Foam roller and archery: Ünlü 2023 study

Twelve male archers aged 18 to 20 were tested on three separate days: without a foam roller, after thirty seconds of self-massage with the roller, and after sixty seconds. On average they were 18.92 years old, 171.83 cm tall and 65.67 kg, with two years of shooting and three training sessions a week.

Every measure came out better in the two roller conditions. Visual reaction time went from 347.17 milliseconds in the control condition to 271.08 after thirty seconds and 285.33 after sixty; auditory reaction time from 396.67 to 277.42 and 289.42. Single-leg balance, measured with the stork test, rose from 30.00 to 42.75 and 43.16 seconds on the right foot and from 28.25 to 41.33 and 41.25 on the left. The shooting score went from 79.17 to 134.50 after thirty seconds and to 117.00 after sixty.

All the comparisons favour the two roller conditions over the control condition and, on the shooting score alone, also favour thirty seconds over sixty. The authors conclude that self-massage with a foam roller has a positive effect on reaction, balance and shooting performance.

The archers were recruited at an archery centre, with the criteria of two years of practice, regular training, no chronic illness, no recent long course of medication and no supplements in the previous six months. The researcher met them four times. The first visit was used to explain the study and to let them get used to the roller. At the second, anthropometric measures were taken and the visual and auditory reaction tests, the stork balance test and the shooting test were carried out as the control condition. At the third, the same measures were repeated after thirty seconds of self-massage with the roller, and at the fourth after sixty. Visits were 48 hours apart, all sessions ran between ten and twelve in the morning, and care was taken to use the same equipment throughout.

The analysis is a repeated-measures analysis of variance with LSD post hoc comparisons and a threshold of p below 0.05; normality was checked with the Shapiro-Wilk test.

On two important points the paper says nothing. It does not describe the roller protocol, which parts of the body were worked, with how much pressure and over how many passes, and it does not describe the shooting test: there is no distance, no number of arrows, no target face, and the score stays a number without a scale.

The limitation that governs everything else is the order of the sessions. The control condition is always the second visit, thirty seconds always the third, sixty always the fourth, for all twelve participants: the condition without the roller is therefore also the first time each of them faces those tests. Everything that is learned by repeating a reaction test, a single-leg balance test and a round of arrows adds to the effect credited to the roller, and the two cannot be separated. The paper calls the design a crossover, but a crossover in the proper sense means the order varies between participants, and here it does not.

The size of the changes makes the problem concrete: the shooting score rises by 70%, single-leg balance by 40%, visual reaction time falls by seventy-six milliseconds, all after thirty seconds of self-massage. The discussion in the same article cites a study in which thirty and sixty seconds of rolling produced no significant difference, without explaining how that squares with these results.

To that add a sample of twelve men from a single centre, the absence of any measure of joint range of motion, which leaves the mechanism offered, blood flow and connective tissue, taken from the literature rather than measured here, multiple comparisons corrected with LSD, which is the most permissive option, and a shooting score with no scale, which cannot be compared with anything. The work comes from the first author's master's thesis and appeared in a sport sciences faculty journal.

Read as an archer, the study says less than it promises. A score that goes from 79 to 134 with no indication of how many arrows, at what distance and on what target face is not a usable result: it is not even clear whether the maximum was 150, 300 or something else. And because the condition without the roller was always tested first, any part of that jump could come simply from facing the same tests for the third time.

What is left is a small and honest point: in twelve young archers, thirty and sixty seconds of rolling before shooting did not make reaction, balance or score worse. In the registry the source counts as a marker of a still open question about warming up, not as evidence of an effect.