Balance and training in shooting: Zemkova 2023

An exploratory review of a question archery shares with many other sports: does the specific training of a discipline improve balance, and does that improvement show up in results? The authors, two Slovak researchers, gathered 126 articles and found that only 14 had related a measure of balance to a measure of sporting performance. Where that relation does exist, it appears in seven sports: shooting, archery, golf, baseball, ice hockey, tennis and snowboarding.

The archery section gathers ten papers. From them the review reports that maximum sway speed, draw force and clicker reaction time are important factors in elite recurve archers; that postural sway during shooting is smaller in elite archers than in mid-level archers and beginners; that the ability to control the bow and body sway together is better in medallists; and that among archers of the same level the precision with which the positions of head, elbow and bow are repeated varies a good deal, so much so that postural consistency does not appear to be the trait that separates the best. Two results pull away from the idea of immobility: in six elite archers the better shots were those in which joint variability was exploited to hold the orientation of the arrow steady, and in another study archers resisted a visual disturbance better than others, a sign that they lean more on proprioception than on vision to stay upright. The oldest paper, on Austrian archers in 1986, finds a correlation between score and the excursion of the centre of pressure in the second before release: minus 0.30 across the whole group, minus 0.51 in the juniors, minus 0.24 and not statistical in the more experienced seniors.

The authors' conclusion is negative in a precise way: how much a sport's own exercises contribute to the greater stability of its athletes remains unknown, because the improvement can be ascribed just as well to general body conditioning, and the experiments that would separate the two have not been done.

The search was run on Scopus, Web of Science, MEDLINE and the Cochrane Library, completed with Elsevier, SpringerLink and Google Scholar, with no date limits, with the keywords combined sport by sport (balance exercises, sport-specific exercise, postural control, performance measures, neurophysiological adaptations, sensorimotor functions, and others). Only original research published in peer-reviewed journals was kept, English preferred, and books, theses, case reports, abstracts and conference proceedings were excluded. The reference lists of the reviews found were searched by hand for further work, and between two publications on the same data the more recent was kept.

The databases returned 193 articles; after screening, 126 remained, spread over some twenty sports, from gymnastics to football to slacklining. The initial inclusion criteria were three and strict: that the training included balance exercises specific to the sport, that postural variables were related to performance measures, and that the adaptations induced by sport-specific training were analysed. Since this left very few studies, the authors widened the search to include studies of adaptations produced by general body conditioning, and use that difference as a measure of the gap.

Screening and appraisal were carried out by the two authors together. There is no quantitative analysis, no effect size calculation and no formal risk-of-bias assessment: this is a scoping review, which recounts the results sport by sport and summarises them in a table with population, postural variables, performance measures and findings. The authors state as reservations the representativeness of the samples, the missing information on the balance exercises included in the programmes, the imprecise description of the variables and the uncontrolled compliance with training.

The review answers a question by saying that the answer is not there. None of the 126 articles trained one group with sport-specific exercises and another with general ones and then compared performance and balance: until that is done, any gain in stability observed in the athletes of a discipline may come from the discipline, from general conditioning, or from the selection of those who reach that level.

Archery takes up one section and one table row here, and the ten papers cited are not summarised in numbers: only two of them have a table entry with coefficients and samples, the rest appear as one sentence each. Anyone wanting the details has to go to the originals, where the samples are small and the designs almost always cross-sectional. The studies gathered are for the most part comparisons between athletes of different sports and levels, not experiments: they say who sways less, not what makes anyone steadier.

Being a scoping review, there is no appraisal of the quality of the individual studies and no quantitative synthesis, and the selection of articles was made by the two authors without a third person to settle differences. The search favoured English, and the weight given to the authors' own earlier output is noticeable: several passages rest on work by the first author. Finally, a note on transfer: that balance is measured on the same plate in an archer and in a gymnast does not make the two results comparable, and the authors themselves recall that postural adaptations are specific to the context in which the activity is practised and transfer poorly to new tasks.

For someone who shoots, this review is useful for knowing what has not been measured. The archer's balance has been described many times, and with some agreement: those who shoot better sway less in the second before release, and elite archers sway less than beginners. But the next link, that a balance programme raises the score, has not been shown in any of the 126 papers gathered, in any sport.

There is also a result that cuts a commonplace down to size. Among archers of the same level, the precision with which the positions of head, elbow and bow are repeated varies a good deal, and postural consistency does not separate the best; in six elite archers the more accurate shots were not the ones with less movement, but the ones in which the movements of the joints compensated each other and held the orientation of the arrow steady. Anyone who has shot for years recognises the difference between being rigid and being stable, and here the literature points the same way.

The last pointer concerns the senses. In one of the studies cited, archers withstood a visual disturbance better than team-sport players and than untrained people, and the authors read this as a shift of weight from vision to proprioception. It is an observation on different groups, not a measurement of training, and the registry keeps it as context: not as a method for training balance.