Circuit training for young archers: Susanto 2021

Twenty children aged 10 to 12 attending an archery course at a primary school in Yogyakarta were measured three times, at the start, the middle and the end of a circuit training programme, on two things: the Indonesian physical fitness test battery for that age and a score over 36 arrows at 20 metres.

In the boys' group the fitness battery score went from 11.80 to 16.70 to 18.80, and the shooting score from 145.60 to 171.80 to 204.70. In the girls' group the fitness battery went from 13.20 to 16.70 to 19.80, and the shooting score from 155.30 to 187.70 to 214.50. Every comparison comes out significant except the one between middle and end for the boys' fitness (p = 0.071). The distribution across the battery's rating bands also changes: at the first test 40% were in the adequate band, 45% in the poor band and 15% in the very poor band; at the last, 15% were in the very good band, 55% in the good band and 30% in the adequate one.

The two groups in the title, though, are not a treated group and a control group: they are the boys and the girls, and all twenty did the programme. The paper states a two-group before-and-after design in its abstract and a single-group before-and-after in its methods.

The participants are ten boys and ten girls aged 10 to 12, from the fourth to the sixth year of a primary school in Yogyakarta, enrolled in an organised archery course; all of them were included, with no selection.

The circuit is built for that age with five stations: thirty seconds of work per station, fifteen or twenty seconds of rest between stations, and a complete circuit lasting between five and twenty minutes. What the five stations are the paper does not list in the text, and in the discussion it names only one of the exercises, the bent-knee hang, calling it the most influential. How many sessions a week and over how many weeks the programme ran is stated nowhere; the conclusion adds that the circuit should be done at 70 to 80% of maximum capacity.

Physical condition is measured with the Indonesian battery for ages 10 to 12, which comprises a 40-metre run, a bent-knee hang, sit-ups, a vertical jump and a 600-metre run; the total runs from 5 to 25 points and translates into five rating bands. The shooting score is the total of 36 arrows at 20 metres, in twelve ends of three arrows with three to five minutes of rest between ends, scoring 1 to 10 per arrow.

The analysis is a paired t-test, preceded by a Shapiro-Wilk normality check and a Levene homogeneity test, run in SPSS 22. The authors add in the discussion that they included visualisation exercises between sessions, for concentration.

There is no control group at all. The two groups the paper compares are boys and girls, and all of them did the same programme, so every comparison is between the before and after of the same person. In children aged 10 to 12 who are learning to shoot, that makes the main result unattributable: a score rising by around sixty points over 36 arrows at 20 metres, that is a point and a half per arrow, is what happens to beginners who keep shooting, and a battery of fitness tests improves simply by being repeated.

The programme cannot be reproduced from the paper. The overall duration, the number of sessions, the weekly frequency and the list of the five stations are all missing. And the treatment is not one thing: the authors state that they added visualisation exercises for concentration, so even if there were an effect there would be no telling where it came from.

The figures are inconsistent. The t values quoted in the text do not match those in the tables (6.647 against 6.641 for the boys, 13.292 against 13.229 for the girls), and in the boys' table the shooting score carries the same p value, 0.009, for a t of 3.301 and for a t of 8.245, which cannot be. The sentence in the abstract explaining the decision rule says the opposite of what the analysis does. The third measurement, the middle one, also appears only in the results: the methods describe two time points.

Finally, the study measures physical condition with a general school battery rather than with archery-specific tests, and a score over 36 arrows at 20 metres in children at their first attempts is a measure that varies a great deal from one occasion to the next.

The result takes one line to describe: twenty children who followed a circuit training programme improved both on the school fitness battery and on their score at 20 metres, boys and girls alike. That the circuit caused this the study does not show, because there is no group that did without it and because over the same period those children were learning to shoot.

For anyone working with the youngest archers some concrete information remains. A bodyweight circuit of five thirty-second stations, with fifteen or twenty seconds of rest and a circuit lasting five to twenty minutes, was carried out by ten-year-olds without the score suffering: that is a finding about feasibility, not about effect. And the Indonesian battery for that age moved a long way, a sign that the group started low, with 60% in the two lowest bands at the first test.

What cannot be taken from it is everything else: which exercise counts, for how long, at what frequency, and whether another kind of physical work would have produced the same. A beginner's score, at this stage of learning, rises for several reasons at once, and separating them needs a comparison group, which is not here.