Kinesio taping in young archers: Mülazımoğlu 2018

Eight young Turkish recurve archers (3 girls and 5 boys, mean age 15.63, mean experience 1.75 years) trained for four weeks with kinesio tape on the shoulder, applied before every session. Their score over 30 arrows at 18 metres went from a mean of 224.63 to 248.38 points out of a possible 300: a rise of 23.75 points, significant on a paired t-test (t = -4.07, p < 0.01), with a Cohen's d of 1.437. Scores before and after were closely correlated (r = 0.93): those who started higher stayed higher.

The authors attribute the rise to the tape and conclude that archers should use it in training.

The tape, a 5 cm strip of Kinesio Tex, was applied by an experienced physiatrist over the anterior and posterior deltoid using a Y technique, and over the acromioclavicular joint with an I strip stretched to 100% in the middle. The paper refers to the shoulder of the gripping arm, presumably the bow arm. The shooting test followed indoor rules: 10 ends of 3 arrows at 18 metres, 120 seconds per end, with each archer's own competition bow, supervised by a coach with experience as a national team athlete.

The first test was shot with the tape already on, after a warm-up. The archers then followed their usual training programme for four weeks, four days a week, always taped, and at the end repeated the same test. The comparison is a paired t-test, with Pearson correlation and Cohen's d. The study had been presented orally at a conference in 2016.

There is no control group, and that limitation settles everything. Young archers with under two years' experience on average improve over four weeks of training without any tape, and by the second test they already knew the procedure. Since the tape was on for both the first and the second test, the comparison does not even measure the effect of the tape on shooting: it measures four weeks of training done while taped.

Eight archers of different ages and experience (12 to 18 years old, 1 to 5 years of shooting), each with their own equipment, make it impossible to separate these factors. No measures of the shoulder, stability or strength were taken, so the proposed mechanism, better proprioception through stimulation of the skin, is not tested. The closing recommendation to use the tape goes beyond what the design can show. The journal has questionable editorial standards.

For an archer, the study does not show that kinesio tape on the shoulder raises the score. It shows that eight youngsters in their first years of shooting, training for a month, scored about twenty points more on average over 30 arrows at 18 metres, a plausible improvement for archers at that level even with nothing on their shoulder.

For an archer who likes the tape, this study gives no reason for or against it; a coach thinking of using it to improve accuracy will find no grounds for it here. Finding out whether the tape matters would take a comparison between taped and untaped archers, or a sham tape, with the same amount of training.