Phased distance training for archers: Dwijawanti 2024

Ten archers from an Indonesian shooting school, chosen because their level was similar, did twelve sessions in which the target distance changed from one session to the next. On the 30 metre test, eighteen arrows in six ends of three, the mean went from 97.4 to 147.6 points, a mean gain of 50.2 points (t = -20.89 on 9 degrees of freedom, p below 0.001). The lowest of the group went from 90 to 137 points, the highest from 115 to 163, and the spread stayed much the same, with the standard deviation moving from 7.4 to 9.0. There was no comparison group: everyone followed the same programme and the only comparison is before against after.

The gain is large for four weeks and has to be read together with the starting point. The authors write that in the test each arrow is worth 10 points at most and 5 at least, and the lowest starting score is exactly 90, that is eighteen arrows scoring 5. The group therefore started just above the bottom of the scale, with a mean of 5.4 points per arrow, and finished at 8.2: the first test said little more than that the arrows stayed on the target face, and the improvement is that of archers learning to hold a group at 30 metres, not that of formed archers gaining points.

The study is what the authors call pre-experimental, with a single group measured before and after. The ten athletes come from the Dega Archery School in Palembang and were chosen with a uniform level of ability in mind. The programme is twelve sessions, three a week, described as a maximum load at full intensity. The planned progression is to shoot the first session at 10 metres, the second at 20, the third at 30, then to go back to 10 and start the cycle again, so as to repeat the technique at each distance.

Here the paper contradicts itself: the results section says instead that from the fourth meeting the distance was fixed at 30 metres until the twelfth, and the discussion speaks of four sessions a week and of fourteen meetings counting the two tests. The first and last tests were shot in the same way, three arrows over six ends at 30 metres, and the comparison is a paired t test in SPSS 23. The paper does not give the athletes' age and sex, the discipline and the equipment, how many arrows were shot per session and how long it lasted, who recorded the scores, or whether the shooting was indoors or outdoors and in what wind.

With no comparison group, four weeks of any organised training, plus the familiarity that comes from shooting the same test a second time, cannot be separated from the effect of the graded distances. The group is ten athletes from a single school, there was no randomisation because there was nothing to randomise, nobody was blinded and nobody was followed after the programme ended. The starting point near the bottom of the scale also inflates any improvement: an archer starting from 5.4 points per arrow has a great deal of room above and almost none below.

There are printing errors that matter. The post-test mean is written as 1.476 in the table instead of 147.6, and the mean difference as -5.020 instead of -50.2, while the confidence interval and the t value on the same line correspond to -50.2. The third table, presented as a frequency distribution of the scores, cannot be read: it totals 140 observations spread over nine intervals, when ten athletes measured twice give twenty scores, and the classes do not match the data in the other tables. The authors themselves, in closing, ask for larger samples and tighter controls. The journal is a regional university periodical.

Raising the distance session by session and then starting again from close in is common practice on the field, and this study does not test it against anything else: it describes it in a group of ten people and measures how much they improved in a month. For an archer who already holds a group in the high rings at 30 metres it says nothing, because these archers started barely inside the target.

Its value is that of a description: in the first month of structured work at a shooting school, scores at 30 metres rose a long way, and rose for all ten archers. How much of that jump comes from the order of the distances, how much from the extra sessions and how much from having already seen the test, the study does not separate, and fifty points of gain is not a figure to carry elsewhere. Anyone planning a progression of distances can take it as a precedent that does not contradict common practice, rather than as a reason to choose one progression over another.