How archery training time is used: Tan 2022 study

The study filmed training in six sports at a national sports school in Malaysia, archery among them, and measured how the time was divided. Activities were sorted into three types: playing form, meaning open, competition-like practice with opponents, scoring or match conditions; training form, meaning closed technical or physical exercises repeated without variation; and transition, meaning rest, general briefings and time without any sport-specific movement.

The archers spent 83.32% of the time in training form, almost all of it technical work, the highest share of the six sports, and no time at all in playing form; the rest, about 17%, was transition, while physical conditioning took up a minimal share. Hurdlers and volleyball players also did no playing form; squash was the only sport with a substantial share of it (39.54%). Grouping the three individual sports and the three team sports showed no difference for any type of activity: on average 59.06% of the time was training form, 15.33% playing form and 25.61% transition.

For each sport, three sessions run by the same coach were filmed during the pre-competition period with a fixed camera on a tripod, giving 2,294 minutes in all, which were then coded with performance analysis software (LongoMatch). Timing for each activity began when the first athlete started it, and when athletes were doing different things the activity of the majority led by the coach was what counted; collecting arrows was included in the technical activity under way. Three experts reviewed the categories, and agreement between two observers, and for the same observer two weeks apart, was high (intraclass correlation coefficients between 0.90 and 0.99).

There were 10 archers, male and female, with a mean age of 19.5, all competing nationally and some internationally, training 9 times and 18 hours a week in sessions averaging 129 minutes; their coach was 34 with 9 years of experience. Across the six sports there were 67 athletes, from 3 hurdlers to 16 netball players. Time for each activity is expressed as a percentage of the session.

For archery the most important point is what was not filmed: the coach explained that on certain days the squad held scoring sessions, small internal competitions, but none of the three filmed sessions was one of them. The zero for playing form therefore depends partly on which days were chosen, and three sessions with a single coach are not enough to describe a whole training programme, as the authors admit. The definition of playing form comes from team sports: in archery, where even in competition each archer shoots alone at a fixed distance, the line between a practice end and a scored one is thin, and the authors discuss this themselves.

Activities were coded for the group rather than for each athlete, and the playing and training figures are slightly inflated because they include collecting equipment and changeovers. The paper does not say whether the archers shot recurve or compound. The registry gives the year as 2022, while the paper appeared in the journal's 2023 volume. Finally, the study does not measure performance, so it cannot say whether one way of dividing the time is better than another.

For an archer, the study describes something many will recognise: at a school preparing athletes for national competition, almost all the time in the observed sessions went on shooting arrows while working on a technical point, at a fixed distance, without scoring and without any simulation of competition. The authors see this as a traditional approach and think individual sports should also include competition-like practice, but that is their position: the study does not measure whether it would change results, and it acknowledges that neither playing form nor training form has been shown to be superior.

The concrete takeaway for anyone planning their own training is a point of comparison: in sessions lasting more than two hours, the share of time under competition-like conditions was nil, and breaks took up about a sixth of the session.