Mental strategies of Korean archers: Lee 2025 study

Sixty-five Korean archers from university and professional teams answered open-ended written questions about what they were doing and thinking when they put an arrow in the X ring. The answers were coded and counted, phase by phase, following the eight steps of the shot grouped into four moments. The sample is 55 per cent female, with a stated average of 327 points out of 360 at 70 metres and eight years of practice.

In the preparation phase, stance and nocking, the most frequent theme is confidence and a positive mindset (25 mentions out of 81, 30.9 per cent), followed by an absence of thoughts (17, 21 per cent), goals tied to execution such as attending to posture (15), goals tied to the outcome such as expecting the X (15), and finally mental regulation techniques such as visualisation and breathing (9).

In drawing and anchoring, technique dominates: balance between the two sides of the body, consistency, arm position and absence of shake together account for 87 mentions out of 157 (55.4 per cent). Then come external conditions, meaning quiet, good weather and no wind or light wind (55, 35 per cent), and attention, meaning ignoring the surroundings (15).

In aiming and release the most cited theme is wind management, and within it the most frequent single item is adjusting the strength of the shot (58 mentions out of 76); then natural posture and a relaxed body (56 out of 157, 35.7 per cent) and confidence in the outcome (25). After the shot almost everything is positive emotion, with relief in first place (74 mentions out of 100, 74 per cent), then self-affirmation (14) and tension management (12). Negative thoughts, anxiety and anger do not appear in the answers.

This is a qualitative study with frequency counts, not an experiment. Participants were found through direct acquaintance and snowballing across six university teams and twelve professional teams registered with the Korean Sport and Olympic Committee in 2023, with help from a former member of a professional team. Questionnaire packs were distributed to coaches and supervisors with a request to return only those from athletes who had already shot an X; one item asked them to confirm that experience.

The questionnaire is open-ended and asks, for each of the eight steps of the shot (stance, nocking, hooking and gripping, pre-draw, full draw, aiming and expansion, release, follow-through), which strategies, techniques, states of mind and words the archer remembers from that shot. The questions were reviewed by twelve experts, among them a national team coach, five national team archers and six former players, to settle the terminology.

The analysis is hybrid. First a given framework, the eight steps, grouped after consultation with experts into four phases; then coding that lets themes emerge from the answers, with a codebook, several independent rounds and discussion until agreement. A colleague expert in qualitative research and in archery reviewed the coding, and the findings were put to an outside expert and to the participants themselves. Both authors state that they are former Korean athletes and that they asked researchers outside Korean sporting culture to review their interpretations. The percentages need care: they are shares of mentions within each phase, not shares of archers, and one person can appear several times.

These are recollections, written down some time after unusually good shots. Nobody observed those shots, nobody measured them, and there is no comparison group: accounts of poor arrows were not collected from the same archers, so there is no way to know which of these elements set an X apart from an ordinary arrow. The absence of negative thoughts in the answers, which the authors find notable, may follow simply from the question, which asked about a successful shot.

The background figures do not add up. Mean age is given as 18 years with a standard deviation of 0.5 for a group spanning university and professional teams, and the stated average number of Xs a participant had hit across an entire career is 4.5, which is impossible for archers averaging 327 out of 360 at 70 metres, where Xs are counted in dozens in a single competition. No data are reported on the sex of individuals, the level they reached or the teams they came from.

The percentages invite misreading. The 55.4 per cent for technique during the draw does not mean that 55.4 per cent of archers mentioned technique: it means that 87 of the 157 coded mentions in that phase concerned technique. The phases carry very different numbers of mentions (81, 157, 157 and 100) because participants wrote more about some steps than others, as the authors acknowledge, so the weight of a theme cannot be compared from one phase to another.

Recruitment was by acquaintance and snowballing inside a single national setting; the authors list this among their limitations together with cultural specificity, and advise against extending the findings to archers in other countries. The coding was done by the two authors, both former Korean athletes, with the precautions described. They also state that they used a language model to tidy up the grammar of the manuscript.

The most useful thing about this study is not a technique but a map: when high-level Korean archers are asked to describe an X shot step by step, the content changes from phase to phase. In preparation they talk about the mind, during the draw about the body, while aiming about the wind, after the shot about emotion. Anyone expecting the Korean secret to be a mental formula finds instead that the longest part of the account, drawing and anchoring, is made up almost entirely of balance between the two sides, arm position and absence of shake.

Two further details deserve a note. Among the preparation themes, archers attending to their posture and archers expecting the X sit side by side with equal weight: the study does not say which of the two takes anyone further, and the authors note that the debate over which orientation works better remains open. During aiming, the single most frequent item is adjusting the strength of the shot for the wind, which is a decision on the field rather than an exercise in concentration.

What the study does not allow is taking this list as a set of things that produce an X. They are recollections of successful shots, with no comparison against shots that went badly, and the counts say how often a theme appears in the accounts, not how much it matters to the score. For a coach it is material for understanding where an archer's attention goes at each step, and for noticing that the same question asked about the poor arrows is missing here too.