Heart rate and anxiety in kyudo archers: Miyamoto 1994

Five kyudo archers from the Gifu University club (three women and two men, aged 19 to 21) wore a heart rate monitor during three kinds of practice and during an official team match, and after each round they rated their somatic anxiety, meaning the physical sensations of tension. For all five the peak heart rate of each shot was higher in the match than in practice, and the differences were significant: from 103.0 beats per minute in free practice to 146.5 in the match for one woman, from 110.9 to 149.0 for one man. For most of them the heart rate reached about 150 in the first rounds of the match. With each shot the heart rate rose, peaking about 10 seconds after the release, and then fell.

Somatic anxiety was also higher in the match than in formal practice (four archers analysed, F(1/22) = 11.76, p < 0.01). Taking all the data together, heart rate and somatic anxiety were moderately related (r = 0.388 across 35 measurements; 0.945 in one archer alone). Accuracy, on the other hand, did not change: the proportion of hits did not differ between practice and the match, nor between the match and the previous five days of training. Four of the five shot at least as well in the match as in practice. The fifth, whose heart rate was already high in the practice sessions before the match (from 139.6 in free practice to 161.7 in the match), shot worse and was taken off during the match for that reason. No correlation between heart rate or anxiety and accuracy was significant.

The data were collected in the field, at the Gifu University kyudo range, during five official matches between university clubs held on different days, one for each archer. The target was the kyudo mato, a 36-centimetre circle at 28 metres with a 12-centimetre centre, and each arrow counted only as a hit or a miss. Each match had five rounds of four arrows, with spectators cheering for their own team. Before the match the archers had a free practice, with results not recorded, a formal practice that imitated the match, with results noted down, and finally a free practice together with the visiting team.

Heart rate was recorded every five seconds by a PE3000 monitor, and the peak value was taken for each shot. Somatic anxiety was measured after each round of formal practice and of the match with five statements (heart racing, feeling tense, trembling knees, feeling upset, stage fright), each rated 1 to 4, for a score from 5 to 20. As a reference for each archer's usual accuracy, the author used the hit rate over the last five days before the match, between 0.464 and 0.594 over 136 to 192 arrows. The analyses were run archer by archer (one-way analysis of variance on heart rate, with post hoc comparisons), plus an analysis of variance on anxiety and Pearson correlations.

Five archers from one club, and one of them has no anxiety questionnaires for the formal practice: the conclusions apply to them, and the author himself writes that the data are not enough to draw further conclusions. Heart rate also rises with physical effort, and in the match the archers shot in front of cheering spectators, so the comparison does not separate the effect of what was at stake from the effect of the setting. There are few arrows per condition and each counts only as a hit or a miss, so a small change in accuracy would be unlikely to reach significance.

In the summary the author describes curvilinear, inverted-U relationships between heart rate, anxiety and performance, but the results contain no analysis that tests them: there is only a reference to their similarity with an earlier study of his, while the linear correlations are not significant. The inverted-U reading therefore remains the author's interpretation.

The study shows how much a match changes the body even when the shot itself stays the same. In archers using the same technique in practice and competition, a heart rate 20 to 44 beats per minute higher than in free practice and a stronger feeling of tension did not make accuracy worse in four cases out of five. For archers this is useful to know: a pounding heart in competition is normal, even in archers used to competing, and on its own it says nothing about where the arrow will go. The fifth archer, whose heart rate was already high in the practice sessions before the match and who shot worse, points the other way, but he is a single case.

Kyudo has a target, distance and scoring very different from target archery, and these measurements come from five students. The study therefore does not say at what level of arousal archers shoot best, or whether each archer has an ideal level: it raises those questions without answering them.