A mental training programme improves the elite archer's mood

The summary today

There is a single study, of the Chinese national team, and the figures need reading together with their context. Sixteen archers, eight men and eight women among the best in the country, were followed from December 2019 to August 2020: two months of baseline, five months of weekly sessions lasting an hour to an hour and a half, from February to June, and two months after the end. The programme was not the usual mental skills training, because alongside relaxation, imagery and goal setting it included sport psychology lectures and a cultural component drawn from traditional Chinese philosophy. Total mood disturbance measured with the POMS, on a scale from 74 to 234, falls from 123.9 to 118.4 during the intervention, without reaching significance, and to 115.4 in the two months after (p = 0.029 against baseline); case by case, the authors see a strong effect in fourteen archers and none in two, one of whom actually moves the opposite way. There is no control group, and those months coincide with the start of the pandemic, which is also why the staff had asked for the sessions: without a comparison nobody can tell how much of the drop comes from the programme and how much from the season.

Also phrased as: "mental training and mood"; "psychological preparation and mood state"; "profile of mood states in archers"; "sport psychologist and archer wellbeing"

Evidence

• 2023
  For Archers Published later

  16 archers from the Chinese national team (8 men, 8 women, 22.8 ± 3.7 years, ten years of practice on average), a single-case design with two months of baseline, five months of weekly 60-90 minute sessions covering mental skills, psychology lectures and cultural education, and two months after the end; POMS completed once a month after technical training. Total mood disturbance: phase effect F(1, 15) = 3.62, p = 0.039, η² = 0.19; baseline 123.94 ± 21.74, intervention 118.40 ± 21.74 (not significant), after the intervention 115.44 ± 23.22 (p = 0.029, 95% CI 0.98 to 16.02). The non-overlap indices give a strong effect in 14 archers and none in 2; in one of the two mood gets worse (NAP = -1.00 in both phases).

  Applying skill-oriented and spirit-oriented psychological training to Chinese national archery team athletes: a single-case mixed-methods study · Na Xu, Weihua Yan, Mingyu Sun, Rui Li, Yingchun Wang, Lizhong Chi

Status history

1. 1990 Not studied No one in the registry's bibliography had yet tracked the mood of elite archers before, during and after a mental training programme: the question had no data.
2. 2023 Reported The first data arrive. Sixteen archers from the Chinese national team, eight men and eight women, follow a five-month programme combining mental skills, psychology lectures and cultural education. Total mood disturbance measured with the POMS falls from 123.9 to 118.4 during the intervention, without reaching significance, and to 115.4 in the following phase (p = 0.029 against baseline). There is no control group, the months are those at the start of the pandemic and two archers out of sixteen do not change: a single, limited supporting study, hence reported.

Related

Research lines

• 52 studiesMental training: what has been tested on archers since 1979

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