https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/mind/parasympathetic-activity-experienced-novice-archers Changes to this claim in Matteo Campagna's evidence registry: its status, its year-by-year history, revisions of the page. en-gb https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/mind/parasympathetic-activity-experienced-novice-archersThere is only one direct comparison: seventeen adolescent male archers, ten experienced ones with about four years of practice and seven novices, monitored beat by beat during an indoor competition at 18 metres. Over the twenty seconds before each release the experienced archers have higher RMSSD and pNN50, and compared with their own resting values pNN50 rises by 10.2 points in the experienced archers and falls by 2.6 in the novices; at rest, before the start, the two groups could not be told apart. Three things stop the claim going further. The first is that the effects are small, with eta squared between 0.005 and 0.1, and the thousand arrows are treated as independent observations. The second is that experience goes together with age, 16.5 years against 14, so part of the difference may simply be growing up. The third is that parasympathetic activity is inferred from heart rate variability rather than measured, and its link to shooting is not straightforward: in the experienced archers the high frequency index rises between the first and second arrow of the end while the score falls, and what is most closely tied to the score is not the heart but shot time, 28.1 seconds per arrow against 20.2. A 2020 Turkish study of thirty-nine novices complicates the picture: from rest to shooting the parasympathetic index rises in them too, but only in the better-shooting half. The 2022 systematic review reads the literature the same way as the claim, but for the comparison between experienced archers and novices it relies on the 2011 study.claim:parasimpatico-esperti-gara:revision:2026-09-17:3Thu, 17 Sep 2026 08:00:00 GMT https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/mind/parasympathetic-activity-experienced-novice-archersclaim:parasimpatico-esperti-gara:new_claim:2026-08-31:riportatoMon, 31 Aug 2026 08:00:00 GMT