Mindfulness in competitive archers: Wu 2021 study

Twenty-three competitive Taiwanese archers, 19 men and 4 women aged 20.64 ± 1.20 with 7.47 ± 1.89 years of practice, followed eight 60-minute sessions of a mindfulness programme, twice a week for four weeks. None had ever done meditation, yoga or tai chi. Before and after, they shot a full simulated competition, 72 arrows at 70 metres in six ends of 12, and completed a paper Stroop task; mindfulness and rumination were measured three times, before, midway and after.

The shooting score rises from 613.48 ± 29.72 to 621.70 ± 32.08 out of 720, with t(22) = −3.58, p = 0.002 and a Cohen's d of 0.27: 8.2 points more, that is 1.1%. It is the primary measure, and the effect is small.

On the Stroop task the times shorten in all three conditions: neutral from 22.69 to 19.77 seconds (d = 0.71), congruent from 19.62 to 17.59 (d = 0.51) and incongruent from 33.70 to 29.01 (d = 0.64), all with p below 0.001.

Among the questionnaires, general mindfulness goes from 4.36 to 4.67 (p = 0.032, partial eta squared 0.15) and sport mindfulness from 3.67 to 3.96 (p = 0.004, eta squared 0.22), with the gain concentrated in the attentional control subscale (from 4.27 to 4.72); the non-judgment subscale does not change. Emotion-focused rumination falls early and stays down: from 3.19 before to 2.78 midway and 2.46 at the end, with eta squared 0.43, and between the midpoint and the end there is no further difference. Instrumental rumination does not change.

At the end of the programme, the shooting score correlates with sport mindfulness (r = 0.426, p = 0.043) but not with the Stroop times nor with the other psychological measures.

The programme, which the authors call mindfulness-based peak performance, derives from the components of mindfulness-based stress reduction and from an earlier programme by the same authors. Eight 60-minute sessions, two a week for four weeks, in a university classroom. Each session covered two basic concepts, mindfulness in general and in sport, and six modules on brain science topics linked to performance: habits, stress, rest, attention, emotion and executive function. The exercises included mindful check-ins, the raisin exercise, mindful breathing, body scanning, seated meditation, mindful walking, mindful listening and mindful Bagua Dǎo yin. The course was run by a doctor of sport psychology and three certified instructors with master's degrees. Each session opened with a story about performance, then review and discussion of homework, then theory, then an exercise, and closed on how to apply the skills in competition, for instance breathing mindfully before shooting or walking mindfully on the way to collect arrows. To support adherence, the coach led 15 minutes of group practice before normal training, and 20 minutes a day were set at home; everyone received a handbook with a timetable and notes.

Performance was measured with a simulated Olympic individual competition: 70 metres, 72 arrows in six ends of 12, on the university's outdoor field, during the normal training season. To limit disturbance from wind, the speed was measured with a vane anemometer: between 0.1 and 1.2 metres per second in the initial test and between 0.0 and 1.3 in the final one. The final scores were supplied by the coach.

The Stroop task is the Chinese paper version, with three conditions of 50 stimuli each: neutral with coloured squares, congruent with colour words printed in their own colour and incongruent with words printed in a different colour. Participants were asked to name the ink colour aloud while ignoring the meaning, as quickly and accurately as possible; on an error they had to try again until the correct colour was named. The score is the time from the first to the last stimulus.

The questionnaires are three, in their Chinese versions: the mindful attention awareness scale for general mindfulness, 15 items on six points; the mindfulness inventory in sport for the sporting kind, 15 items on six points with the attentional control and non-judgment subscales; and the multidimensional rumination questionnaire, with its emotion-focused, meaning-searching and instrumental subscales. The internal consistency reported in this sample runs from 0.76 to 0.97 depending on the scale.

The design is single group with a measurement before and after. The initial test precedes the first session, the intermediate one follows the fourth immediately and the final one the eighth immediately. The sessions started at 1 pm and all measurements were taken between 3 and 5 pm, with a request not to take caffeine in the preceding three hours. Shooting and cognitive function were measured only before and after, to limit the practice effect on the tests; mindfulness and rumination all three times. The analysis uses paired t-tests for shooting and Stroop, one-way analysis of variance with Bonferroni correction for the questionnaires, and Pearson correlations on the final data, in SPSS 26.

The authors are honest about the main limitation and put it first: with no control group, no causal interpretation can be drawn. It is worth seeing how much that weighs here. The gain in shooting is 8.2 points out of 720 over four weeks, that is 1.1%, in archers who were meanwhile continuing their normal training season. An improvement of that order in a month of training is ordinary, and the design does not distinguish it from the programme's effect.

On the Stroop task, the way the times improve suggests a practice effect rather than a gain in inhibitory control. The three times shorten in similar proportions: 12.9% in the neutral condition, 10.3% in the congruent and 13.9% in the incongruent. The neutral condition is the one with coloured squares, in which there is no interference to inhibit: if the intervention had specifically improved inhibition, the gain would have concentrated in the incongruent condition. Interference, that is the difference between incongruent and congruent, does indeed fall from 14.08 to 11.42 seconds, but against a general improvement of that size the two are hard to separate. The authors write that they administered the tests only twice precisely to avoid the practice effect: administering them twice limits it to one repetition, it does not remove it, and repeating the Stroop task is one of the cases in which that effect is best documented.

There is a timing problem worth noting. The final measurements were taken immediately after the eighth session, while the initial ones preceded the first: the final shooting test therefore comes a few hours after a mindfulness session, the initial one does not. Any immediate effect of the session adds to the effect of the four weeks, and the design does not separate them.

The claim about a dose-response relationship, announced in the abstract, rests on little. Shooting and the Stroop task were not measured midway, so for the primary measure no information on dose exists. The only datum of that kind is that emotion-focused rumination had already fallen after four sessions and fell no further after another four, while mindfulness showed its difference only at the end. That is a hint from two questionnaires, not a dose-response curve.

One value in the results table is impossible as written. For the non-judgment subscale the analysis of variance is reported as F(2,44) = 6.22 with p = 0.541: with those degrees of freedom an F of 6.22 corresponds to a probability around 0.004, while the reported eta squared of 0.03 is consistent with the null result the text describes. One of the two numbers is a misprint, and the paper does not make clear which.

The correlation between score and sport mindfulness, r = 0.426 with p = 0.043, is computed on the final data alone and on 23 archers. Without the same correlation on the initial data there is no telling whether the link was produced by the programme or was already there, and it is a single correlation barely under the threshold. In the same sample the score correlates with none of the cognitive measures, that is precisely the ones that improved most.

Points the authors declare remain: the sample is small and imbalanced by sex, 19 men and 4 women from a single university; there is no follow-up, so whether anything persists is unknown; the simulated competition, though a full 70-metre round, lacks the authenticity of a real one; and nothing was collected about the content of the discussions during the sessions. To be added: the scores were supplied by the coach rather than independently recorded, in the Stroop task errors were corrected until the right answer, so they end up inside the time and no accuracy measure exists, and the wind, though commendably measured, was not handled in the analysis.

This is one of the few studies of mindfulness in archers that measures the shooting properly: 72 arrows at 70 metres outdoors, before and after, with the wind measured by anemometer. That is why it is worth looking at, even though the result is small. The score rose by 8.2 points out of 720 over four weeks, 1.1%, with no comparison group: an archer training normally can gain as much in a month, so that figure is neither a reason to start nor a reason not to.

The reusable part is the programme, described fully enough to reconstruct: eight one-hour sessions, two a week for a month, with a fixed structure (a story about performance, review of homework, theory, an exercise, and a closing section on using it in competition), 15 minutes of group practice led by the coach before normal training and 20 minutes a day at home. The detail that matters is that last part of each session: mindfulness was tied to concrete moments of the shot, breathing mindfully before loosing, walking mindfully on the way to collect arrows. Without that link the rest stays a classroom exercise.

The most interesting result concerns rumination, that is chewing over negative thoughts. It is the only measure with a large effect (eta squared 0.43), and it had already fallen after four sessions, without falling further over the next four: from 3.19 to 2.78 midway and 2.46 at the end. If the finding holds, it says that the part which works first is the one about thinking, not the one about attention: the mindfulness measured by the questionnaires moves only at the end. It remains a questionnaire finding in a group without a control.

Two things should not be taken away. The improvement on the cognitive tests, which is the most striking, appears in the same proportion in the condition without interference, that is the one requiring no inhibitory control: it resembles a practice effect on the test. And in the same sample the shooting score correlates with none of the cognitive measures that improved, so even taking those gains at face value, they come out unconnected to how the archers shoot.