Wall squat and plank in archers: Wattimena 2024

Sixteen archers at the Jakarta training centre preparing for the 2024 Indonesian National Games were measured before and after a period of wall squat and plank work. On the wall squat the mean goes from 88.19 to 121.00, with individual values ranging from 35 to 144 before and from 65 to 214 after; on the core and plank test the mean goes from 3.94 to 8.81, with values from 1 to 7 before and from 1 to 12 after. Both measures therefore rise, and rise a great deal in percentage terms, but the unit they are expressed in stays obscure: the paper calls them "gerakan", that is movements or repetitions, while the description of the wall squat in the introduction is of a hold with knees and hips at ninety degrees, which is timed in seconds and repeated one leg at a time.

The statistical test reported does not compare before with after. The two significance values quoted in the text, 0.19 and 0.20, are used by the authors to conclude that "there is no significant difference between the wall squat and the core and plank", that is to compare the two exercises with each other. For the move from 88 to 121 and from 3.9 to 8.8 no test is given at all. Shooting accuracy, score and any other measure tied to the archer's shot were not recorded.

The design is a before-and-after with no control group, on all sixteen athletes of the regional centre, who together make up both the population and the sample. There are two instruments: a wall squat test and a test called "core and plank". The training programme carried out between the two measurements is described nowhere in the paper, neither its length, nor its frequency, nor the number of sets or repetitions, and the participants' sex, age, discipline and years of practice are not reported either.

The statistics were run in SPSS 25. Normality was checked with Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk: the table reports p values of 0.440 and 0.401 for the wall squat before and after, 0.176 for core and plank before and 0.000 for core and plank after, where a value that low indicates that the distribution is not normal. The text, however, states that "the significance value before and after is 0.16 > 0.05, so the data are normally distributed", a number that does not appear in the table. A t test follows, from whose table the text reports only two significance values, 0.19 and 0.20, and uses them to compare the two exercises with each other. Between Table 2 and Table 4 the numbering jumps: there is no Table 3.

This is a very thin paper, and it is worth saying so. Sixteen athletes, no control group, no description of the training given, undeclared units of measurement and a statistical test that answers a different question from the one in the title. The paper's conclusion does not even report the result: it confines itself to recommending further research on the topic.

What remains is the pair of means before and after, with wide standard deviations (31.98 and 42.30 on the wall squat, 1.88 and 4.15 on core and plank) and with at least one athlete who did not change, since the minimum value on core and plank stays at 1 in both measurements. Without a comparison group, a before-and-after at a national training centre does not separate the effect of the exercises from that of the rest of the preparation, of familiarity with the test and of the point in the season. The journal is a regional university publication and the peer review status is not stated. No measurement concerns shooting, so nothing follows from the study about the relationship between trunk strength and score.

For anyone who shoots, nothing changes. The study only confirms that in a group of national-level archers two holding tests went better after a period of work on those same movements, which is what any repeated exercise would be expected to produce. It does not measure accuracy, it does not measure score, it does not describe the training and it does not compare it with any alternative, so it does not say whether the wall squat and the plank do more for an archer than anything else.

In the registry the source counts as a note that Indonesian training centres use trunk and leg holding tests to monitor archers, and as an example of how fragile numbers become when the unit of measurement goes undeclared. The values reported, from 88 to 121 and from 3.9 to 8.8, cannot be compared with those of any other study.