Atlasprofilax and balance in archers: Manent 2023

Six archers from the Brazilian national team, three women and three men, took a balance test on a force platform in South Korea in November 2014. Twelve days earlier just one of them, athlete 5, had received a treatment in Brazil with the Atlasprofilax method: an 8-minute session with a device that delivers percussive vibration to the suboccipital region, at the base of the skull.

In the test athlete 5 had the best result in both the risk of fall assessment and the fall index, with an index of 0 against values of 8 to 12 in the other five. No adverse effects were reported. The authors infer that the treatment may improve balance, proprioception and performance in archers, and propose a study with two groups and before-and-after measurements.

This is a case series, described as a pilot study. The treatment was given on 13 November 2014 at a clinic in Belo Horizonte, and the test took place on 25 November at a sports rehabilitation centre in Korea, during a training camp with athletes from other countries. The Korean examiners and the other five athletes did not know who had been treated.

The platform was an AMTI system with six plates, and its software produced two outcomes: a risk of fall assessment, read as distance from an origin on a chart, and a fall index summarising stability, weight distribution and sway across several frequency bands in eight conditions (eyes open or closed, head straight, turned, up or down, standing on elastic pads). No athlete was measured before the treatment: the only comparison is between the treated athlete and the other five on the same day. There is no statistical analysis and no shooting score was recorded.

The design cannot attribute anything to the treatment: one treated athlete, no baseline measurement, and no comparison with people given a sham treatment or no treatment by random allocation. Athlete 5 may already have had the best balance in the team, and nothing in the test rules that out; this athlete was also the oldest of the six (32.2). The title and conclusions speak of performance, but shooting performance was not measured.

The data are from 2014 and were published in 2023. The first author directs the academy that teaches the method and the second practises it, a declared conflict of interest, and much of the work cited in support of the method comes from the same authors. The proposed mechanism, that vibration at the back of the neck acts through myofascial chains on whole-body balance, is not measured in the study.

For an archer, the study does not show that the Atlasprofilax method improves balance or scores. It shows that on one test day the treated athlete had the best balance among six teammates, a result consistent with many explanations other than the treatment, starting with individual differences that were already there.

Without before-and-after measurements and without comparing people randomly allocated to treatment or control, a result like this cannot tell the effect of the treatment from chance. Stability in the shooting position remains a relevant topic for archers, but this case series adds no evidence on how to improve it.