So just to give a bit of context, I went out for drinks last night with a friend of mine who tried outdoor target shooting for the first time. He said he really enjoyed it and as we started discussing this topic. I regurgitated something I had heard, at some point, from someone (I know, I sound like someone that knowingly spreads Facebook disinformation) about how if archery is practiced from a young age before the archers growth plates are fused, it can add a few inches of height. My friend shot me a pretty incredulous look, and I realized that I might have just spewed some particularly hot BS.
So this morning, I started furiously googling what effect regular archery practice might have on height. Not only did I not find any information positively affirming what I'd said, I couldn't find any information debunking it either. There were plenty of articles on the health benefits of archery, what muscle groups to strengthen and what exercises to do, but nothing on archery and height. At this point I'm thinking that what I said was so astoundingly stupid that no one would even believe it as a misconception. I then started wondering if it was just a case of height potentially providing some sort of competitive advantage, and archers on average being tall, so I started trying to do some research on the reverse: does being tall or short give you an advantage in archery?
I found the Wikipedia article on Height in Sport. Now it's not the best article. It's riddled with [citation needed]'s, anecdotal examples and some questionable sources. But while it has at least brief entries on a lot of sports that aren't exactly what I'd call part of the mass public consciousness (like sumo and fencing) there's no entry on archery.
I then moved on to trying to find studies, papers, articles, anything about the long term physiological effects of archery if any. There seems to be absolutely nothing on the topic, except for this nerdist article containing a YouTube video from an archery YouTuber showing his body (questionably NSFW, guy shirtless from the waist up))
So then I started to try to find heights of Olympic or other professional archers to see if there's at least a least an anecdotal relationship you could infer. This is actually pretty easy for a lot of sports. For example, Wikipedia has an article on Men's Water Polo at the 2016 Summer Olympics that lists every team's roster and includes their height and weight. Not exactly enough data to get a paper past peer review here, but some tenuous conclusions can at least be drawn. I then tried checking out the article on Archery at the 2016 Summer Olympics – Men's individual. No listing of height or weight for any of the participants in the article, and only a few of them have a height and weight listed on their individual pages.
So now this is something that's probably gonna keep me up at night. The way I see it there are 3 sane possibilities:
- I'm actually really bad at googling and doing journal research, and there's something obvious i missed
- Archery has absolutely no or negligible long term effect on physiology, bone structure, etc that's worth writing a paper about. The reverse is also true, height and weight are totally and completely irrelevant to archery, and as such no one has really bothered going through the effort to compile a study
- There is a massive hole in sport physiology research with regards to archery, and for some reason no one has bothered to do research even though there are some potentially interesting findings.
So, does anyone have any resources, both formal and anecdotal, about how archery affects someones body long term, if it all? I'd also be interested to hear some speculation about the mechanics of archery are affected by height, weight, limb proportions, etc from you guys.
Edit: Fixed formatting
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