Imagery or meditation for 40 m archery: Yachsie 2023

Twenty-four male archers from the Banyumas regency in Indonesia did ten sessions of mental training: twelve with imagery of the shot, twelve with meditation. Before and after, they shot a test at 40 metres over two sessions, added together. In the imagery group the mean rose from 443.92 to 547.00 points and the spread almost halved (standard deviation from 152.005 to 81.981); in the meditation group the mean went from 419.58 to 435.08. The authors treat both changes as significant (p 0.000 and 0.002) and conclude that imagery has the larger effect, since the text gives a mean gain of 101.08 points against 15.57.

There was no control group without mental training, and imagery and meditation are compared by setting the two mean differences side by side, with no statistical test between the groups. The choice of 40 metres was practical: in the regency's monthly scoring checks it was the distance with the lowest averages, and some athletes said it made them anxious.

The study took place in June 2022. From a population of 26 archers in the regency, 24 were chosen on set criteria: male, active, training regularly for regional competitions, and not currently injured. After the first test they were split into two groups of twelve by ordinal pairing on their scores, that is, balancing the groups by level, with no random allocation. Each group had ten 15-minute sessions, three times a week. The paper explains in general terms what imagery and meditation are, but does not describe the protocol used in the sessions: there is no script, and it is not stated who led them.

The shooting test is the score at 40 metres over two sessions, added together; the authors report a validity of 0.895 and a reliability of 0.944 for it, citing an earlier paper of their own. The number of arrows, the target face and the division are not given: the discussion mentions the "standard bow" division of Indonesian competitions without saying explicitly that the participants shot that bow. The analysis is a paired t-test within each group.

There is no control group and no random allocation. Without a group that simply carried on training, the effect of mental training cannot be separated from the shooting done in the same month, from familiarity with the test or from regression to the mean. This matters most in the imagery group, which started with a very wide spread (a minimum of 188 points) and where much of the gain comes from the lowest scorers: the minimum rises to 424, while the maximum only goes from 621 to 639. The authors themselves say they could not control what the athletes did on the other days.

The numbers do not agree with each other. The paired-test tables report mean differences of -3.71 and 1.43 with standard deviations below 1.3, which cannot correspond to scores in the hundreds; in the second test the mean is positive but the confidence interval is entirely negative. The mean differences in the text (101.08 and 15.57) do not match those that follow from the descriptive table (103.08 and 15.50), and the discussion gives averages (337 to 347 and 329 to 325) that fit none of the tables. The conclusions shift too: the discussion says imagery is not suited to beginners, while the conclusion recommends meditation for beginners and imagery for more experienced archers, although the study never compared different levels. The journal is flagged in the registry for questionable editorial standards.

For an archer, the study offers little that is solid. Twelve athletes who added a quarter of an hour of imagery three times a week shot better on the 40-metre test a month later; without a group that did no mental work, though, there is no way to know how much of that improvement would have come anyway, and meditation, in the same design, barely moved. The conclusion that imagery works better than meditation rests on a comparison of means with no test, and on statistical tables that do not add up.

Archers who already use imagery in their routine will find no reason here to change it, and those who do not will find no evidence that should make them start. The protocol is not described, so what was done cannot even be repeated. In the registry the study counts as weak evidence, on regional-level archers, to be read alongside the better-controlled studies of mental training in archery.