VO2max to select archers: Putra 2026 study

Twenty-one students at a secondary school in Bali who do archery as an extracurricular activity performed the 20-metre shuttle run test, from which maximal oxygen uptake is estimated. The mean is 27.84 ml per kg per minute, with a standard deviation of 4.45, a minimum of 22.93 and a maximum of 38.84. Comparing the values against a reference table for ages 15 to 17, the results table places 11 of the 21 students, 52.4 per cent, in the middle band, 6 in the lowest, 3 in the good band and 1 in the highest. The boys averaged 29.9 and the girls 25.1.

From this comes the authors' proposal, which belongs to sports management rather than physiology: use the figure as a stated criterion for picking the team, for differentiating training loads and for following each athlete over time, so that the coach's choice can be checked by the school and the families. No shooting measurement was collected and no relationship between aerobic capacity and performance was calculated: the part of the article that credits oxygen uptake with heart rate control, sustained concentration and shot stability is a review of claims taken from other papers, not a result of these data.

A quantitative descriptive study of 21 student archers, 12 male and 9 female, tested on the school field. The instrument is the Multistage Fitness Test, the 20-metre shuttle run paced by an audio signal: it does not measure oxygen uptake, it estimates it from the level reached. The values were converted into ml per kg per minute and described with the mean, standard deviation, minimum, maximum and distribution across bands.

The band table separates males and females with four thresholds: for males above 36 the highest band, 32 to 35.9 the good band, 28 to 31.9 the middle band and below 28 the lowest; for females the same bands start at 32, 28 and 24 respectively. The article does not say where these thresholds come from, does not give the equation used to derive oxygen uptake from the test, does not report the protocol followed or the testing conditions, and does not provide the individual measurements, although it announces them.

The study measures one thing, indirectly, in 21 students at a single school, and it does not measure shooting. There is no score, no competition and no comparison over time, so the conclusion that aerobic capacity plays a part in an archer's performance does not rest on these data; neither does the proposal to use it for selection, which is a management idea presented as though it were a finding.

The presentation of the numbers is inconsistent. The band table assigns 1 student to the highest band and 6 to the lowest; a few lines later the text puts 2 in the highest and 5 in the lowest. The methods announce five bands and the table has four. The difference between boys and girls is called significant, yet no statistical test was run: the study is avowedly descriptive. Two whole paragraphs of the discussion are repeated verbatim and one opens with a word left over from an article about futsal. One individual student is named.

With a mean estimated uptake of 27.8 ml per kg per minute the values are low for active adolescents, but the material needed to interpret them is missing: no weight or height data, no information about these students beyond their school age, no reference to training volume.

For an archer the answer is short: these data say nothing about what it takes to shoot well. They say that in a group of twenty-one students who do archery at school the shuttle run returns modest values, and that the authors propose taking those values into account when picking the team.

The proposal is worth looking at for what it is. Taking a measure of aerobic capacity and using it as a criterion for team selection means deciding access to a precision discipline on a quality whose link with shooting, in this paper, was not measured. In the registry the study stays on as an example of that practice, and as raw data on the shuttle run in young school archers, not as evidence that aerobic training moves a score.