Body awareness in archers and shooters: Li 2021 study

The study compared 41 athletes from the Chinese national shooting and archery team (27 shooters and 14 archers) with 43 athletes from the Hebei provincial team on two computer tasks. In the first, based on breathing, the athlete watched a curve of their own breathing on screen, sometimes in real time and sometimes 0.4 seconds behind, and had to say which it was; in the second, a control task, they had to say whether a red dot had flashed on the curve for 30 milliseconds.

On the breathing task the national team did better: 83.59% correct responses against 72.05%, with a sensitivity (d') of 2.80 against 1.64. On the red dot task the two groups were level, at 91.07% and 90.53%. After a mindfulness programme lasting 5 to 8 weeks, offered only to the national team, correct responses on the breathing task rose from 83.59% to 92.12%, while on the red dot task they stayed at 91.07%.

Looking at the 14 archers alone, though, the picture changes. On the breathing task they were already at 89.93% and reached 93.29%, and none of the before-and-after differences was significant. The improvement after mindfulness comes from the 27 shooters, who went from 80.30% to 91.52%.

There were 84 athletes, 46 women and 38 men, aged 14 to 40; the paper does not say how many archers were in the provincial team. Breathing was recorded with a chest band and shown as a blue curve scrolling for 12 seconds. Each task had 40 trials, half in each condition, preceded by four demonstration trials and eight practice trials, taking about 50 minutes in all, with the order of the two tasks counterbalanced across athletes. The outcomes were the percentage of correct responses and the d' index, which separates the ability to tell signal from noise from a tendency to answer one way.

The mindfulness programme was adapted from two well-known courses, MBSR and MBCT, leaving out the parts designed for depression: body scans, sitting meditation, walking meditation and yoga, with one guided session of an hour and a half per week and 15 minutes of home practice each day. The plan was for 8 weeks, but because of the athletes' schedules it lasted between 5 and 8. The comparisons are two-way analyses of variance: group by task, and before-after by task, also run separately for shooters and archers.

The comparison between the national and provincial teams cannot say whether attention to breathing helps athletes reach a higher level or grows with that level, and the two groups also differ in age (24.54 against 19.05 years on average) and in make-up, since the share of archers in the provincial team is not reported. No shooting performance was measured, as the authors themselves acknowledge.

The mindfulness part has no control group and involves only the national team. The authors rule out a simple test-repetition effect because the red dot task did not improve, but that task was already above 90% correct and had little room to rise. For the archers in particular the conclusion does not hold: there were 14 of them, they started high and they show no significant change. The title speaks of shooters and archers together, but the training result belongs to the shooters.

For an archer the study says two things of unequal weight. The first is that athletes in the Chinese national team, shooters and archers together, are better than their provincial counterparts at telling whether the curve of their own breathing is four tenths of a second behind: a kind of attention to bodily signals, since it means comparing the breathing one feels with the breathing one sees on screen. Whether this is a cause of their level or a result of years of training is unknown, and the task itself has nothing to do with shooting.

The second is that a few weeks of mindfulness improved this ability in the shooters. It did not show up in the archers, perhaps because they were already close to the ceiling, perhaps because there were too few of them; either way the study gives no grounds for saying that mindfulness makes people shoot a bow better. Archers who already use it in their preparation will find neither support nor contradiction here as far as archery is concerned.