Anxiety and heart rate in elite archers: Aksuy 2025

Eighteen archers from the Turkish Olympic preparation centre, 11 men and 7 women aged 18.44 ± 1.38, were measured twice: before a training session at the centre and half an hour before competing at the 2024 national indoor championships. Each time, five minutes of heart rate variability recording seated and at rest, followed by the CSAI-2 questionnaire on state anxiety.

Between training and competition three values change, and they are three ways of saying the same thing. Heart rate goes from 67.72 ± 8.98 to 75.77 ± 9.97 beats per minute (p = 0.008), the minimum from 58.11 ± 7.95 to 67.77 ± 6.37 (p = 0.001) and the interval between beats from 902.33 ± 132.51 to 775.33 ± 190.78 milliseconds (p = 0.011). The heart, already before the first arrow, beats eight times more per minute.

No variability index changes significantly: RMSSD 82.83 against 69.55 (p = 0.539), SDNN 75.60 against 67.52 (p = 0.621), pNN50 37.84 against 28.43 (p = 0.195), the low-to-high frequency ratio 2.35 against 1.65 (p = 0.629), parasympathetic index 2.17 against 0.24 (p = 0.168), sympathetic index −0.04 against 0.55 (p = 0.169), stress index 7.31 against 9.08 (p = 0.191). The means all move in the expected direction, none crosses the threshold.

Reported anxiety does not move at all: cognitive anxiety 19.22 against 19.27 (p = 0.927), somatic anxiety 16.55 against 16.27 (p = 0.367), self-confidence 27.55 against 26.77 (p = 0.090). It is the study's clearest result, and it runs opposite to what the title would lead one to expect.

Between the cardiac parameters and the questionnaire's three scales, of the 66 correlations calculated exactly one comes out significant: before the competition, the low-to-high frequency ratio is associated with somatic anxiety at r = 0.536 and p = 0.022. Before training no correlation crosses the threshold, and the largest is r = −0.359.

The participants are athletes active at the Olympic preparation centre in Antalya. Entry required at least five years of practice, at least five training days a week, no cardiac or respiratory illness, no injury in the past year, no medication for psychological treatment and no smoking or alcohol. Before the measurements they were asked not to take sympathomimetic substances, for instance caffeine or pseudoephedrine. The sample started shooting at 9.94 ± 2.50 years on average and trains 5.89 ± 0.46 days a week; height 174.67 ± 8.96 cm, weight 68.72 ± 8.06 kg. Ethical approval is from Karamanoğlu Mehmetbey University.

Collection runs in three steps. First a meeting with athletes and technical staff to explain the procedure. Then, at the centre, the measurement before training: Polar H10 chest strap, five minutes seated on a chair, at complete rest, in a soundproofed room at 24 degrees. Finally, on the day of the 2024 national indoor championships at the Antalya sports hall, the same measurement half an hour before competing, with the same instructions. The interval between the two measurements is stated to be the same for all participants.

The strap's data were transferred by Bluetooth to the Elite HRV programme and analysed with Kubios HRV. The variables considered are, in the time domain, mean heart rate, SDNN, RMSSD and pNN50; in the frequency domain, low frequency, high frequency and their ratio; plus three indices computed by Kubios, parasympathetic, sympathetic and stress. Alongside these, the table reports the interval between beats, the minimum heart rate and the maximum.

Anxiety is measured with Martens's CSAI-2, in Koruç's Turkish adaptation: 27 items on a four-point Likert scale and three subscales, cognitive anxiety, somatic anxiety and self-confidence, where higher scores indicate more anxiety or more confidence. In this sample internal consistency is alpha 0.71 for cognitive anxiety, 0.70 for somatic and 0.89 for confidence.

The analysis is in SPSS 21: Shapiro-Wilk for normality, Pearson correlations between the cardiac parameters and the subscales, paired-sample t-tests between the two conditions, threshold at 0.05. No shooting scores were collected.

The result carried in the abstract, the correlation between the frequency ratio and somatic anxiety before competition, is one out of 66. The tables compute eleven cardiac parameters by three subscales in two conditions, with no correction for multiple comparisons: with the threshold at 5% about three significant results are expected by chance, and one came out, at p = 0.022. That is not a reason to discard it, but a reason not to build on it: it is exactly the kind of result a second round of data collection often fails to find again.

The low-to-high frequency ratio is a fragile index in itself, and here it is visibly so. Before training its mean is 2.35 with a standard deviation of 5.44: for a quantity that cannot fall below zero, a deviation more than twice the mean indicates a strongly skewed distribution, with some extreme values. The same holds for the parasympathetic index, 2.17 ± 5.20. A Pearson correlation on variables like these moves a good deal if a single participant shifts, and with 18 people that takes little. The authors write that Shapiro-Wilk confirmed normality; on these two parameters that is hard to credit.

The three significant differences are one. The mean interval between beats is the inverse of the mean heart rate, and the minimum rate is the same measurement read at another point of the distribution: saying that three parameters out of eleven changed makes the result look broader than it is. The result is one: the heart beats faster. None of the indices describing variability, that is the ones that would be needed to distinguish sympathetic activation from parasympathetic withdrawal, reached the threshold. With 18 participants and standard deviations of that order the power is low, so those null results do not settle the question, but nor do they open it.

The two conditions do not differ in competition alone. One measurement is in a soundproofed room at 24 degrees at the training centre, the other in a sports hall on championship day. The place changes, as do the acoustic and thermal environment, the travel, the state of warm-up and, probably, the time of day. The authors state that the instructions and the interval between measurements were identical, not the conditions.

The authors' conclusion, that there is an interaction between physiological and psychological state before competition, is stronger than the data. In their own figures the two move independently: the heart rises by eight beats, reported anxiety stays identical to within a tenth of a point. What their design shows is a dissociation, not an interaction; the only link is the single correlation above. And there is no performance measure, so nothing can be said about how these archers shot.

The sample and the venue remain. Eighteen archers from a single centre, aged 18.4 on average: «elite» here means a national Olympic development squad, not senior international medallists. The discipline is not stated. The journal is a local publication, marked as regional in the register. In the text the Kubios version is given as 3.4 in one place and 4.1.2.1 in another, and the tables' legend defines both the frequency ratio and pNN50 the other way round.

The finding worth taking away is the dissociation between body and words. Half an hour before a national competition, these archers had their heart at 75.77 beats per minute against 67.72 on a training day, both measured seated and at rest; but on the questionnaire they reported the same anxiety, 19.27 against 19.22, and the same confidence. The body knew it was competition day, the self-rating did not. For anyone training with a log or a feelings scale, it is a useful reminder: asking yourself «how keyed up am I» is not a measure of arousal, and in this study's data the two do not go together.

The second point is that the eight extra beats are not a state of alarm. They are a resting rate that stays within normal values, in young people training six days a week with high resting variability (RMSSD around 70 to 80 milliseconds). Competition shifts the starting point, it does not upend it.

The third point is a caution about what circulates. The only link between heart and anxiety this study finds is a correlation between the frequency ratio and somatic anxiety, and it comes from one line out of 66 comparisons, on an index known to be unstable. Anyone using an app that shows a low-to-high frequency ratio and reads it as a «stress level» is reading far more than these data support. In these same archers, the stress index computed by the software does not separate competition from training.

Finally, nobody looked at the scores: there is nothing in this study linking the heart or anxiety to how the archers shot.