Resistance bands for young archers: Syahputra 2021

Forty young archers at an Indonesian club were split into two groups of twenty: those who followed a programme of elastic band exercises improved their score on the 30 metre shooting test by 12.25 points on average, while those who carried on with the club's usual strength work improved by 8.55. The gap between the two improvements is 3.70 points in favour of the new programme (t = 3.492 on 38 degrees of freedom, p = 0.001), and within each group the gain is sizeable (t = 14.329 in the experimental group, t = 13.656 in the control group, both on 19 degrees of freedom). Both groups improved, then, and the elastic band group improved more.

Before that effectiveness test, the study is a piece of teaching-material development. The author designed fifteen exercises for boys and girls aged 13 to 15 and put them to three experts, who judged fourteen of them suitable, 93.3%, and rejected one because performing it risked injury. A trial with ten athletes dropped a further exercise that repeated the pattern of an earlier one, and a second trial with twenty-five confirmed the remaining thirteen. The experts' comments say what each exercise is for: the legs in the first three, the arms and abdomen in those that follow, while the last two are meant for the release and for the coordination of the whole shot.

The design is research and development: a needs analysis based on interviews with the club's coaches, product design, validation by three experts who rated each exercise as suitable or not, a small-group trial with ten athletes, a large-group trial with twenty-five, and finally an effectiveness test with forty. All of it took place at the DSR Archery Club in Depok, in the province of West Java, and the participants are described as beginners. The only measuring instrument is the 30 M Archery Test, that is the score over a round of arrows shot at 30 metres, taken before and after the training period.

The statistics were run in SPSS. The distribution of scores was checked with Shapiro-Wilk (0.613 before and 0.738 after in the experimental group, 0.327 and 0.695 in the control group), the improvement within each group with a paired-samples t test, and the comparison between the two improvements with an independent-samples t test preceded by Levene's test for equality of variances (F = 3.108; p = 0.086). The control group did "the strength exercises usually done at the club", which the paper does not describe. How long the programme lasted, how many sessions a week it involved, at what load and for how many repetitions is nowhere stated, and neither is the number of arrows that made up the shooting test.

The main limits concern what is not written down. Without the length of the programme, the number of sessions and the resistance of the bands, the result can be neither repeated nor placed in context: a twelve-point gain means something different over six weeks and over six months. The exercises are described only by a one-line comment on the muscle group they train, and the authors themselves, in their list of shortcomings, write that the way each exercise is carried out should be explained more clearly and that its duration should be pinned down better.

Allocation to the two groups was not random, or at least is not described as such, and it is not said whether the forty in the final test were the same people as in the earlier phases. Twenty per group is a small sample, all from a single club. The score at 30 metres is the only measurement: strength, which is the stated purpose of the programme and appears in the conclusions, was never measured, so the link between bands, strength and score remains the authors' assumption. The journal is a regional university publication, and the three expert ratings are recorded as yes-or-no judgements, with no scale.

For anyone coaching young archers the study says one modest thing and one useful thing. The modest thing is the result: at an Indonesian club a package of elastic band exercises built around the shooting movement was followed by a larger gain in score at 30 metres than the club's usual physical preparation, 12.25 points against 8.55. Since the control group improved as well, and since neither programme is described, nothing follows from this about what to do in the gym.

The useful thing sits in the part the authors treat as preliminary. Three experienced coaches, asked to rate fifteen exercises designed for archers aged 13 to 15, turned one down because carrying it out brought a risk of injury, and field testing dropped a second one because it repeated another. It is a reminder of how a programme for youngsters gets built: variety keeps young people interested, but exercises that resemble each other add nothing. The study does not measure strength and says nothing about shooting technique, so in the registry it counts as weak evidence on general strength work for young archers, not as a demonstration that bands buy points.