Meditation and archery performance: Shinde 2022 study

Twenty male archers at a college in Pune, India, were split into two groups: the tables imply 10 and 10. The first did six weeks of meditation alongside normal shooting training, the second training only. Before and after, everyone filled in a mental toughness questionnaire and a competitive anxiety questionnaire.

In the meditation group mental toughness went from 20.2 to 22.1 and the anxiety score from 69 to 71; in the control group mental toughness went from 19.4 to 19.8 and anxiety from 69.1 to 69.6. The author reports both changes in the meditation group as significant and concludes that the programme improved both variables.

The direct comparison between the groups at the end says something narrower. For mental toughness the difference (22.1 against 19.8, t = 2.141) only just clears the threshold the author gives; for anxiety (71.0 against 69.6, t = 0.709) it is not significant. On top of that, the meditation group's anxiety score went up, and the paper does not say whether a higher score means more anxiety or less.

The participants were regular archers at Dr. D. Y. Patil College in Pune, aged 17 to 25 according to one part of the paper and 18 to 25 according to the summary, chosen 'at random' without saying how. The measures were two questionnaires, filled in before and immediately after the programme: for mental toughness one described as the MTQ48 and attributed to Alan Goldberg, for anxiety one attributed to Heinssen, Glass and Knight (1987). The comparisons use independent and paired t-tests, with significance set at 0.05.

The paper does not describe the meditation programme: it does not say what kind of meditation it was, how many sessions a week, how long they lasted, who led them, or what the control group did beyond training. Nor does it give the number of archers per group, which has to be inferred from the degrees of freedom, or the type of bow.

An intervention that is not described can be neither repeated nor assessed. The instruments raise doubts of their own: the name MTQ48 refers to a 48-item questionnaire, with which scores around 20 are not compatible, and the anxiety questionnaire is not described, so it is not even clear which way its score should be read. If a higher value means more anxiety, anxiety rose in the meditation group, and the author presents this as an improvement.

The calculations do not add up in several places. In the meditation group's table a difference of 1.9 with a standard error of 0.883 gives about 2.15, not the 3.298 reported, and a difference of 2 with an error of 1.046 gives about 1.91, not 4.243; in the control group the anxiety difference is given as 0.276 while the means give 0.5. The within-group tests use a one-tailed threshold (1.833), and the text also mentions 1.88. Only the final mental toughness difference between the groups survives these checks, and only just. The journal is flagged in the registry for questionable editorial standards, and nothing measures shooting.

For anyone who shoots the study changes nothing. It does not say what kind of meditation was tried, does not measure score, and the anxiety result, read carefully, shows no significant difference between those who meditated and those who did not. What remains is a difference of about two points on the mental toughness questionnaire, obtained with an unclear instrument and calculations that partly cannot be reconstructed.

Anyone who meditates, or wants to try, will find neither support nor a reason against it here: they will find a study that allows nothing to be said about the effect of meditation in archers.