Technique test for recurve archers: Ichsandi 2025

The authors propose a battery of seven tests for recurve archers and check it on fourteen young athletes at the Indonesian national training centre for promising athletes. The tests are: qualification score, elimination score, arrows shot in one minute at five metres, number of complete draws in one minute without an arrow, holding at full draw past the clicker, a test of rising levels of draw and rest, and shooting to exhaustion at five metres.

Each test correlates with the battery total above the critical value for fourteen people, which is 0.532: holding at full draw 0.838, qualification score 0.825, draws in one minute 0.817, elimination score 0.811, shooting to exhaustion 0.768, arrows in one minute 0.702 and the levels test 0.695. Repeating the battery a day later, the total of the second administration correlates 0.893 with the first (p < 0.01).

The benchmark values, those the paper sets at 100%, come from Indonesian senior national team athletes who have competed at the Olympic Games: 679 points in qualification, 147 in elimination, 350 arrows in the shoot to exhaustion, 75 seconds holding at full draw, 37 draws in one minute, 6 levels in the step test and 7 arrows in one minute. The authors note that these values are not absolute and may change with the results of later testing.

The work follows a research and development method along the steps of Borg and Gall, adapted into six stages: identifying needs, analysing product development, writing performance objectives, building the instrument, trialling and evaluating it, and revising it. Needs were gathered through interviews with coaches, observation of training and analysis of the tests already in use; the tests were then carried out in the field, at Cibubur, and revised with comments from coaches and athletes. The sample is the whole group at the centre, fourteen athletes.

The protocols are described one by one. The qualification score is the total of two sessions of six ends of six arrows, 72 arrows in all; the elimination score is the total of five ends of three arrows. The arrows in one minute are shot at five metres with the archer's usual technique, counting only those actually released. The draws in one minute are done without an arrow, from the set-up position to the anchor, without lowering the bow. Holding at full draw is done with an arrow: the archer goes past the clicker and holds as long as possible, and timing stops when the forward movement begins. The levels test alternates draw and rest of rising duration, five seconds at the first level and thirty-five at the seventh, and ends when the draw no longer reaches the anchor fully. Shooting to exhaustion is done at five metres in sets of twelve arrows, with no rest between sets and a drink allowed, until the athlete can no longer shoot.

What the paper calls validity is the Pearson coefficient between each test and the total of the seven; reliability is the coefficient between the total of the first and the second administration, one day apart, computed in SPSS.

What the paper calls validity is the correlation between each test and the sum of the seven tests, of which that test is itself a part: a measure that contributes to its own total correlates with it by construction, so those coefficients say little about how well the tests measure what they are meant to. Criterion validity, which the methods announce as a comparison with the official qualification scores, appears in no table: the qualification score sits inside the total instead of staying outside it as a reference.

The sample is fourteen athletes, a very small number for building an instrument, and their sex, age, draw weight and years of practice are all unknown. Not even the distance for the two shooting scores is given, which the text says varies with the athlete's age, and that makes the totals not comparable between athletes.

The one-day retest is a problem in itself. The battery includes a shoot to exhaustion and a levels test carried to failure: repeating it the next day means measuring an athlete still carrying the previous day's fatigue, and a coefficient of 0.893 does not separate the stability of the instrument from tiredness shared across the two occasions.

The benchmark values, finally, are presented as 100% thresholds, but there is no statement of how many Olympic athletes they were collected from, when, or under what protocol. And the sources cited in the introduction are given with generic author names and journal titles, with no DOIs, so they cannot be checked from the paper.

The part of this work that can be taken to the field is not the statistics but the list of tests. Five of the seven measure things the score does not show: how many complete draws fit into a minute, how long the draw is held past the clicker, how many arrows can be shot before no more will come, how many arrows go off in a minute at five metres, and how far up the ladder of draw and rest an archer gets. They are done with the archer's own bow, without instruments, and each has a protocol described precisely enough to repeat.

That they are valid, though, the study does not show: the check it reports is circular, the group is fourteen people, and the comparison with official scores announced in the methods does not appear in the results. The benchmarks taken from Indonesian Olympians should be read as an order of magnitude rather than as targets: 37 draws in a minute or 75 seconds of holding say something about the level of an archer who reaches them, but we do not know from how many athletes or under what conditions they were measured.

The point of interest for the registry lies elsewhere. The paper describes a way of looking at an archer's specific condition that does not go through the target, and so does not depend on the wind, the equipment or the day; it is a reasonable idea resting on a weak check, and the merit of having written the protocols out in full survives the weakness of that check.