Reaction time in archers and bocce: Geçitli 2021

A Turkish study compared the reaction time of 16 Olympic-style archers and 19 boules players from the pétanque discipline, all young athletes who had been training for at least two years, four days a week for two hours. Reaction time was measured with the falling ruler test, catching the ruler between thumb and index finger.

The archers averaged 0.134 seconds with the right hand and 0.127 with the left, the boules players 0.142 and 0.143, with a standard deviation of 0.04 in every case. The differences were not significant (right p = 0.471, left p = 0.268), and neither were those between boys and girls, compared with the two sports pooled (p = 0.878 and 0.544). Mean age was 16.56 years for the archers and 16.74 for the boules players; the archers were slightly shorter (159.29 against 165.32 cm) and lighter (60.21 against 62.74 kg).

In the Nelson test the athlete sits with the hand projecting 8 to 10 cm beyond the edge of a table and the thumb held open opposite the fingers; the tester holds the ruler vertically with the start of the scale level with the hand, drops it after a ready signal, and the athlete stops it by closing the fingers. The distance travelled in centimetres is converted into seconds with the free-fall formula. Each hand had five trials: the two worst were discarded and the mean of the remaining three was used.

The paper reports the mean wind speed (6.7 km/h) and temperature (27 °C) at the training area, which suggests the testing took place at the training ground. The groups were compared with independent-samples t-tests after checking normality; the authors say they also calculated Cohen's d, but the values do not appear in the tables.

The ruler test measures simple reaction to a visual stimulus, with the fingers closing in a pinch: this is far from reacting to the clicker, which is an auditory and tactile signal and calls for relaxing the fingers holding the string. The result therefore says nothing about clicker reaction time. With 16 and 19 athletes and a spread of 0.04 seconds, small differences between the groups would not have shown up anyway.

The number of boys and girls in each group is not given, nor the athletes' competitive level, and the comparison by sex pools the two sports. There is no group of non-athletes of the same age, so it cannot be said whether either sport gives times different from those of people who do not train. In the discussion one sentence on sex reports "p<.05", whereas the table and the rest of the text indicate no significant difference.

The study finds no difference in simple reaction speed between young archers and young boules players, and both groups sit at around 0.13 to 0.14 seconds. For archers this says little: the reaction that matters in Olympic-style shooting is the one to the clicker, and it was not measured. The result supports neither the idea that archery makes people quicker nor the idea that good shooting needs an especially fast reaction; it remains a description of a group of young Turkish athletes using a field test.