Mindfulness in archers one year on: Thompson 2011 study

The study gets back in touch, a year later, with people who had taken MSPE, a four-week mindfulness programme for athletes, in two earlier studies with archers, golfers and runners. Of the 52 people who had agreed to be contacted again (10 archers, 17 golfers and 25 runners), 25 replied: 4 archers, 8 golfers and 13 runners, 14 men and 11 women aged 18 to 72, 48.28 on average.

For the archers, their best competition scores in the following year did not differ from those of the year before. The runners improved over the mile, from 7.36 to 6.54 minutes as best time; the golfers showed no difference from before the course but a better score than at its end (79.00 against 82.42). Pooling the three sports, the questionnaires showed a rise in overall mindfulness (from 130.32 before the course to 132.86 at its end and 138.58 after a year) and in acting with awareness (from 30.41 to 32.82), and a fall in task-irrelevant thoughts during competition (from 15.73 to 13.59). Sport anxiety fell from the end of the course to follow-up (from 40.35 to 34.09), but at the start it had been 35.70. Confidence and flow, measured in archers and golfers, did not change.

Twenty-one of the 25 said they practised mindfulness occasionally, on average 1.15 times and 0.42 hours a week. None of the four archers practised it any longer.

A year after the end of each course, participants were sent a packet of questionnaires by post, to return within two weeks. For the archers there was an 8-item questionnaire written for the study, asking for their best competition and practice scores of the past year; since they shot in tournaments with different numbers of arrows, each score was expressed as a percentage of the maximum possible and compared with that of the 12 months before the course. Everyone completed again the scales used before and after the course: mindfulness (KIMS), disruptive thoughts during competition (TOQS) and sport anxiety (SAS); archers and golfers also completed scales of sport confidence and flow.

Open answers were coded by two people, with agreement between 0.73 and 0.85. Those who replied were compared with those who did not on the starting data: the two groups were similar, apart from higher flow among those who replied. The analyses use paired t tests, repeated measures analysis of variance and correlations; for the archers no correlations were calculated because there were too few of them.

For archery the study rests on four people. There is no control group, the scores are those participants report as their best of the year, and fewer than half of those eligible replied, with higher flow at the start. The authors themselves say that, given how little participants practised, the changes in the questionnaires could be down to the expectations created by the study. The measures of general anxiety and life satisfaction before the course are recollections a year later.

Some numbers do not add up. For the intensity of general anxiety the text says it was lower at follow-up, but reports 2.64 at follow-up and 2.12 before the course. A fall in task-related worries at p = 0.052 is presented as significant. Many correlations were calculated, and some may be down to chance, as the authors acknowledge for golf.

For archers this study says very little. There were four of them, their scores did not change and a year later none of them was still practising mindfulness. The changes in the questionnaires concern the whole group, in which archers were a small part, and the performance improvements belong to the runners.

One piece of context remains: a short mindfulness course, with no practice afterwards, left no visible mark on the scores of these few archers. It does not allow anyone to say that mindfulness is useless for archery, nor the opposite. In the registry it counts as very weak evidence.