What matters for archers in competition: Kim 2015

The study does not measure archers: it asks Korean experts which factors matter most for competitive performance, and by how much. In three rounds of questionnaires (the Delphi method), 20 experts with more than 15 years' experience, among them professors and coaches of the national and professional teams, started from 27 items split between fitness, skill and mental factors and kept 17. Responses from 463 Korean archers on these items were used to check, with confirmatory factor analysis, that the three areas held up as separate groups; 11 items survived. Finally, 36 experts compared the items in pairs (the AHP method) to give each a weight; 28 questionnaires were used and 8 discarded as inconsistent.

The mental area received the largest weight (0.479), followed by skill (0.344) and fitness (0.177). Among individual items, self-confidence alone accounts for 0.221 of the total; next, almost level, come keeping the shoulders balanced while extending through the aim (0.113) and shooting with a consistent clicker time (0.112), then concentration on the match (0.106). In the fitness area the heaviest item is drawing the bow without an arrow (0.080), fifth overall, ahead of weight training for the legs and for the upper body.

The work ran from June to October 2013. In the Delphi rounds, items were first gathered through open questions, then rated as important or not, dropping those rejected by half or more of the experts (balance with eyes closed, holding the position after the shot, self-talk before shooting), and finally scored from 1 to 7; items with a mean below 5 or a content validity ratio below 0.42 were excluded, among them long-distance running, full anchoring and a consistent foot position. The archers in the factor analysis, 220 men and 243 women, were 169 middle-school pupils, 119 high-school pupils and 175 adults, with on average 3.7, 6.8 and 14.3 years of shooting, approached at three national competitions; items loading below 0.50 were removed, and the final model has a goodness-of-fit index of 0.94 and an RMSEA of 0.08. In the AHP only questionnaires with an inconsistency index below 0.10 were kept, and the weights were calculated with the Expert Choice software.

The weights are expert opinions, not measured effects on scores: no item was related to the archers' results, and the authors themselves write that the conclusions should not be taken as absolute. That the mental area carries almost half the total tells us what top Korean coaches think, and they explain it themselves: an archer with more than five years of shooting already has the fitness and skill to compete, so it is the mind that makes the difference. For someone still building their shot, nothing says the order would be the same.

The items differ in kind between areas: for fitness the experts weighed training methods, for skill abilities, for the mental area psychological qualities, and the comparison between areas puts them on the same footing. It is unclear exactly what the 463 archers filled in. In the final table the weights for upper-body (0.053) and lower-body (0.044) weight training appear to be swapped: multiplying the within-area weights by the fitness weight gives 0.044 for the upper body and 0.053 for the legs, which also matches the order of the rankings. Finally, for the adults the stated age range (19-22) is incompatible with the mean of 25.4 years.

The study is a snapshot of how the Korean school weighed the ingredients of performance in 2013, which makes it of interest outside Korea too. Two things stand out. The first is the place of self-confidence, which for those experts outweighs any single technical or physical item. The second is the weight given to drawing the bow without an arrow, an exercise on which Korean archers spend a great deal of time: the experts see it as the most useful physical work because it tests exactly the extension and the shoulders' hold, but the authors point out that no research supports it.

For an archer or a coach these are the priorities that top-level coaches set for the athletes they train, not a measure of what raises scores. The authors also acknowledge that in Korea at the time only a minority of archers, in practice the national team and a few other squads, had access to structured psychological work, despite the weight the experts gave to the mental side.