Mental skills and archers' scores: Thepfukolie 2025

Thirty Indian national-level archers aged 16 to 21 were randomly allocated to three groups of ten: one followed an imagery programme, one a self-regulation programme, and the third carried on with its usual technical and physical training. The two mental programmes ran for 12 weeks, three sessions a week of 50 to 60 minutes each.

Scores rose in all three groups: from 299.70 to 324.00 with imagery, from 297.20 to 319.00 with self-regulation, and from 293.20 to 302.80 in the controls. Once starting scores were taken into account, the imagery group finished 17.03 points above the controls and the self-regulation group 13.64 points above, both at p < 0.001; the gap between the two mental programmes was 3.40 points and not significant (p = 0.791). Group membership carried a large share of the variance (partial eta squared 0.579), but the strongest predictor of the final score was still the starting score (0.698). All thirty archers completed the study and the authors report no adverse events.

The archers came from the Sports Authority of India's centres of excellence and from the Guwahati branch of the Lakshmibai National Institute of Physical Education, each with at least three years of competition behind them. The imagery group rehearsed the shot routine mentally from inside and outside the body, using visual, auditory and kinaesthetic cues, sometimes in slow motion to correct faults. The self-regulation group worked on self-monitoring, goal setting, arousal control, positive self-talk and reflection after shooting, following the three-phase cycle described by Zimmerman: planning beforehand, then performance, then reflection. Everyone kept up their normal training.

Scores were taken a week before the programme and straight after it, under competition rules on Olympic-standard faces; each archer's figure is the mean of two trials. The paper gives no distance, number of arrows, bow type or round. The final comparison is an analysis of covariance with the starting score as covariate, followed by Bonferroni-corrected pairwise comparisons.

Ten archers per group is a small sample, and starting scores were more scattered in the control group (standard deviation 20.44 against 13.31 and 10.93). The control group, which the abstract calls active, received nothing extra: the two experimental groups had thirty-six additional sessions with a practitioner, and so more attention, more time spent thinking about shooting and more expectation. The paper does not explain how randomisation was done or whether the people recording scores knew each archer's group, and there is no follow-up and no measure of mental skills to show whether the programmes changed how the athletes thought.

The text has several inconsistencies: the same group is called imagery, psychological intervention or experimental depending on the page; the sample is described as mixed, but the split between men and women is not given, and neither is the discipline; the introduction claims archery is 70-80% psychological without a source. The journal is flagged in the registry for questionable editorial standards. The mechanisms put forward in the discussion (neural networks, anxiety, target panic) were not measured.

This is one of the few studies on national-level archers to use random allocation and compare two mental programmes against training alone. The result points the same way as other work on imagery: the archers who did three months of structured mental work finished a few points higher. How many points that would mean in a given round is impossible to say, because the score is described without distance or arrow count; and without a control group spending the same time with a practitioner, the effect of the content cannot be separated from the effect of the attention.

For an archer, perhaps the more interesting finding is the second one: imagery and self-regulation produced similar results. The study does not say which of the two to choose, and it says nothing about holding up under pressure in competition, which was not measured.