Mental training in archers: Yudho 2022 study

Thirty-two archers from South Sumatra followed sixteen training sessions split across four combinations: mental work by imagery or by self-hypnosis, paired either with a dumbbell strength circuit or with a bodyweight circuit. Before and after the programme each archer shot at 50, 40 and 30 metres, and the score at each distance is the only outcome measured.

Taking all thirty-two together, the mean score rose from 243.59 (standard deviation 25.84) to 250.63 (26.95) at 50 metres, from 261.25 (24.70) to 267.34 (26.22) at 40 metres and from 277.66 (19.79) to 285.53 (20.97) at 30 metres. The repeated-measures analysis of variance reports differences at all three distances, with significance given as 0.000 at 50 and 30 metres and 0.001 at 40 metres.

The comparison between the four combinations appears only in the abstract and the conclusions, not in a table: the archers who did the dumbbell circuit gained a mean of 31.13 points on the total with imagery and 31.12 with self-hypnosis, while those on the bodyweight circuit gained 10.00 points with imagery and 13.5 with self-hypnosis. No interaction emerged between mental technique and type of circuit, meaning that the two mental techniques behaved the same way whatever physical work was paired with them.

The design is a two-by-two factorial quasi-experiment: one variable is the mental technique (imagery or self-hypnosis), the other is the muscular endurance circuit (with or without equipment). The authors describe total sampling, meaning they took all thirty-two archers on the South Sumatra regional circuit without random allocation and without a group that did nothing, which leaves eight archers per cell. The programme ran for sixteen sessions, and the paper does not say over how many weeks they were spread.

The equipment circuit is described in the discussion rather than the methods, and used dumbbells: front and lateral raises, shoulder shrugs, overhead side bends, overhead triceps work, lunges, bent-over reverse flyes, upright rows, overhead presses and trunk twists. For the mental training only the idea is given, that is rehearsing the movement in the mind for imagery and giving oneself instructions for self-hypnosis, with no indication of how long each session lasted or who led it.

The shooting tests were held at 50, 40 and 30 metres over roughly three hours in total. The paper does not say how many arrows were shot at each distance or what the maximum possible score was, and figures around 250 and 285 points are consistent with ends of thirty-six arrows out of a maximum of 360. The data were checked with the Shapiro-Wilk test for normality and the Levene test for homogeneity, then analysed with a two-way repeated-measures analysis of variance.

Without a group carrying on with normal training, the improvement in all four combinations cannot be separated from what sixteen extra sessions would have produced anyway, or from growing used to repeating the same shooting test. Allocation was not randomised, the paper does not say who decided which archer went into which group, and it reports no age, sex, level, years of practice or baseline scores by group. Whoever recorded the scores knew which programme each archer had followed.

Muscular endurance is in the title but is never measured: there are no strength or holding tests before and after, so it is not known whether the circuit changed anything in the muscles. The tables give only the overall means by distance, not those of the four combinations, so the gains of 31.13 and 10.00 points quoted in the abstract cannot be checked against the published data. Effect sizes and confidence intervals are missing altogether.

Some of the numbers do not add up. Significance values are printed as 0.000, a figure that does not exist and should be read as below 0.001; the homogeneity test returns exactly 1.000 in all eight rows, which is hardly plausible with real data; the degrees of freedom of the analysis are not reported; and the text contains typing errors such as 0.0.742 and 0.0.933. The paper appeared in an Indonesian university journal, and much of the text summarises general concepts instead of describing the procedure, which stays incomplete at exactly the points that would be needed to repeat it.

For an archer this study says little more than is already known: after sixteen sessions combining mental rehearsal of the shot with a strength circuit for the shoulders and arms, scores at 50, 40 and 30 metres rose by seven or eight points on average. How much of that gain comes from the mental part, how much from the dumbbells and how much from simply having trained sixteen more times cannot be separated, because none of the four groups served as a reference.

The one internal comparison of any use is between the dumbbell circuit and the bodyweight circuit, and it has to be taken cautiously because the group-level data are not published. The absence of an interaction between mental technique and physical work means that, in these thirty-two archers, imagery and self-hypnosis gave the same result: the study offers no grounds for preferring one over the other. In the registry it counts as weak evidence on the mental training line, that is a measurement on real archers with a design that does not allow the change to be attributed to any particular cause.