Anxiety and balance in young archers: Tokmakci 2023

In 22 Turkish archers aged 11 to 14, 16 boys and 6 girls, a mental arithmetic task under pressure changed neither heart rate nor standing balance, and according to the authors it did not change the score either. The finding they put first is a different one: those who scored higher on anxiety sensitivity, measured with the ASI-3 questionnaire, scored fewer points in the set shot after the task. The correlation with the questionnaire's total score was r = -0.513 (p = 0.021), and with the social part alone, which concerns the fear of being judged, r = -0.634 (p = 0.003); in a regression model the social part accounts for 40.2% of the differences in score in that set.

In the set shot before the task the link was weaker: r = -0.454 with the social part (p = 0.044) and r = -0.370 with the total, which was not significant. Mean heart rate while shooting was 104.64 beats per minute before and 105.64 after (p = 0.680), and none of the five sway measures taken on the pressure mat changed: the ellipse area, for example, was 3.66 cm² before and 3.78 after (p = 0.908). The authors themselves conclude that the stress they set out to induce did not materialise.

The participants were all the licensed archers aged 11 to 14 in the Manisa area of Turkey who met the inclusion criteria (mean age 11.90), with between 2 and 36 months of practice (13.50 on average). Each was seen alone, at a time away from training: first they filled in the Turkish version of the ASI-3, 18 questions in three parts (physical, cognitive and social) scored from 0 to 72, then shot 5 warm-up arrows. Balance was recorded for 40 seconds at 50 Hz on a Tekscan HR MatScan pressure mat before the sets, and heart rate with a Polar RS400 chest strap during shooting.

The first set was 10 arrows at 18 metres on a 60 cm face, using the bow each archer used in competition: the best and worst arrows were discarded and the other eight added up. After an hour's break came the stress task, taken from the children's version of the Trier Social Stress Test but cut down to the arithmetic part: counting backwards from 1,000 in steps of 7, 9, 11 or 13 for at least a minute, starting again after every mistake, while the person running the test sometimes questioned the numbers given. Balance was then measured again and another 10 arrows shot. The before and after comparison uses paired tests, the link with the questionnaire Pearson correlation and a linear regression.

The stress task did not produce stress, as the authors admit: heart rate did not move, and the social part of the test, the part that usually works, had been left out. The study therefore cannot say that stress makes anxious archers shoot worse, even though the conclusions say so: what it shows is a correlation between a trait measured by questionnaire and the score of eight arrows, partly present before the task as well. The mean scores before and after are not reported. There are 22 young archers, with very different levels of experience (from 2 months to 3 years of practice), and the type of bow is not given: the more anxious archers may also have been those who had been shooting for less time, and the analysis does not account for this.

Some figures do not add up. In the text the regression on the social part has p = 0.03, in the table p = 0.003; the two regression tables give the same constant with the same standard error, and a constant of 9.215 does not fit a score that adds up eight arrows worth 10 points each. Balance was measured standing before the sets, as far as the method makes clear, so it says nothing about stability while aiming. Proposing the ASI-3 for selecting young athletes, as the authors do, goes well beyond these data.

For anyone coaching young archers, the interesting point concerns how an archer experiences being judged by others: among these 22, those most afraid of looking bad tended to score fewer points, and the link was clearer in the second set. It is an association in a small group, not proof that anxiety causes poor shots or that working on it raises scores.

On competition pressure the study says little: counting backwards alone in front of a researcher changed neither heart rate nor scores, and a competition brings in different things, such as spectators, time limits and what is at stake. The questionnaire is not a selection tool, and when anxiety really weighs on a young archer the person to turn to is still a sport psychologist.