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Do archery athletes' hand dexterity, strength, and cognition exceed those of age-matched athletes and non-athletes? A
Xinpeng Gao1, Fuxin Hong2, Jinlong Hou1
1School of Physical Education, Yulin University, Yulin, China.
Purpose:
Sport-specific training may reshape athletes' executive function and manual fine-motor control in a discipline-specific manner, affecting the efficiency of sensorimotor-cognitive coupling. Open-skill and closed-skill sports differ in environmental uncertainty and movement stability demands, but direct comparisons of hand dexterity, inhibitory control, and their interrelations across these sport types are limited.
Methods:
In this cross-sectional observational study, 114 participants (17 females, 97 males; mean age 20.07 ± 1.64 years) were recruited into three groups: Basketball athletes (BA), Archery athletes (AA), and Sedentary controls (SC). Under a unified testing protocol, participants completed the Purdue Pegboard Test (PPT), Grooved Pegboard Test (GPT), Handgrip strength assessment, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), and the Stroop Color-Word (SCW) Test to evaluate unilateral and bilateral fine manual dexterity, hand strength, global cognition, and inhibitory control.
Results:
AA outperformed both BA and SC on fine-motor tasks (PPT and GPT; all p < 0.05; d = 0.76-0.96 vs. SC). BA showed significantly greater grip strength and higher MoCA total scores than AA and SC (all p < 0.05; grip strength d = 0.95 and MoCA d = 0.83 vs. SC). Both athletic groups exceeded SC on PPT, GPT, and grip strength measures (all p < 0.05). On Stroop measures, BA showed higher word-reading completion than SC and AA, whereas AA scored lower than both SC and BA under the color-naming and color-word interference conditions (all p < 0.05); error counts did not differ between groups.
Conclusion:
Findings indicate sport-specific adaptations: archery training is associated with superior fine motor control and movement stability, whereas basketball training is linked to enhanced neuromuscular strength and higher global cognitive screening scores (MoCA), together with better performance on a Stroop interference task. These specialization effects suggest that inter-sport assessments and training programs should account for discipline characteristics and integrate targeted strength and cognitive training to promote more balanced athlete development. Given the cross-sectional design, these associations cannot establish causality, as self-selection into specific sports cannot be distinguished from training-induced adaptation; the sex-imbalanced sample (97 males, 17 females) further limits generalizability. Longitudinal or intervention studies are warranted.
