Renegade row and strength in archers: Windasari 2021

Ten novice girls at an archery club in Jambi, Sumatra, did 18 sessions of renegade rows, three a week, and before and after took an arm strength test on a push and pull dynamometer. The mean rose from 38.5 to 43.9 points (from 28 to 50 before, 32 to 53 after), with a t of 6 against a critical value of 1.833. On the norm table used, 4 girls were in the middle band and 6 in the low band before the programme; afterwards one was in the high band, 7 in the middle and 2 in the low.

The author adds that when shooting their own bows the girls' arms shook less. That is her observation, not a measurement.

The design is a single group tested before and after, with no control group. The renegade row, as usually understood, is a dumbbell row performed from a push-up position; the paper speaks of an exercise with a barbell and also describes it as a hold of 30 seconds to a minute, like a plank, and reports no load, sets, repetitions or session length. It says only that the author lengthened the times session by session, starting from what each girl could manage, and that each session ended with 10 minutes of stretching.

Strength was measured with a push and pull dynamometer, which the paper does not describe; the result is in points, compared with a norm table for women. The final test was done the day after the last session. The analysis is a paired t test with 9 degrees of freedom.

Without a control group the effect of the exercise cannot be separated from that of shooting itself: the girls were beginners who kept training at the club during the six weeks, and drawing a bow is strength work for the arms in its own right. On top of that comes familiarity with the test, which on its own tends to produce better numbers the second time.

The paper also contains transcription errors that affect the result itself: the text gives the difference between the means as 2.8 points rather than 5.4, and the conclusion reports a final mean of 34.9 rather than 43.9. A t of 6 is compatible with the means and standard deviations in the table, but individual data are not reported. The reference list is largely unrelated to the topic (football, public health, urban heat islands) and includes papers from 2022, 2023 and 2025, later than this 2021 issue, which suggests it belongs to another document. There is no measure of shooting.

That ten beginners push and pull a little harder on a dynamometer after six weeks of an arm strength exercise plus normal club training is the result one would expect, and the study cannot credit it to the renegade row rather than to everything else. It does not measure score, aiming stability or holding at full draw, so it says nothing about how they shoot. With the programme described so sketchily, it cannot even be reproduced.