Fitness in Turkish traditional archery: Eyibil 2025

Forty-five traditional Turkish archers, 20 women and 25 men aged between 20 and 35, from two clubs in Yozgat, were measured on anthropometry, isometric strength, flexibility, balance, manual dexterity, attention and heart rate, and then shot one end of five arrows at 18 metres. Their experience was short: a mean of 1.44 years for the women and 1.88 for the men.

The only measure linked to the score in both sexes is mean heart rate during shooting, and the sign is negative: r = -0.877 in the women and -0.552 in the men. Those who shot with a slower heart scored more.

Back strength, measured with a dynamometer pulling up from a platform, is linked to the score only in the women (r = 0.560); in the men it is not (0.265). Grip strength is not linked in either group (from -0.011 to 0.089 in the women, 0.014 and 0.038 in the men), and neither is thumb strength, flexibility, balance on the flamingo test, or time on the nine-hole peg test. None of the eleven anthropometric measures, from arm length to shoulder breadth, was related to the score in either sex.

Of the d2 attention test, the figure that moves with the score in both sexes is the total of items processed minus errors (0.558 in the women, 0.469 in the men); in the men, the total number of items marked as well (0.453). Concentration performance, total errors and error rate are not related to the score.

Comparing the sexes, the men are taller (174.44 against 163.70 cm), heavier, stronger in the back (149.86 against 73.43 kg) and in the grip, and score higher on average (7.60 against 6.15 out of 15); the women are more flexible on the sit and reach (29.88 against 24.94 cm) and faster on the peg test.

A cross-sectional study in a single session, on athletes licensed for at least a year with the Turkish traditional archery federation and free of injury for the previous six months. Before the measurements, participants did an archery-specific warm-up, and rest was given between tests.

Anthropometric measures were taken with a stadiometer, an electronic scale and an anthropometer: total arm, forearm and upper arm length, trunk height, foot and leg length, biacromial breadth, and shoulder, chest and flexed biceps circumference. Grip strength was measured with a Baseline digital dynamometer, standing with the elbow extended, three 3-second trials per hand with the highest value kept; back strength with a Takei dynamometer over two trials; thumb strength with a Saehan pinch gauge in a key pinch, three trials per hand averaged.

Static balance is the flamingo test, on a beam of 50 by 3 by 5 centimetres, counting how many times the athlete loses balance in 60 seconds: here a higher number means worse balance. Flexibility is the sit and reach. Dexterity is the nine-hole peg test, timed. Attention is the d2 test in its Turkish version, fourteen rows of 47 figures, 20 seconds per row, about eight minutes in all.

Heart rate was recorded with a Polar H10 chest strap and Polar Beat software, taking the mean during the shooting.

The shooting test is the most unusual part, and needs reading carefully before this study is compared with any other. Each athlete shot one single end of five arrows, with their own bow, at a target of 110 by 77 by 20 centimetres placed at 18 metres, under the Turkish federation's indoor rules: 20 seconds per arrow, 100 seconds in all, with any arrow not shot in time counted as a miss. The scoring gives 3 points for the outer ring and 1 point for the other valid areas, so the maximum possible is 15.

The analysis was run in SPSS 25: Shapiro-Wilk for normality, Student's t tests for comparisons between men and women, and Pearson correlations calculated separately within each sex, with a threshold of 0.05.

The weak point is the outcome. Five arrows, one single end, and a score worth 3 or 1: the whole performance sits between 5 and 15 points, and a single arrow moves the result by a fifth. With twenty women and twenty-five men, a correlation of 0.88 rests on twenty pairs of numbers. Nobody repeated the test on a second day, so there is no way of knowing how stable either the score or the heart rate is.

Heart rate is a mean over the whole end, and a lower mean can mean a calmer archer, an aerobically fitter one, or one who took less time. The study does not separate these and does not measure anxiety.

Mean experience is between one and two years. These are club members rather than formed competitors, and the relationships between strength, dexterity and score in such a group may differ from those in seasoned archers.

The paper has no limitations section, and some of the numbers do not add up. In the body composition table, body mass index has a t of -1.792 with p reported as 0.000. In the comparison table, mean heart rate is 108.10 for the women and 101.56 for the men, while the discussion swaps the two values. The dexterity test is described in the methods as the nine-hole peg test and discussed as the Purdue Pegboard, which are different tests. The text says the men achieved higher scores on the peg test, but that test measures a time, and the men's longer times mean less dexterity, not more. Left thumb strength goes from 9.68 to 22.36 kilograms between women and men with a t of -2.369, much smaller than those reported for narrower gaps.

The journal is a Turkish regional publication.

What remains is that, in this group, those who shot with a lower mean heart rate scored more, and that this is the only association present in both sexes. Which way the link runs the study does not say: a calmer archer may shoot better, or an archer who is shooting well may stay calmer. Nothing here measures what happens if someone tries to lower their heart rate, and the correlation in the women, 0.88, is higher than is usually seen for measures of this kind.

The other half of the result is negative, and it is the sturdier half: grip strength, thumb strength, flexibility, standing balance, finger dexterity and eleven body measurements said nothing about who scored more. In archers with one or two years of practice, the numbers a battery of fitness tests produces did not separate the better shooters from the rest.

Back strength in the women is a single result in a subgroup, drawn from a set of comparisons with no correction, and in the same study it is absent in the men. It counts as a signal, not as guidance.

The context matters for any comparison: the score here is the traditional Turkish one, five arrows worth three points or one on a rectangular target, not a sixty-arrow indoor round. The figures do not move from one format to the other.