Arm strength and aiming in archery: Ibrahim 2019 study

Six young archers from a club in the Diyala province of Iraq followed eight weeks of strength endurance exercises for the arms, and at the end their score and their bench press repetitions were far higher than before. There was no comparison group.

The score over 36 arrows at 70 metres went from 127.333 points with a standard deviation of 5.046 to 191.333 with a standard deviation of 15.857, a mean increase of 64 points (t = minus 13.326, p < 0.001).

The strength endurance test was a maximum number of bench press repetitions at 50% of the one-repetition maximum, carried to fatigue: the mean went from 11.666 repetitions with a standard deviation of 1.632 to 18.5 with a standard deviation of 2.880, that is 6.833 repetitions more (t = minus 11.371, p < 0.001).

The six athletes were aged 18 to 22 and made up the entire population of the club, so the sample is 100% of the group considered. The author starts from a problem observed at first hand, the weak results of the archers at that club, which he attributes to poor arm strength endurance and to loss of concentration while aiming. He concludes that the exercises prepared improve accuracy and are the main factor in raising strength endurance in archers, and recommends extending them to other age groups and spreading them among coaches.

The study is in Arabic and uses a before-and-after design on a single group, with no control. The sample is the six archers of the club, chosen because they were all there were.

There were two tests. The first is the competition score at 70 metres: six ends of six arrows, 36 arrows in all, two minutes per end, on a paper face with the standard scoring zones, where an arrow is worth up to ten points and each end up to 60, for a total of 360. The second is the bench press, described as a test of arm strength endurance: a bench, a twelve-kilogram German-made bar and ten-kilogram plates, a load at 50% of the weight the athlete could lift once, with as many repetitions as possible to fatigue.

The programme ran for eight weeks, with three sessions a week (Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday) of 90 minutes each, divided into fifteen minutes of preparation, seventy of main work and five of closing; one or two special exercises were added to the daily session as needed. The exercises are listed in an appendix and come to two dozen, almost all with elastic bands, dumbbells or machines: pulls on a band fixed under the feet with the arms extended forwards, a band held with both arms opening outwards, a pull in the shooting position, a band under the foot with lateral pulls up and down, a band overhead and behind with an arch of the back, two-kilogram medicine ball throws forwards and backwards, shoulder and wrist rotations with dumbbells, lateral and front raises, upright rows with an overhead press, curls and triceps extensions, cable pulls for the back to the front and to the rear. The exercises were submitted to expert judgement before being used.

A pilot trial was run on a different group of archers before the baseline tests, and the starting measurements were collected over two days, one for the shooting and one for the gym test, with the same procedure repeated at the end.

Six people, one group, no control. Over eight weeks of regular training a group of young archers improves anyway, and this design cannot separate the effect of the exercises from that of the arrows shot over the same period, from familiarity with the test and from regression towards the mean in a group chosen because it was performing badly.

The increase stated is very large: 64 points over 36 arrows at 70 metres, from 127 to 191 out of a maximum of 360. A jump of that size in two months fits very inexperienced archers learning to shoot rather better than it fits the effect of a strength programme. The study reports neither the athletes' years of practice nor the conditions on the two test days, and does not say whether the tests took place in the same wind, with the same equipment and the same draw weight.

The reading of the PDF is partial. The Arabic text comes out of the converter with corrupted character forms and with the digits inside the Arabic text transposed (the publication years of the references read as 0981 instead of 1980), so the numbers embedded in sentences are not reliable. The values given in this record are those of the two tables, which the converter returns in Latin digits and which are internally consistent: the means, standard deviations, differences and t values can be derived from one another with six subjects. What remains uncertain are the dates and the count of sessions, which contradict each other in the text: the programme is stated as eight weeks with three sessions a week, the start and end dates cover about four weeks, and the total number of sessions matches neither reading.

The number of arrows is also given in two ways: one line describes six ends of six arrows for a total of 360 points, the next adds that the six ends are repeated a second time for 720 points. The scores reported, around 127 and 191, are consistent with 36 arrows. No interpretable effect sizes are reported, and two columns of the tables are left without a legible heading.

For an archer this source counts for little on its own. It says that six young Iraqi archers, after eight weeks of work with bands, dumbbells and machines for the arms and back, scored 64 points more over 36 arrows at 70 metres and went from twelve to eighteen bench press repetitions at 50% of their maximum. Without a group that did not do that work, those 64 points cannot be attributed to the exercises, and over two months a beginner improves anyway.

What remains useful is the content of the programme, described exercise by exercise: strength endurance work for the arms, shoulders and back, with light loads, elastic bands and a few machines, three times a week for ninety minutes. Anyone wanting to know what strength endurance means in this context will find it listed.

What the study does not say is whether the strength gained is the reason for the score. The two measures grew together, which is exactly what is expected of a group of beginners in training: a great many things grow together. In the registry this source counts as a weak indication, from six subjects and without a comparison, inside a line of research that needs studies with a control group.