Muscle soreness after weights in archers: Putra 2022

Twenty boys from an archery school in Purbalingga, Central Java, did one upper-body weights session and 48 hours later rated their muscle soreness on a 0 to 10 visual scale. Half of them, 10 of 20, gave the maximum value of 10, which the authors call very severe pain; 5 (25%) were between 7 and 9, 3 (15%) between 4 and 6, 2 (10%) between 1 and 3, and none at 0. The authors report no means or other measures: the whole result is this distribution across categories.

The discussion and conclusion are about something else: that delayed onset muscle soreness is a normal response to an unaccustomed load, that it should not be mistaken for injury, and that warming up, cooling down and active recovery ease it. These points come from the literature cited and were not tested in this study.

The participants were boys aged 12 to 16 (13 to 16 in the abstract), with no injuries to the back, chest, shoulders or arms, no surgery in the previous six months and no anti-inflammatory medication; before the session their pulse, blood pressure and a physical activity readiness questionnaire (PAR-Q) were checked. The authors say they were chosen at random from those who met the criteria, without saying from how many.

The session had three exercises, lat pulldown, bench press and shoulder press, in 3 sets of 12 repetitions with 60 to 90 seconds' rest between sets. The load is not given, either in kilograms or as a percentage of maximum, and we do not know whether the boys had lifted weights before. Soreness was recorded once, at 48 hours, on a 0 to 10 scale; the authors call the study qualitative and descriptive and report counts and percentages.

Without the load the session can be neither repeated nor compared: 3 sets of 12 can be light work or exhausting, depending on the weight. The most useful piece of information for reading the soreness is also missing, namely whether the boys were new to weights: delayed soreness is much stronger after an unfamiliar load, and half the sample at the top of the scale suggests exactly that. There is no measurement before the session, so we do not know whether anyone started out already sore, and we are not told where the soreness was. A single reading at 48 hours says nothing about how long it lasted.

That half the boys chose 10, the end of the scale, for muscle soreness also says something about how 12 to 16-year-olds use a scale of this kind; the categories from mild to very severe are the authors' own. The study measures neither strength nor shooting in the days that followed.

For anyone coaching young archers, the study fits something already known: an upper-body weights session, here at an unstated load, can leave most boys very sore two days later. It does not say what load caused it, whether it changed how they shot in the following days, or how to reduce it: the advice on warming up and recovery in the discussion is taken from other work.

The study does not show that the session harmed anyone, and it does not assess that. If a young archer has pain after weights that does not settle within a few days, or pain in a joint rather than a muscle, that is a different situation from the one described here, and one usually taken to a doctor or physiotherapist.