Breathing and anxiety in para archers: Salsabila 2025

Twenty Indonesian Paralympic archers did a quarter of an hour of deep breathing three times a week for two months, and anxiety measured by questionnaire fell. There were 17 men and 3 women, aged 19 to 53, registered with the Indonesian national Paralympic committee and training in the cities of Bandung and Cimahi. They were split into four groups of five: national standard bow and compound, each with its own control group carrying on with normal training.

In the groups that did the breathing, the Sport Anxiety Scale-2 score went from 29.0 to 21.2 in the standard bow division and from 27.8 to 19.2 in compound, a reduction of 27% and 31%. In the two control groups it held still or rose: from 27.4 to 27.8 in standard bow and from 26.6 to 29.0 in compound. The before-and-after comparisons within each group give t values of 4.47 (p = 0.011) and 5.85 (p = 0.004) in the two trained groups, and no difference in the two controls (p = 0.86 and p = 0.24).

The comparison between the two divisions, by contrast, gives nothing: neither in the experimental group (t = 0.66, p = 0.53) nor in the control group (t = minus 0.26, p = 0.80). This is where the paper contradicts itself, because the abstract and the discussion argue that compound archers had lower anxiety thanks to the mechanical stability of the bow, while Table 5 says the two divisions cannot be told apart. The title and the design promise a comparison between divisions that the data do not support.

What survives of the stated aim is therefore the first half: in ten archers out of twenty, two months of guided breathing were followed by a lower anxiety score, while in the other ten they were not. The study measures nothing about performance in the sense of scores on the target, even though it concludes that the method also improves physical performance.

The design is a pre-test and post-test with a control group, with no account in the paper of how the twenty archers were assigned to the four groups of five. Anxiety is measured with the Sport Anxiety Scale-2, a questionnaire with four response options (not at all, a little, quite a bit, very much), administered before and after the intervention through a Google form. The authors report a validity value of 0.279 and a reliability of 0.708 for the instrument, and say they adopted it unchanged from an earlier paper.

The intervention is 4-7-8 breathing. The archer sits or stands with the spine in line, right hand on the chest and left hand on the abdomen to feel the movement of the breath, breathes in through the nose for a count of 4 while trying to fill the abdomen rather than only the chest, holds for a count of 7, then breathes out through the mouth for a count of 8 until the lungs are empty; the cycle is repeated 5 to 10 times, and the length of the counts can be adjusted as long as the ratio is kept. Each session lasted 15 minutes, three times a week for two months, 24 sessions in all, and was built in five steps: opening, an explanation of anxiety and its signs, an explanation of the technique, guided practice and a close.

The control groups carried on with their usual technical and physical training, with no substitute activity of equivalent length. The analysis uses the t test: four before-and-after comparisons within each group, a normality test on each of the eight distributions, a homogeneity test and two comparisons between divisions. There is no direct comparison between the experimental and control groups, and no effect sizes are reported.

Five archers per group, and the authors themselves write that twenty people do not represent the population of archers with disabilities and that the results should be read with caution. No random allocation is described, nobody was kept unaware of their group, the questionnaires are self-administered, and the control group received nothing in place of the 24 sessions: anyone who had spent six hours with the researchers knew they were in the treated group, and the questionnaire measures what the archer reports feeling.

The comparison that matters was not made. The effect rests on four before-and-after t tests within groups, not on a comparison between those who did the breathing and those who did not, which is the only way to separate the intervention from the passing of time and the competitive season. Without that comparison, one group going down and another going up is not a measured difference.

Some of the numbers do not add up. Table 1, which should give the mean age of the groups, ends with two rows reading 67 and 74 under the age column, and the text reads them as the number of subjects per division, which is impossible with twenty archers in total; the standard deviations quoted in the text (20.098 and 18.844) do not match those in the table (20.908 and 14.844). In the results paragraph the standard bow control group is described as having dropped from 27.80 to 19.20, which are the values of the compound experimental group. Figure 1 gives an 11% rise in the compound control group, whereas going from 26.6 to 29.0 is a rise of 9%. The paper, finally, never states the range of the scale used, and without it scores around 27 are hard to place.

Then there is what the title promises and the data do not bear out: the difference between divisions. The explanations offered in the discussion, a wooden standard bow shot at three distances of 30, 40 and 50 metres against the mechanical stability and let-off of the compound, come from other papers cited there and are not measured here. The study appears in a regional journal, with five days between submission and acceptance.

For a Paralympic archer, or for someone coaching one, what the study offers is a protocol written precisely enough to be recognisable: 4-7-8 breathing, a quarter of an hour, three times a week, with a part of explanation and a part of guided practice. It does not offer evidence that the protocol does anything, because the comparison between those who did it and those who did not is absent from the data, and because five people per group leave little room.

About shooting it says nothing that was measured. Nobody counted a point, nobody looked at stability or release timing: the only outcome is a questionnaire about competitive anxiety. The paper's conclusion, that breathing also improves physical performance and accuracy, does not come from its own data.

On the difference between standard bow and compound, the cautious reading is that the study did not find one, whatever its abstract says. Anyone looking for guidance on how the division changes the psychological load will not find it here, nor anything on the relationship between a particular impairment and anxiety, because the paper does not describe the participants' functional classes. What remains of the exercise is modest and honest: twenty archers with disabilities agreed to two months of guided breathing, and the ten who did it reported less anxiety afterwards than before.