Wheelchair para archers: Mahlovanyy 2023 study

Twenty Ukrainian Paralympic archers, all men between 24 and 39 who shoot seated in a wheelchair, were followed for twelve weeks and split into two groups of ten. The experimental group added to their usual session a set of special archery exercises on a shooting simulator in the first part, 30 to 35% more arrows in the main part, massage of the back, shoulder girdle and arms at the end, and a 45-minute swimming session on their free day. The control group carried on with the established plans.

At the start the two groups did not differ on any measure. Over the following weeks differences appeared only in the experimental group. Heart rate on the shooting line was lower: on day 17, 72.2 ± 1.1 beats before the session and 76.4 ± 1.5 after, against 78.7 ± 2.1 and 83.5 ± 2.6 in the controls; on day 33, 71.3 ± 1.3 against 87.6 ± 2.4. Grip strength in the drawing hand went from 37.4 ± 2.5 to 45.5 ± 1.4 kilograms, a gain of 8.1, and the other hand gained 5.2 kilograms; in the control group it did not change.

In the task of reproducing a force of 20 kilograms on a dynamometer from memory, the experimental group came closer to the target (20.4 ± 0.7 on the right and 19.6 ± 0.9 on the left before the competition) while the controls stayed between 16.7 and 17.8. In the task of reproducing a five-second interval from memory, the experimental group stayed around 5.0 seconds while the controls drifted towards 4.2 and 4.4, counting time faster than it passed. In the control competition at 18 metres, eight of the top ten finishers came from the experimental group and two from the controls.

The study comes from the shooting range of a university in Lviv and ran for twelve weeks: 48 sessions in three blocks of four weeks and sixteen sessions each, with a control competition on day 49. Sessions were four a week, 90 minutes long, under the same conditions and at the same time for both groups. The twenty participants are masters of sport and international-class masters of sport, medallists at national, European and Paralympic championships, grouped by diagnosis: five with cerebral palsy, five with amputation of the right lower limb, four with congenital dislocation of the right hip, six with the after-effects of a spinal fracture or injury.

The measurements were repeated before and after the first session of each block and before and after the competition. Heart rate was counted on the shooting line with an electronic stopwatch over ten seconds and then converted to a minute. Grip strength comes from a hand dynamometer held with the arm extended to the side. What the authors call muscle sensitivity consists of reproducing a force of 20 kilograms on the dynamometer three times while watching the scale and then three times from memory; the sense of time, of reproducing a five-second interval three times while watching the stopwatch and then from memory, with the right hand and the left.

The competition was an 18-metre round under official rules: 60 arrows on the 40 cm triple face. The paper states that methods of mathematical statistics were used without naming any test, and gives the 5% threshold in the table notes.

The paper does not say how the twenty athletes were allocated to the two groups: it speaks of a division into two equal groups, with no randomisation and no criteria. Nobody was blinded, and the people taking the measurements were the people who designed the intervention. The sample is small and analysed as a whole despite four different clinical pictures, which change how the athlete sits in the chair and how much the trunk can be used.

The most serious point concerns the intervention, which is not one thing but four: simulator exercises, 30 to 35% more arrows, massage at the end of the session and swimming on the free day. If something worked, the paper gives no way of saying which part, and the extra shooting volume alone would account for the rise in grip strength. The main outcome is left hanging too: not one competition score is reported, only the composition of the top ten places, and with ten athletes per group that composition can change over a few points.

The instruments are coarse for what they have to measure. A heart rate counted by hand over ten seconds and converted to a minute carries six beats of error for every beat miscounted, and the differences between groups are six or fifteen beats. The muscle sensitivity and sense of time tasks are home-made, with no reliability data and no external comparison, and no statistical test is named.

To this add how the text is written: several paragraphs are repeated word for word, and the baseline grip strength of the right and the left hand appears twice with the same value, 37.4 ± 2.5, a figure that cannot hold for both. The tables are hard to read and the journal is a regional one.

This record concerns high-level Paralympic archers who shoot seated in a wheelchair, and that sets its scope: it does not transfer to an archer standing up and says nothing about beginners. Within that scope the study describes a twelve-week block in which one group added simulator work, more arrows, massage and swimming, and in which grip strength rose by eight kilograms in the drawing hand while heart rate on the shooting line stayed lower than in the comparison group.

What it does not say matters more. It does not say which of the four ingredients produced the result, so it supports no conclusion about massage or swimming in particular. It does not say how much the scores changed, because it reports none: the only competition figure is that eight of the top ten came from a group of ten people. And the two tasks the authors read as a sign of stability, reproducing a force and a time interval from memory, were built for the occasion rather than validated as measures of anything known to be linked to the score.

One last point concerns the reader: these are athletes with specific diagnoses, and in their case decisions about loading, recovery and treatment go through the doctor and physiotherapist who look after them. The registry describes what the study observed and stops there.