Virtual reality and imagery in archery: Bedir 2021

Thirty-four athletes from three precision sports, 14 curlers, 13 bowlers and 7 archers, were randomly split into three groups and followed for four weeks. One group did conventional mental training: progressive muscle relaxation, watching a video of a successful shot on a laptop, then imagining the same shot. The second did the same, but with the video filmed in 360 degrees and watched through a virtual reality headset. The control group watched entertaining videos about their sport. After each session everyone took 10 warm-up shots and 5 shots scored by experts from 0 to 10.

In the headset group the mean shot score rose from 4.68 at baseline to 7.33 in week four; in the laptop video group from 5.21 to 6.60; in the control group from 5.06 to 5.37. Both mental training groups got worse in the first week (4.22 and 4.79) and then improved. Comparing gains from baseline, the headset group was ahead of the other two from week two and stayed there to week four; the laptop group pulled away from the controls only in week four. The movement imagery questionnaire (MIQ-R) improved in both mental training groups (from 3.97 to 5.27 with the laptop video, from 3.57 to 5.04 with the headset) and hardly at all in the controls (from 3.97 to 4.17), with no difference between the two methods. Interviews with six athletes describe scepticism and stress in the early sessions, followed by growing confidence.

Athletes had to be of a high standard and have no previous experience of mental training: the curlers came from the Turkish first league, the bowlers from the Atatürk University team and the archers from national leagues. Of the 39 who enrolled, 34 finished (mean age 21.7 years, about 7.4 hours of training a week). There were 3 archers in the control group, 2 in the laptop video group and 2 in the headset group. For archery the task was at 30 metres, with what the authors call a "classic" bow, on a square target 30 centimetres across, scored from 0 to 10 as shown in a figure in the paper; curling and bowling had their own tasks, converted to the same scale.

The video of a successful shot was filmed with a GoPro Fusion 360-degree camera mounted on the head of a leading athlete, from the changing room through to the shot, so that the viewer saw it in the first person. Sessions lasted about two hours, three days a week for four weeks. The baseline score was the mean of 15 shots over three days; after that the daily scores were averaged for each week. The analysis is a repeated-measures analysis of variance, with pairwise comparisons corrected by the Bonferroni method (threshold p < 0.017).

For archers the main limitation is numbers: 7 archers in all, split into groups of two or three, with results reported only for the three sports combined. There is no knowing whether the effect holds for archery in particular, and the archery task, 5 shots at 30 metres on a 30-centimetre square, is a long way from competition. The comparison between groups on its own was not significant (p = 0.344): the finding lies in how the groups changed over time.

The headset group started from the lowest mean (4.68 against 5.21 and 5.06), which leaves room for regression towards the mean. The paper does not say whether the experts scoring the shots knew which group each athlete was in, and those using the headset knew they were trying the study's new method. The control group did no mental training at all, so part of the advantage may come from the attention received. There are no measurements after the four weeks ended. Some tables are inconsistent: the control group has different means in the normality table (5.74 at baseline) and the results table (5.06), and the percentages of men and women in one group do not match the counts.

The study tests a simple idea: making the material that imagery is built on more realistic, by showing the shot in the first person and in 360 degrees rather than on a flat screen. In these athletes the idea gave an advantage in task scores, but with 7 archers and short tasks it does not show that a headset improves archery in competition.

Two observations are of interest to coaches. The first is the dip in the first week in both mental training groups, which the athletes put down to scepticism and the stress of a new method: in this study the benefit came only after a few sessions of adjustment. The second is that the ability to imagine movement, as measured by the questionnaire, grew by the same amount with the laptop video and the headset: whatever difference in scores there is between the two methods does not seem to be linked to how vivid the athletes reported their imagery to be.