Archery course and physical fitness: Türkmen 2021

Twenty-five students at Bayburt University in Turkey who had never done Olympic archery took an eight-week course, three times a week for an hour, and were measured before and after. In the ten women the pinch strength of individual fingers increased: the index finger from 10.9 to 14.8 kg, the middle finger from 11.0 to 13.7 and the ring finger from 9.0 to 11.3. In the fifteen men, back and leg strength on the dynamometer increased (from 145.37 to 168.25 kg), as did the index finger (from 14.53 to 17.07) and the middle finger (from 16.13 to 18.93); the ring finger rose from 12.20 to 13.97 without reaching significance (p = 0.070).

There was no significant change in body mass index, grip strength in either hand, chest skinfold, or shoulder and arm circumference. In the women back and leg strength also rose, from 84.85 to 106.30 kg, but with p = 0.059. Effect sizes, where reported, range from 0.51 to 0.63 in absolute value.

It is a single-group study with measurements before and after and no control group. The participants, 10 women (mean age 21.9) and 15 men (25.3), were volunteers enrolled at the university in the autumn semester of 2020-2021. Body composition was measured with Tanita SC-240 scales, the strength of each finger with a Baseline hydraulic pinch gauge, grip with a hand dynamometer, back and leg strength with a back dynamometer, chest skinfold with a caliper, and shoulder and arm circumference, flexed and extended, with a tape measure.

Each session began with 10 minutes of warm-up and exercises with a soft training bow (the "kepaze", 3 sets of 25 per hand), followed by 45 minutes of shooting recurve bows at 5, 10 and 18 metres, then three kinds of push-up (3 sets of 15) and resistance band work for the triceps, shoulders, back and chest (one set of 15), and finally 5 minutes of cool-down. There were 7 bows, 64 inches long on average and 24 pounds in draw weight. Differences were analysed with the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, separately for women and men.

Without a control group the effect of the course cannot be separated from familiarity with the test: a finger strength test done a second time can give higher readings even without training. The course was also more than shooting, since it included push-ups, resistance bands and soft-bow exercises, so even if the gains were due to the course it would not be clear which part produced them.

The groups are small, 10 and 15 people, and there are eleven variables per sex with no correction for multiple comparisons. Both the abstract and the text describe the participants as volunteers and also as chosen by a random method, two things that are hard to reconcile, without saying what group they were drawn from. The tables have layout faults: some counts appear as machine-translated words ("one", "2nd", "11th") and some lines are repeated under chest skinfold. The suggestion that the men did not improve their ring finger because they drew with only two fingers is the authors' guess, and the study measures nothing about shooting, neither score nor technique. The paper appeared in a nutrition journal, an unusual home for a training study.

For anyone teaching beginners, the study describes what changed in adult students after a basic two-month course with 24-pound bows: above all the strength of the fingers that hold the string and, in the men, back and leg strength, while grip, body weight and circumferences stayed the same. Since the course also included strength exercises and there was no comparison group, the change cannot be put down to shooting as such.

For experienced archers the study says nothing: it concerns the very first stage, with light draw weights, and the authors themselves think that bows which were the same for everyone and lighter than needed limited the effects. There is no measure of shooting at all, so the question that matters most to an archer stays open: whether stronger fingers change the release.