Fluid loss in an archery round: Arifin 2026 study

Eleven archers from the university archery club at Universitas Negeri Jakarta were weighed before and after an outdoor qualification session, on a single day. The drop in body mass was read as fluid loss, counting one kilogram as one thousand millilitres.

Every archer lost weight. The mean loss was 390.9 ml, with median and mode at 400 ml, a minimum of 200 and a maximum of 700; six of the eleven fell between 201 and 400 ml and only one reached 700. The paired t-test gives a value of 168.491, and the authors conclude that even one archery session causes noticeable fluid loss and that a hydration strategy is needed.

The design is a single-group pre-post study with no control. The eleven participants were chosen on inclusion criteria the paper does not list, from a club given as 16 members in the abstract and 20 in the methods. Body mass was measured on a Tanita digital scale immediately before and after a shooting session in qualification-round format. The paper does not report distance, number of arrows, duration, temperature, humidity or clothing, or whether the archers drank, ate or passed urine between the two weigh-ins. The participants' starting body mass is also missing, so the loss cannot be expressed as a percentage of body mass.

The change between two weigh-ins includes everything that goes into and out of the body: without knowing how much the archers drank and ate, or whether they went to the toilet, there is no way to say how much of the 390.9 ml was sweat. The session length and weather are also missing, which are exactly what the loss depends on, as is any measure of hydration status beyond body mass, such as urine colour or specific gravity.

The statistics are not plausible. With values between 200 and 700 ml the standard deviation cannot be 7.348 ml; with a spread consistent with those values the result would still be significant, but with a t an order of magnitude away from 168.491. The frequency table puts two archers in the 0 to 200 ml band, while the stated minimum is 200. Finally, the comparison only shows that body mass went down, which is expected after an outdoor session, and says nothing about shooting, since performance was not recorded.

The useful figure is the order of magnitude: after an outdoor qualification session in Jakarta these archers had lost about 400 grams on average, and one of them 700. For an adult of average build that is well under 2% of body mass, the threshold the hydration studies cited by the authors link to a drop in performance; but that is our own estimate, since starting body mass is not reported.

The study does not show that the loss changed anyone's shooting, because scores were not looked at. For archers who shoot for hours in the sun it confirms something intuitive, that even a sport with low physical demands makes you sweat; whether and how much dehydration affects accuracy is a question for the studies in the registry that measured it directly.