Aerobic circuit for young archers: Fitoni 2023

Eleven archers aged 10 to 13, enrolled at the sports school run by the faculty of sport sciences at Yogyakarta State University, followed a two-month aerobic circuit. Before and after, they took three tests: an elevated side-plank hold, used as the measure of arm endurance, the multistage shuttle run for aerobic capacity, and a 36-arrow test for accuracy.

The means rose on all three. The plank hold went from 42.45 to 59.82 (the paper gives no unit, presumably seconds), the maximal oxygen uptake estimated from the shuttle run from 26.71 to 30.31, and the score from 287.54 to 309.91 out of a possible 360, with t = 7.807 on ten degrees of freedom. The score rose in all eleven children, by 12 to 39 points, and the gap between the best and the weakest narrowed: the standard deviation fell from 22.57 to 14.50. Aerobic capacity, on the other hand, dropped in one child, from 31.4 to 26.8, while that child's score went up by 12 points. The authors read the three gains together as showing that endurance and accuracy improve side by side, but they do not calculate any relationship between the three measures.

The design uses a single group, tested once before and once after, with no control group. The study ran from 15 January to 14 March 2020 on the university's archery field, although the paper came out in 2023. Children could take part if they had been active for at least three months, owned their own equipment, could shoot at 30 metres and were aged 10 to 13: eleven met the criteria and all of them were included. The type of bow is not stated.

The circuit alternated short stations with easy running: 15 seconds of jumping jacks, then 2 minutes of jogging, plank jacks for 15 seconds and 15 seconds of seated two-arm rowing. The paper does not say how many sessions there were each week, how many rounds of the circuit, at what intensity, or how much shooting practice the children did in the meantime. Of the shooting test it says only that it was 36 arrows: the distance is not repeated, and the entry criterion suggests 30 metres. Before and after were compared with a paired t-test, after a check that the data were normally distributed.

Without a control group, the effect of the circuit cannot be separated from everything else that happens in two months: children of that age grow, keep shooting and become familiar with a test they are taking for the second time. In children of this age, active for at least three months, a gain of 22 points over 36 arrows is also consistent with ordinary progress, and the narrowing spread points the same way, since those who started lower had more room to improve.

The paper does not describe the training dose and gives no unit for the plank hold; for aerobic capacity the text reports p = 0.000 and the table 0.003. The link between endurance and accuracy remains the authors' interpretation: no analysis checks whether those who improved most on the fitness tests were also those who improved most on the target, and the child who lost aerobic capacity still raised their score.

For anyone coaching children aged 10 to 13, the study shows that two months of an aerobic circuit, added to normal practice, went together with more endurance, better aerobic fitness and higher scores, and that nobody got worse on the target. It does not show that the circuit is what raised the scores, and it says nothing about adult or experienced archers, for whom endurance weighs differently over a long competition.

The idea that physical conditioning helps archers hold their technique to the last end is reasonable, and other studies discuss it; this paper on its own is not enough to measure it. In the registry it counts as weak evidence in favour, to be read alongside the studies that have a control group.