Visualisation training for novice archers: Sa'ari 2019

Twelve boys aged 14 to 17 (15.83 on average), from the Pahang state reserve youth squad in Malaysia and from school teams, shot a set of 10 arrows before and after four weeks. Six, described as novices, followed a guided imagery programme over that month using the VMBR method (visuo-motor behaviour rehearsal); the other six, described as experts, carried on training as usual.

The novices went from 73.83 to 81.83 points out of 100, a mean gain of 8 points; the experts from 92.83 to 95.50, a mean gain of 2.67. Both gains were significant when each group was compared before and after. In both groups those who shot best at the start also shot best at the end, with correlations between the two tests above 0.90.

The imagery sessions ran three times a week for four weeks, 15 minutes each, in three phases: relaxation, imagining the shot and reaction, following a guided script taken from an earlier study. The group without imagery followed the same shooting training. The test was a single set of 10 arrows, with a scoring system shown in a figure and adapted from a golf study; the distance and the size of the target face are not given.

Means before and after were compared with a paired t-test within each group, and the scores of the two tests were related with Pearson's correlation. The study appeared as a conference contribution, in a special issue of the journal.

The control group does not work as a control: it is made up of much better archers, already close to the maximum (92.83 out of 100 at the start), who had little room to improve. The two groups are never compared with each other, and the control group also improved significantly; with a design like this, eight extra points for novices after a month of training could be explained by practice alone.

How the groups were formed is unclear: the abstract says by the team the boys belonged to, the methods speak of random assignment. Each test is only 10 arrows, with no stated distance. The figures are also inconsistent: the novices' final score is 79.83 in the text and 81.83 in the table and abstract, and for the experts an r of 0.9231 comes with an R² of 0.6465, which does not match.

The study does not allow anyone to say that imagery helped these boys: the novices improved, as can happen to anyone who trains for a month, and there is no group of novices without imagery to compare them with. Nor does it show that imagery is useless. For a youth coach what remains is the description of a protocol that is easy to organise, 15 minutes three times a week of relaxation and guided imagery, whose effect this paper does not measure.