Bow grip in traditional archery: Kamarudin 2021

Four Malaysian traditional archers, each with more than four years of experience, shot using four different ways of gripping the bow described in a Mamluk treatise of 1386 known in English as Saracen Archery. The treatise links the grip to height: square for tall archers, intermediate for those of medium height, oblique for short ones. With each grip, every archer shot 6 arrows at 5 metres while electromyography recorded two forearm muscles of the bow hand, flexor digitorum superficialis and extensor digitorum.

Performance was the distance of the arrow from the centre. Only for the first archer did the grip change that distance significantly, in favour of the intermediate grip; for the other three the differences were not significant. None of the four shot best with the grip the treatise assigns to their height: the tallest archer (170.6 cm) did best with the intermediate grip, the two of medium height with the oblique, and the shortest (155 cm) with the square. In each archer's best grip the extensor was more active than the flexor, significantly so in three cases out of four, and from this the authors conclude that a more active extensor than flexor goes with better shooting.

Testing took place in a biomechanics laboratory at Universiti Malaysia Perlis, in collaboration with a private traditional archery academy. The archers were three men and one woman, free of shoulder problems. The grips were tried in random order, with a one-minute break between sets. The treatise's three grips differ in where the back of the bow's handle sits on the fingers: the crease between the first and second phalanges for the square grip, the middle of the first phalanx for the intermediate, and the crease between fingers and palm for the oblique. The fourth, called the combination grip, was explained by the coach directly to the archers and is not described in the paper because it is considered confidential.

Surface EMG (BioRadio 150, at 950 Hz) was placed on the left forearm, normalised to each muscle's maximal voluntary contraction, and the second before release was analysed. Five Qualisys cameras at 200 Hz tracked the shoulders, elbows and wrists, with a marker on the right thumb to identify the moment of release. For each archer the grips were compared with a repeated-measures analysis of variance, or with the Friedman test when the data were not normally distributed.

This is a pilot study with four people and 24 arrows each at 5 metres: at that distance small differences in grip have little effect on where the arrow lands, and six arrows per condition are far too few to tell one grip from another. The distances from the centre appear only in charts, with no values. Bow type, draw weight, arrows and release technique are not described, and one of the four grips is secret, so it cannot be repeated.

The conclusion about the extensor goes beyond the data: the extensor was often more active than the flexor in grips that did not give the best result as well, and for the fourth archer the difference in the best grip was not significant. There is no direct statistical comparison between muscle activity and distance from the centre. The authors acknowledge that each archer may have shot best with the grip closest to their usual one, which was not recorded before testing, and that alone could explain why the height rule found no support. The venue is a conference proceedings volume, and the type of review is unclear.

For traditional archers the study offers no rule. The treatise's advice linking grip to height found no support in these four archers, but the test is too small and too close to the target to say the rule does not work. What can be seen is that each archer had one grip they shot best with, probably the one they were used to.

On forearm muscle activity, the authors link their finding to studies on recurve archery suggesting that an active extensor in the bow hand helps avoid torquing the bow at release. Here, though, it remains an observation on four people, with no measure of its effect on the shot.