Fitness tests and recurve score: Rusdiawan 2024

Eighteen young recurve archers from the East Java and West Java training centres, aged 13 and 14 and with about seven years of practice behind them, went through a battery of physical tests and then a qualification round of 72 arrows at 70 metres, which they finished with a mean of 619.61 points and a standard deviation of 22.22.

Of all the tests, only two move with the score: the finger-draw hold on the right, with a Spearman's rho of 0.748, and the same on the left, with 0.632. A third test, holding the shooting position without drawing, stays just outside the threshold (0.445, p = 0.064).

Nothing else is related. Incline sit-ups give 0.044, the forearm plank 0.053, single-leg balance -0.084 on the right and 0.174 on the left, the prone hold with arms and legs raised -0.150, and the shuttle run converted into maximal oxygen uptake 0.281.

The group's mean values: 24.22 sit-ups, 105.44 seconds of plank, 84 and 84.67 seconds of balance on the right and left leg, 53.28 seconds of prone hold, 15.47 kilograms of arm strength measured at full draw with a bow scale, 85.17 seconds of draw hold on the right and 77.22 on the left, and 27.4 millilitres per kilogram per minute of maximal oxygen uptake.

On these data the authors then built a classification: the silhouette method indicates six groups, and a k-means algorithm distributes the eighteen athletes among them, with eight in one and a single athlete alone in another. Their reading is that every group lacks a balance between the muscles that hold the posture and those that hold the bow, and that only three athletes out of eighteen are balanced.

One point needs clearing up first, because it changes the meaning of the main finding. The pinch grip in this study is not a force. The text presents it as the isometric peak strength of the hand and forearm, but the procedure described is something else: the athlete draws the bow with a finger draw and holds the correct starting position, and the result is recorded in seconds. In the same way, the standing archery hold is a time. The two tests that turn out to be linked to the score are therefore hold times in the shooting position, not dynamometer readings, and should be read that way in any comparison with other work.

The other tests: incline sit-ups, counted over 30 seconds; a plank on the forearms and toes, held until the back gives; a prone hold with arms and legs raised together; single-leg balance, timed until the raised foot touches the ground; a 20-metre shuttle run, converted into maximal oxygen uptake. Arm strength was measured with an Easton digital bow scale while the athlete drew the string to the maximum, and is given in kilograms.

Performance is the recurve individual qualification system, that is, 72 arrows at 70 metres.

The analysis begins by standardising the data, chooses the number of groups with the silhouette method, applies a k-means algorithm in R using Euclidean distance, and adds a Spearman correlation between each test and the score, with a threshold of 0.05.

Eighteen archers, nine tests and one correlation each, with no correction for multiple comparisons: with numbers like these, one strong result is roughly what you would expect to find by chance, and the strongest, 0.748, rests on eighteen pairs of values.

The sample itself is inconsistent within the paper. The abstract and the tables speak of 18 athletes, the participants section describes 7 males and 6 females, which makes 13. The number of test items is given as nine in the abstract and ten in the instruments section, and the two balance variables are called Bosy Right and Bosy Left in one table and Standing Balance Right and Left in another.

In the table of standardised data, the right balance value, 0.43408, repeats for fourteen athletes out of eighteen, and the left value, 0.32972, for thirteen: the raw times were almost identical, so those two variables could not correlate with anything, and their null result says nothing about balance.

The archers are 13 and 14 years old with a declared mean of about seven years of practice, which means starting at six or seven, and the text does not discuss it. There is no limitations section.

The clustering is descriptive and stays disconnected from the score: no group is compared against shooting results. The reading that the clusters show an imbalance between postural muscles and bow-holding muscles is the authors' interpretation of their own test battery, not a measurement; and the abstract and the conclusion disagree with each other, since the first writes that trunk and lower limbs receive less attention and the second that the training concentrates on arms and trunk.

The qualification round was shot once, so the score carries that day's wind and that day's form with it.

There is one measurable thing to take from this study: among these young archers, those who could hold the draw on their fingers for longer were also the ones who scored more at 70 metres. That is a hold time in the shooting position, not hand strength read off a dynamometer, and the difference matters because the two numbers are often confused when studies are compared.

Everything else, sit-ups, plank, prone hold, single-leg balance and the shuttle run, was unrelated to the score. That does not say those qualities are of no use: it says that, among eighteen thirteen-year-olds who all train at a national centre, the differences between them on those tests did not line up with the differences in their scores. A homogeneous group leaves little distance to measure, and that is one reason links are found or not found.

The six clusters serve to describe the test battery, not to judge anyone's training: no cluster was compared against competition results.

The most interesting question stays open, and the study does not address it: whether holding longer comes before shooting better or after it. Nobody was followed over time.