Calmness training for archers: Susanto 2025

Twenty archers from the Malang Regency squad, preparing for the Indonesian provincial games (PORPROV), took part in a study of four weeks of calmness training: deep breathing exercises, mindfulness meditation and visualising a successful shot. The authors write that they split the archers into a group that followed the programme and a control group that did not.

According to the paper, in the trained group shooting accuracy rose from about 60% to 82% of shots on the set target, and the anxiety score, measured with the Sport Anxiety Scale-2, fell from about 60% to 40%. In the control group anxiety reportedly stayed much the same and accuracy rose by 5% on average. The before-and-after differences are reported as significant (p < 0.05) on a paired t-test. Observations and interviews describe archers who were calmer, less hurried in their movements and more confident under pressure.

The method is written almost entirely in the future tense, like a proposal, and leaves out the details needed to understand what was measured. We are not told how many archers were in each group or how they were allocated; we are not told what bows they shot, at what distance, on which target face or with how many arrows, nor how accuracy was turned into a percentage. For anxiety the Sport Anxiety Scale-2 is named, but the result is given as a percentage rather than in the scale's scores. Of the programme we know that it lasted four weeks and included breathing, meditation and visualisation, with no number of sessions, duration or content. Behaviour was observed by coaches and researchers during practice and competition simulations, and the interviews with archers and coaches are summarised in a few sentences.

With this information the result cannot be checked. Exact means, standard deviations, test values and the control group's data are all missing, and the main figures are rounded (about 60%). The comparison with the control group, which ought to be the strength of the design, is reported in a single sentence with no between-group test: the paired t-test only compares before and after. Behaviour was observed by coaches and researchers, and nothing suggests they were unaware of who had done the programme and what they were expected to see. A jump of 22 percentage points in accuracy in four weeks, without knowing the distance or the number of arrows, calls for great caution, not least because the whole squad trains harder in the run-up to an important competition.

The study adds nothing usable on how much breathing, meditation and visualisation change shooting: the idea is reasonable and other work supports it, but this paper gives no figures that can be checked. For anyone wanting to try calming techniques before a competition, the registry points to studies that describe their protocol and measure score in a repeatable way. What remains here is the account of archers and coaches who felt better prepared, which tells us about their experience, not about their accuracy.