Social media before archery shooting: Mafra 2026

Ten experienced Brazilian archers shot two simulated indoor competitions at 18 metres, 60 arrows each, at least 24 hours apart. Before one competition they spent 45 minutes on social media of their choice; before the other they watched a 45-minute documentary on the Olympic Games of ancient Greece. The hypothesis was that more than half an hour of social media would bring on mental fatigue and lower the score.

It did not: after social media the average score was 435.6 out of 600, after the documentary 433.9 (p=0.791), with small differences in each half of the competition too (216.3 and 219 against 221.2 and 212.7). Neither mood, measured with the BRUMS scale, nor the visual analogue scales for tiredness, concentration and alertness differed significantly between the two conditions at any of the four measurement points. Reported tiredness rose during the competition in both conditions, reaching 5.8 at the end after social media and after the documentary alike. The authors accept that mental fatigue was probably never induced, and conclude that 45 minutes of social media before an archery competition, under these conditions, did not harm performance.

The study is a crossover: each archer did both conditions, in an order drawn with an online app, at their usual training venue. Of the 30 athletes invited, 10 took part, all with at least a year of official competition and at least three competitions a year; on average they were 35.9 years old (range 19 to 60), had 3.8 years of competitive shooting, had entered 8.4 competitions in the previous year and trained 1.8 times a week. During the 45 minutes of social media, archery content and meditation or relaxation content were not allowed.

The competition followed the World Archery indoor format: three 90-second practice ends, then two rounds of 10 ends of 3 arrows, with 90 seconds per end and a 10-minute break between rounds, on single or triple 40 cm faces set 1.3 metres off the ground. The BRUMS (24 items across six subscales) and three visual analogue scales (tiredness, concentration, alertness) were filled in at the start, after the 45 minutes, halfway through and at the end. The two conditions were compared with a Mann-Whitney test, that is, as if they were two separate groups of people.

The sample is small, 10 archers, and the authors say so: with these numbers only a large effect would have shown up. The main problem, though, comes earlier: the subjective measures do not show that social media was any more tiring than the documentary, so the study compares two conditions that, as far as one can tell, were much alike. The result concerns this way of using social media, not mental fatigue as such.

The analysis treats repeated measures on the same people as independent, which costs statistical power, and the authors list this among the limitations. The type of bow is not reported, and the use of both single and triple faces suggests that different divisions were mixed together. In the PDF the results paragraph breaks off mid-sentence; the visual analogue scales are described as running from 0 to 100 millimetres, yet the values in the table lie between 1 and 7, probably in centimetres, and p values are given for only some of the variables. The discussion mentions a subjective rise in fatigue after social media that the table does not show to be significant.

For anyone who shoots, the study is reassuring but narrow. In experienced recreational archers training fewer than twice a week, three quarters of an hour of social media before an indoor competition did not change the score: 435.6 against 433.9 out of 600, a gap far smaller than the differences between one archer and another (standard deviations of 47.0 and 64.7 points). It does not show that mental fatigue is irrelevant to shooting, because by the authors' own measures there was no mental fatigue here.

The situations where the question matters most are left out: outdoor competitions, long days of qualification and elimination rounds, high-level athletes, and social media use that is emotionally charged or full of comparison with others. The authors themselves write that content, engagement and personal habits may change the picture. In the registry the study counts as a null result from a protocol that did not achieve its aim, not as evidence that the phone before a competition makes no difference.