, but they held a submaximal force more steadily, and the difference was of the order of one percentage point of coefficient of variation. Put another way, the same maximal force can go with a different level of control, and control is what shooting asks for.

It does not follow that training force steadiness adds points: there are no scores in this study, and the authors present the idea as an expectation of theirs to be tested. Nor does it follow that bench curls are an archer's exercise, since that movement served to compare the two groups in a standardised way, not to reproduce the draw. One detail is worth noting: the difference between the groups did not appear in the first adjustment, because over the first five seconds everyone oscillated alike, but in the twenty-five seconds that followed.