Hand dexterity in archers: Gao 2026 study

One hundred and fourteen young Chinese adults aged 18 to 22 were split into three groups of 38: archers, basketball players and sedentary controls. The two athlete groups competed at provincial or national level and came from the same club: the archers had a mean of 9.4 years of practice and about 4 hours of training a day, the basketball players 9.8 years and 3.5 hours. The sedentary group did less than half an hour of moderate activity a week and had not played sport regularly for three years.

On the fine dexterity tests the archers were the best of all. On the Purdue Pegboard, which counts how many pins are placed in 30 seconds, they scored 16.61 with the dominant hand against 15.84 for the basketball players and 15.16 for the sedentary, 15.32 with the non-dominant hand against 14.39 and 13.87, and 12.84 with both hands against 12.16 and 11.74. On the sum of the three, 44.76 against 42.39 and 40.76. On the assembly subtest, which asks for pin, washer and collar to be put together, the two athlete groups are level (37.82 and 37.92) and ahead of the sedentary group (33.13).

On the Grooved Pegboard, where the outcome is a time and less is better, the archers finished in 52.41 seconds with the dominant hand against 53.84 for the basketball players and 59.54 for the sedentary; with the non-dominant hand the two athlete groups are level (60.26 and 60.29) and remain ahead of the sedentary group (65.71).

On grip strength the picture changes: 43.98 kilograms for the archers, 46.98 for the basketball players, 38.8 for the sedentary. Both athlete groups are above the sedentary, and there is no difference between them.

On the cognitive tests the result runs the other way. On the MoCA, a cognitive screening questionnaire, the archers scored 26.87, the basketball players 28.50 and the sedentary 27.29: the basketball players above everyone, the archers indistinguishable from the sedentary. On the Stroop, the archers scored below both other groups in colour naming and in the word-colour interference condition. The number of errors did not differ between groups in any condition.

A cross-sectional study run in China between January and February 2026. Recruitment went through coaches and teachers: 120 people enrolled, 114 analysed. The archers and basketball players came from the same club and the same training camp, a choice made to keep training environment and load comparable; the sedentary group came from nearby universities, matched for age and lifestyle. The inclusion criteria were tight: aged 18 to 22, body mass index between 18.5 and 23.9, regular diet and 7 to 9 hours of sleep over the previous three months, no chronic or congenital disease, no recent injury, no psychiatric or neurological diagnosis, no long-term medication, non-smokers, normal or corrected vision.

Each participant attended twice. The first visit was for familiarisation with the tasks and for height and weight; the second, 48 hours later, held the five formal tests, given in a randomised and counterbalanced order, all within a 10:00 to 16:30 window to control for time of day, in quiet rooms of a provincial laboratory near the club. Each session lasted 35 to 40 minutes.

Grip strength was measured with a Jamar hydraulic dynamometer in the standard position recommended by the American Society of Hand Therapists, three maximal 6-second contractions per hand with a minute of rest, and the mean of the three as the final value. The Grooved Pegboard asks for 25 slotted pegs to be placed in a 5 by 5 board as quickly as possible, with one familiarisation trial and three formal trials per hand. The Purdue Pegboard has four subtests: 30 seconds with the dominant hand, 30 with the non-dominant, 30 with both, and one minute assembling pin, washer, collar and washer; the whole block was repeated three times and averaged.

The Stroop was given straight after the Grooved Pegboard, in three conditions: reading words printed in black ink, naming the colour of the ink, and a conflict condition in which word and colour do not match and only the colour is to be named. The score is the number of correct answers in 45 seconds. The MoCA was given face to face in the Chinese paper version, with no practice runs, in about ten minutes, with the scoring checked by a second researcher.

The analysis is a one-way analysis of variance with Tukey tests, replaced by a Welch correction and Games-Howell tests where variances were not homogeneous, with eta squared and Cohen's d as measures of effect size.

The design is cross-sectional, and the authors say so plainly: an adaptation produced by training cannot be told apart from self-selection, that is, from steady-handed people being the ones who stay in archery. Nobody shot an arrow here: the tasks are boards with pegs, there is no score, no distance and no bow. The archers' discipline is never stated, so whether they shot recurve or compound is unknown.

The sample is heavily male, 97 men and 17 women, and the breakdown by sex within the three groups is not reported: an imbalance between groups cannot be ruled out, and the authors list it among their limitations along with the sample size, the general nature of the cognitive tests and the thin description of training load, given only as years of practice and hours per day.

Some numbers do not match between the text and the tables. For Stroop colour naming the text reports means of 101.32, 98.75 and 68.21, the table 73.71, 76.34 and 68.21; in the interference condition the text gives 62.35, 60.18 and 42.76 and the table 48.13, 48.00 and 42.76, with two different p values. For the non-dominant hand on the Purdue the text reports p = 0.004 and the table 0.001. The ethics statement names one university committee and one date, the methods another committee and another date, a year apart.

The reading the authors offer of the archers' Stroop scores, that a precision sport may limit rapid cognitive processing, is their own hypothesis built on a single comparison between groups, not a measurement.

The comparison the study makes is with basketball players and with sedentary people of the same age, and that is the only comparison this record reports. At moving small pegs with their fingers, the archers were the quickest and the most accurate: about one peg more on the Purdue and a second and a half less on the Grooved than the basketball players, with much wider gaps against the sedentary group. On grip strength they did not beat the basketball players, and on the pencil-and-paper cognitive tests they beat nobody.

For someone who shoots, little changes, and it is worth saying so: nobody shot here, so none of these numbers predicts a score. The study serves as a description of a population, a snapshot of what comes out when a group of archers with nine years of practice behind them is measured on standard hand tests.

And because the design is cross-sectional, the result does not say that archery sharpens the hands. The training may have done it, or those who already had the quality may be the ones who stayed in the sport. Telling the two apart would mean following the same athletes over time, which is exactly what the authors name as the work still to do.