When an archer asks me whether mental training is worth it, they usually have a bad competition in mind and the feeling of having shot worse than in practice. The measurements taken on archers give a more qualified answer than most people expect. In the registry, the claim that mental skills training improves the score is contested, because among the studies with a comparison group published in reliable venues two point one way and two the other. What moves more often is what archers report on questionnaires, confidence above all, and longer programmes do better on average than short ones, although that comparison is between different studies.
This is the page to start from for the mental side of archery. It sets out what has been measured, with the status of each claim in the registry, and points to the articles on the individual tools: imagery, meditation and mindfulness, and breathing before the shot.
What changes between practice and competition
On the shooting line it is taken for granted that archers shoot worse in competition, but the few data comparing the two settings do not show it. In five university kyudo archers followed over the days before a competition and during it, the probability of hitting does not fall, and in a second group of six it rises in some and falls in others, with no common direction. The only figure pointing the other way concerns three Korean women archers in contention for the national team, below their practice level at the first competition of the season and above it at the next two tournaments. The claim that accuracy does not drop in competition compared with practice is therefore reported, with samples of three to six people and both supporting measurements taken in kyudo, where a shot either hits the target or misses rather than scoring out of ten.
What does change, and here the studies agree, is arousal. That archers are more aroused in competition than in practice is corroborated: in eighteen elite Turkish archers, half an hour before a national indoor competition, seated heart rate was about eight beats a minute higher than before a training session, before a single arrow had been shot. More arousal does not necessarily mean fewer points, though. The link between anxiety and score is contested: it often appears when anxiety is measured shortly before competition on a competitive anxiety scale, with correlations between -0.45 and -0.86, and does not appear when what is measured is trait anxiety or mood on training days. Likewise, a lower heart rate at the moment of the shot goes with better scores in observational studies, but when an intervention has moved heart rate the score has not followed, and the claim is contested.
Nor is the band of arousal in which an archer shoots best the same for everyone. Three top Brazilian archers followed for a whole season had different zones at 70 m on a scale of 1 to 9, between 4.7 and 5.9 for the first, 5.0 and 6.6 for the second and 6.1 and 7.15 for the third, and even inside their own zone each of them still shot mediocre ends. On three people, the claim that the ideal level of arousal differs from archer to archer is reported. What I take from it for competition work is that recognising your own band and getting back into it matters more than calming down as far as possible, although whether getting back into it raises the score has not been tested. Arousal is covered in depth in the article on how fired up you need to be to shoot well, and anxiety in the one on competition anxiety.
What mental training does to the score
Studies of archers that measure the score against a comparison group are few, and those published in reliable venues split two and two. In favour are twelve archers from the Hong Kong squad, who after twelve weeks of mindfulness gain 11.3 points over 72 arrows while their twelve matched controls lose three, and thirty-six Turkish beginners who, after eight weeks of imagery or slow breathing, gain more than a group doing practice alone. Against are eighteen Greek archers who, after four weeks of imagery and relaxation, do no better than the comparison group at two official indoor competitions, and sixteen Ukrainian archers randomly assigned to autogenic training, who after one week are indistinguishable from the controls.
The rest carries less weight. A meta-analysis of seventeen Korean studies gives an average effect of 0.47, but it mixes anxiety, questionnaires and performance; several supporting studies are before-and-after designs with no control group, where a few more weeks of arrows would be enough to explain the gain; and two Indian randomised trials with large gains appear in journals with questionable editorial standards, with the shooting test described briefly or not at all, so the registry reports them but does not use them to decide the status. Among the studies in reliable venues the count stays at two and two, and the claim remains contested.
Confidence, concentration and anxiety
When a mental programme changes something, it shows up more often in what archers report on questionnaires than on the target, and even there not everything moves in the same way. Confidence is what rises most consistently: of the four studies that measure it before and after a programme, three see it go up, and the clearest result again comes from Hong Kong, where state confidence goes from 19.5 to 27 points. In the Chinese national team, sixteen archers followed for five months, it rises significantly only in the months after the programme ends. The claim that mental skills training raises an archer's confidence is reported, with one limitation shared by all four studies: confidence is measured only in those who follow the programme, never in a group carrying on with ordinary training.
The claim that mental training improves concentration is also reported. Three studies of archers point the same way and none points against, but the concentration measured is a pencil-and-paper grid test, not concentration on the target; in the cleanest comparison, six club archers doing progressive muscle relaxation rise from 16 to 21.67 points, while the six in the control group go from 16 to 16.33. The same limitation applies to self-hypnosis. In ten archers from South Sulawesi, a self-hypnosis programme raises the concentration and emotional control they report, and the claim is reported, but they all rise by almost the same amount and their ranking stays almost unchanged, which is what happens when everyone fills in the same questionnaire again after a period of dedicated attention. The score on the target was not looked at.
On pre-competition anxiety the studies disagree, and the claim that mental training lowers pre-competition anxiety is contested. The oldest study with a comparison group, the eighteen Greek archers, does not shift the anxiety measured a quarter of an hour before competition, while the largest falls come from studies with no controls. In a Malaysian study, in a journal with questionable editorial standards, the direction even changes with the technique: imagery combined with self-talk lowers cognitive anxiety from 12.8 to 9.9, while imagery on its own raises it. The only study that isolates breathing, in twenty para-archers from the Indonesian Paralympic Committee training in Bandung and Cimahi, with two months of 4-7-8 breathing, sees sport anxiety fall by just under a third in the trained group, while in the controls it stays put or rises slightly. It is a single study, with five people per division and a questionnaire completed away from competition, and the claim that deep breathing reduces an archer's competition anxiety is reported.
How long a programme should last
There is a number in circulation for programme length, twelve weeks, and it comes from a 2021 Korean meta-analysis: seventeen studies of mental training with archers, published between 1990 and 2017, with 273 participants. Programmes longer than twelve weeks have an average effect of g = 0.58 and shorter ones 0.39, and the difference is significant; how many sessions are held each week and how long each one lasts, on the other hand, make no difference. The claim that mental training pays off more when it runs for at least twelve weeks is reported in the registry.
The limitation is that this is a comparison between different studies, not between two durations tried on the same archers. The long programmes supply 26 effect estimates and the short ones 99, and they may differ in everything else: in the same meta-analysis the gap between university theses and journal articles, 0.75 against 0.38, is larger than the gap due to duration.
Within single programmes the picture points the same way, on very few cases. In three Korean women archers followed for twenty-four weeks, anxiety and confidence barely move until week twenty-one and change only after the final phase, which was training under competition conditions, so there is no telling whether it was the length or the content of that phase that counted; in the Chinese national team, mood and confidence improve significantly only once the programme is over, after five months. A short programme is not useless either: twenty-three Taiwanese university archers, after eight mindfulness sessions over four weeks, go from 613.5 to 621.7 out of 720, although with no control group. In practice I read it this way: twelve weeks is a reasonable horizon for judging a programme, and a few weeks are not enough to say it does not work.
How mental skills fit together
Two ideas I hear often concern the relationship between mental skills. The first is that training one lifts the others too. The only measurement comes from forty-five archers at a Malaysian sports school split into three groups for six weeks, imagery only, self-talk only or both together, and each group also improves in the skill it did not train. The figures do not add up well, though: the self-talk-only group improves in imagery more than the group that actually trained it, from 1,722 to 2,639 points against a rise from 1,820 to 2,327, and somatic anxiety halves in all three groups. It is a before-and-after design with no control group, based entirely on self-assessment, in a journal with questionable editorial standards, and the registry reports it but does not use it to decide the status: the claim that training one mental skill also improves the others remains not studied.
The second is that performing at your best under pressure is a separate ability, not the sum of confidence, concentration and calm. In thirty-two young Malaysian archers who completed a coping skills questionnaire, the peaking under pressure scale breaks away from all the others, while confidence and motivation, concentration and coping with adversity cluster together. However, thirty-two people are few for seven scales, that scale is the least suited to the analysis in that sample, and this journal too has questionable editorial standards: the claim that performing at your best under pressure stands on its own remains not studied. Both ideas are still useful as questions for a coach. If an archer improves on questionnaires and not in competition, I treat pressure as a chapter of its own, and that is a choice of method, not a finding.
What top archers say
The techniques usually taught first, breathing and imagery, are not the ones top archers put first when they describe their own shot. Sixty-five high-level Korean archers, eighteen years old on average with eight years in the sport and an average of 327 out of 360 at 70 m, described in answer to open questions how they arrived at an X. In the preparation phase the most cited category is confidence and a positive mindset, with 25 mentions, followed by a mind cleared of thoughts and of the score, with 17, while psychological regulation techniques come last, with 9 mentions, two of them to imagery and one to deep breathing.
The eight archers of the 1996 Italian Olympic team, interviewed before Atlanta, agree with the Koreans on breathing, because slow deep breathing is mentioned by only one of them and two say they have no need to control heart rate and tension. On imagery they do not: in their accounts it is one of the main strategies, with three archers saying they see themselves from inside and two that they see the arrow reach the gold. The strategy all eight mention is mentally checking the actions and positions of the shot sequence, which is the territory of the pre-shot routine. That is why the claim that high-level archers mention breathing and imagery among the last of their shooting strategies is contested, and it should be read for what it measures: what archers put first when telling their story, not what they do. In a survey of two hundred young elite archers at the European youth championships, more than half say they use breathing exercises in training.
The tools, one by one
Each tool has its own status in the registry, and breathing, imagery and mindfulness also have an article of their own.
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Breathing
The figure in circulation, six breaths a minute, comes from studies of healthy adults, in whom the breath-linked swings in heart rate peak at that pace; it has not been measured in archers, and the claim that breathing at around six breaths a minute brings heart rate variability to its maximum is transferred. On anxiety there is the para-archer study mentioned above. The rest, including breathing at full draw, is in the article on how to breathe before the shot, and heart rate variability has an article of its own.
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Imagery
That imagery practice improves the score has been contested since 1991. Among more than a hundred American archers, those who reported using it more had higher averages, but the first experiment with a comparison group, the eighteen Greek archers, found no advantage, and since then the results have alternated. The experiments are gathered in the article on imagery in archery.
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Mindfulness and meditation
That meditation improves an archer's score is reported, on the only controlled comparison in a reliable venue, the Hong Kong study, which is small and was not randomised. On attentional control six studies of archers give two answers that cannot be reconciled, and the claim is contested. The full picture, with yoga and relaxation, is in the article on meditation, mindfulness and yoga.
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Self-talk
That instructional self-talk improves the score is contradicted, on the only figure from a venue without reservations: in 115 American recurve archers, from beginners to an Olympic gold medallist, how much they talk to themselves in competition has no link with their season's average (r = -0.02), and neither do technical self-instructions (r = 0.06). It is a questionnaire rather than an intervention, and the supporting interventions, which date from 2022, appear in journals with questionable editorial standards. In my own coaching I still prefer short cues that say what to do, and that is a choice of method.
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Reappraising emotions
Reading arousal as readiness rather than anxiety is common advice. The only study, of sixty-one archers from the Chinese national team, found that reappraising one's emotions does not come with better performance: at equal confidence, those who reappraise more often do slightly worse, while reappraisal raises confidence and through that route the link turns positive, and the two paths cancel out. It is an association measured once, with a questionnaire: it says that, overall, reappraisal does not come with better results, not that it is useless.
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Beta-blockers
They lower heart rate, and the idea that they improve aim comes from pistol shooting. In archery they have been banned since 1985, and the only controlled study in archers, a randomised double-blind placebo-controlled trial in fifteen archers from national squads, found no improvement in score, body sway or aiming stability: the claim that beta-blockers improve accuracy in archery is contradicted.
Mock competitions
One of the most widespread ideas is that training under competition conditions, with spectators and noise, gets archers used to pressure. The evidence is a single piece of work, the account published in 2008 by a team of sport psychologists who spent about eighteen months with the six archers of Taiwan's Olympic squad before Athens 2004. Their mock competition had crowd noise, announcements in English, family and friends in the stands, a bus transfer from the warm-up field to the competition field, and wind. Most of the archers felt pressure, and they reported that the experience had taught them how to handle it at later competitions.
That is their impression, gathered by the same authors who ran the programme, with no measure of anxiety or score and no comparison group, and transfer to a real competition was not measured. The simulation was also one part of a broader programme, with breathing work, mental imagery, sleep deprivation and outdoor activities, so the team's best Olympic result, silver in the men's team event and bronze in the women's, cannot be credited to any one of these parts. In 2025 three coaches of the Korean national team said that training in baseball stadiums, to get archers used to crowd noise, had worked, but that is testimony, not measurement. The claim that a mock competition with spectators and noise gets archers used to pressure is reported.
I use simulations anyway, for a practical reason: in competition you shoot against the clock, with scores called out and people around you, and an archer who has already tried those conditions at least knows what to expect. I build them up one variable at a time, first the clock, then scores called aloud, then someone watching, and I do not expect them on their own to take away the pressure of a real competition.
Qualification round, matches and team events
The phases of a competition do not weigh on the mind in the same way. The qualification round is an exercise in consistency spread over 72 arrows, where a single arrow counts for little and what matters most is a routine that stays the same and the ability to reset between ends. In recurve set system matches, three arrows per set and five sets at most, with a one-arrow shoot-off at 5-5, a single arrow counts for far more; in team events, the 120 seconds of an end, six arrows and two per archer, have to be shared with the teammates shooting before and after you.
The only field study comparing the phases of a single competition points the same way. At a continental championship, recurve archers from national squads reported more cognitive anxiety before the individual and team matches than before the qualification round, 5.21 and 5.05 against 3.67 on a scale of one to nine, while perceived arousal did not change between phases. The claim that head-to-head matches put more pressure on archers than the qualification round is reported, and in that study the score was not analysed; where it has been looked at within matches, across more than three thousand shoot-offs the deciding arrow is worth about 1% less than the first-set average. More reported anxiety, then, does not necessarily mean worse arrows, and outright collapse under pressure is the subject of the article on choking.
How I set up a programme
Put together, the picture does not give a recipe, but it does give a few criteria. The first is length: I judge a programme over at least twelve weeks, because that is the horizon over which the Korean meta-analysis sees the largest effects and because, in the cases followed over time, the changes came late. The second is the number of tools: I choose two or three and stick with them, rather than changing technique every time a competition goes badly, because otherwise none of them has time to pay off. The third is where they are trained, which is inside the shooting session and not in a separate one.
The sequence I use starts with the routine and breathing, which are trained on every arrow, adds imagery once the routine is stable, and in the final weeks brings everything into conditions close to competition, with a timer, scores called aloud and someone watching. Within the session, too, the mental work has a set place: the warm-up is shot with attention on the routine, the main block with normal technical work, and the last few ends become a small competition.
The time to start is when things are going well. In my experience a breathing or imagery technique tried for the first time at an important competition does not pay off, because under pressure archers fall back on what they know: techniques are introduced in training, tried at minor competitions and only then brought into the ones that matter. Finally, I measure the work by what the archer does under pressure rather than by the sessions logged in a diary: whether the routine was there on every arrow, whether the breathing came back between ends, whether after a mistake they managed to get back into sequence.
When to see a sport psychologist
An archer can do performance-focused mental work alone or with their coach, but some situations call for a professional. That is the case when competition anxiety starts to spoil sleep, mood or life away from the range in the weeks before an event, when thoughts about past mistakes keep coming back and do not ease with the techniques tried alone, or when an archer starts avoiding competitions for fear of failing. In these cases an article, or the coach's work, is not enough, and the right person is a qualified sport psychologist, ideally one with experience of precision sports.