Yoga programme for archers: Baishya 2025 study

The work has three parts: building a yoga programme designed for archers, having it judged by experts, and trying it for two weeks with 14 archers from the team of the Indian state of Assam who were preparing for the National Games. The first version had 43 exercises; 40 experts in yoga, physiotherapy, sport psychology and physical education rated each one as essential, useful or unnecessary, and 32 were kept. Ten were dropped as not essential enough, and the OM meditation because, in the experts' view, it lengthened the programme and gave it a religious slant.

In the trial all 14 archers invited agreed to take part and 13 finished, with no problems reported. After six sessions, reaction times on the Stroop test fell by roughly 10 to 13% (for instance from 1163 to 1019 milliseconds in the hardest condition), total errors from 11.77 to 3.15, somatic anxiety from 17.8 to 15.6 and cognitive anxiety from 19.08 to 14.77, while self-confidence rose from 28.46 to 32. Time balancing on one leg increased by about six seconds on each side. Twelve of the 13 archers said they were satisfied and intended to carry on.

The programme was put together by three experts from four classical hatha yoga texts, two modern texts and the research literature, with input from a yoga teacher, a sport psychologist and an archery coach. It includes mobility exercises, breathing, sun salutation, postures, pranayama, cleansing techniques (kriya), relaxation and meditation, and takes about an hour. The module was sent to 88 experts; 47 replied and 40 ratings were kept, analysed with Lawshe's content validity ratio: an exercise stayed if it scored at least 0.29.

The archers, seven women and seven men, were on average 26 years old with 12 years of shooting; five were international and nine national level, shooting recurve and compound. They did six sessions, three a week from 7 to 8 in the morning, with a certified instructor. Before and after, an independent assessor measured attention and interference control with a computerised Stroop test, competitive anxiety with the CSAI-2R questionnaire and static balance with the stork test.

The trial is a pilot study without a control group, on 13 people over two weeks: its stated aim was to see whether the programme could be delivered, not how well it works. Much of the improvement on the Stroop test may come simply from repeating the same test a fortnight later, and the paper does not say whether anxiety was measured ahead of a specific competition, so it can shift just with the stage of preparation. Shooting score was not measured, even though the module was built for a larger project that includes it.

The expert validation shows that the programme matches what yoga experts consider useful, not that each exercise does something for an archer. The authors themselves list the low response from experts, the length of the module and the small sample as limitations. In the results table the drop in errors is given as 7.3%, whereas going from 11.77 to 3.15 is about 73%.

For an archer, the study mainly offers a programme described in detail, with exercises, repetitions and timings, which national and international archers followed for two weeks without difficulty or problems. That it improves shooting has not been shown: the changes in attention, anxiety and balance were measured without a comparison group, and score was not measured at all. Anyone who already does yoga, or is thinking of adding it to their preparation, will find a reasoned list to start from; anyone looking for evidence that yoga improves shooting will not find it here, nor in the same authors' later randomised trial, also in the registry, which measured attention on a computer task after eight weeks of yoga but not scores.