Yoga and attention in archers: Baishya 2025 study

Ninety-two Indian archers aged 12 to 20, who competed at state level and had been shooting for at least two years, were randomly allocated to two groups: one added eight weeks of yoga to their usual training, three 60-minute sessions a week, while the other carried on training as normal on a waiting list. At the start and at the end everyone took the Attention Network Test, a computer task that separates three components of attention: alerting, orienting towards where the stimulus will appear, and conflict control, the ability not to be pulled along by stimuli pointing the opposite way.

The analysis covered 43 archers in the yoga group and 39 controls. Compared with the controls, the orienting index in the yoga group rose by a further 18.68 ms (partial eta squared 0.261) and conflict interference fell by a further 36.72 ms (0.505): it went from 124.78 to 85.23 ms in the yoga group and from 110.4 to 107.57 in the controls. Alerting did not change differently between the groups (0.01). Overall accuracy also improved, from 0.964 to 0.977 against 0.964 and 0.965, as did reaction times with every type of cue and with incongruent arrows; with congruent and neutral arrows the difference between groups was not significant.

It is a parallel-group randomised trial: allocation was carried out by an outside statistician, in blocks stratified by sex and years of experience (2 to 4, or more than 4), and the assessors did not know which group each archer was in. Of 112 archers screened, 92 entered; nine dropped out (2 in the yoga group, 7 controls) and one was excluded for getting more than 15% of responses incorrect. Mean age was about 15 and mean experience three and a third years, with no baseline differences between groups. The yoga programme, previously validated for archery, included loosening exercises, breathing, sun salutation, nine postures, two pranayamas, two kriyas, relaxation and one meditation; among the concentration practices was trataka, steady gazing, done on an archery target face.

The test, in the PEBL software version, takes about 15 minutes: on each trial a cue appears, or none does, followed by a row of arrows, and the participant presses a key for the direction of the central arrow. Each archer repeated the test on the same laptop. The analysis is per protocol, covering only those who completed, with no correction for multiple comparisons.

The control group did nothing in place of the yoga: three extra hours a week in a group with instructors can change motivation and attention whatever the yoga itself does, and the authors acknowledge this. The archers also knew which group they were in. The test is a laboratory task with responses lasting a fraction of a second, and the step from what it measures to aiming at a target was not examined, because shooting scores were not recorded.

Two details call for caution. At baseline the yoga group had higher conflict interference than the controls (124.78 against 110.4 ms) and lower orienting (32.85 against 37.63), so part of the improvement may be regression towards the mean. There are also many uncorrected comparisons, although the two main effects are large enough to hold up. There is no follow-up, so how long the effect lasts is unknown. The abstract mentions 83 archers completing, the tables 82.

The study shows that eight weeks of yoga in young state-level archers are followed by faster, less disrupted responses on a computer attention task, compared with archers who kept to their usual training. It does not say whether these archers then shot better, because scores were not recorded, nor whether yoga does better than another group activity of the same length.

The authors suggest bringing postures, breathing and trataka into archers' routines, including between ends in competition; these are their own proposals, which the trial did not test. In the registry the study is one of the few randomised trials of a mental intervention in young archers, with a cognitive outcome rather than a shooting one.