Heart rate and archery scores: Oktafiranda 2023

Ten recurve archers, university students from the Jakarta region, shot 15 arrows in a simulated competition while wearing a chest heart rate strap. While aiming, that is from the moment the archer was in position until the release, mean heart rate was 128.13 beats per minute in the 6 men and 142.37 in the 4 women. The mean score was 7.97 for the men and 6.47 for the women: the paper does not say so, but the scale suggests an average per arrow. Both differences were significant on an independent samples t-test (p = 0.026 for heart rate, p = 0.042 for score).

The authors read this as a link between a slower heart and a higher score, but the study only compares two groups split by sex. The men also had almost twice the years of shooting (6.2 against 3.5 on average), so heart rate and score could both reflect experience. No analysis relates heart rate to the score of an individual archer or an individual arrow.

The study is descriptive and cross-sectional: a single session at the Pulomas field in East Jakarta, in May 2023. Participants were drawn from active student archers in the Jakarta region, recurve division, who agreed to take part: 6 men and 4 women, with a mean age of about 20. Heart rate was recorded with a Polar H10 chest strap, first at rest and then while aiming each arrow.

The protocol was 5 ends of 3 arrows. The methods section allows 180 seconds per end, while the discussion describes alternating shooting, one arrow per archer, with 20 seconds per arrow, in a simulation of individual matches. Men and women were compared with an independent samples t-test, after checking normality with the Shapiro-Wilk test and equality of variances with Levene's test.

The sample is very small, 4 women on one side and 6 men on the other, and the design cannot separate sex from experience or from draw weight, which is not reported. The shooting distance, the target face and the way the score was calculated are not given, and the two descriptions of the timing (180 seconds per end, or 20 seconds per arrow with alternating shooting) do not match.

Resting heart rate was measured but does not appear in the results. Maximum heart rate in the table is almost identical in the two groups (199.2 and 199.5) with very little spread, which suggests a value estimated from a formula rather than measured; the paper does not say. Above all, there is no analysis linking heart rate to score within the same archer: the idea that a calmer heart means better shooting is the authors' interpretation, drawn from other studies, not a finding of this one.

For an archer, the useful figure is the order of magnitude: in a simulated competition, university archers from Jakarta had a mean heart rate of 128 to 142 beats per minute while aiming, well above the 60 to 80 beats the paper itself gives as typical resting values. Aiming in competition, even without much physical effort, is not a resting state for the heart.

The study does not show that lowering heart rate raises the score, nor that women have a faster heart rate because of anything to do with shooting: the two groups differed in experience, and with ten people a difference like this can depend on who happened to be there that day. In the registry it counts as a description of heart rate while aiming, not as evidence of a link between heart rate and accuracy.