Mental skills training for young archers: Kim 2010

Three archers from the Korean national reserve squad, all 18-year-olds in their second year of high school with eight years of shooting, followed an eight-week mental training programme before the 2009 World Youth Championships. The programme combined breathing and relaxation, heart rate biofeedback while shooting, work on anxiety-related thoughts and a personal competition routine.

The competitive anxiety questionnaire (CSAI-2), completed before, midway and at the end, showed no trend: cognitive anxiety, somatic anxiety and self-confidence fluctuated with no pattern and with large differences between archers. In interviews after the Championships the boys described anxiety tied to specific moments, such as the first head-to-head match or a tied score, in place of the fear of other people's judgement they had reported before the programme. Their bodily reactions to anxiety (racing heart, trembling, loss of feel) were unchanged; what had changed, and become more specific, was how they dealt with them.

At the Championships the three finished first, second and third in the qualification round (1,344, 1,339 and 1,335 points) and shot between 106 and 115 out of 120 in their head-to-head matches. One won the title and the other two finished fifth and seventh. The authors read these results as a positive effect of the programme.

The authors present the work as a set of single cases, chosen because it was first and foremost applied support. The programme, designed with two of the squad's coaches, ran three sessions a week (Monday, Wednesday and Friday) of 60 minutes a day, split between waking, morning training and afternoon training, in three phases: a basic phase (diaphragmatic breathing, sensing the heartbeat), a consolidation phase (progressive muscle relaxation, heart rate biofeedback during practice shooting and simulated competitions) and an application phase (competition routine, regulating arousal at the venue). For the work on thoughts, each archer chose 20 statements from a list of 127, adapted them, and dropped one a day until three remained for use in competition; each built his routine from a pool of behaviours collected from elite archers.

There were three measures: the CSAI-2 in a five-point Korean version, given three times; two semi-structured interviews, before the programme (five questions) and after the Championships (six questions); and the official Championship scores. As each archer's reference average the authors use the FITA single round (90, 70, 50 and 30 metres) from competitions and training between March and June: 1,359, 1,346 and 1,340 points. The data were not analysed statistically because there were so few archers.

With three archers and no comparison group, the design cannot attribute any result to the programme. The Championships were a single event, with no equivalent competition before the programme to compare against, and the judgement of the head-to-head scores rests on a convention in the sport (110 points is a normal performance, 115 a top one) rather than on these archers' own records. In qualification none of them beat his season average; for one of them the text says 15 points below average, but the table gives a gap of 24 (1,335 against 1,359).

The anxiety questionnaire did not move, and the authors explain this with a ceiling effect in top athletes: possible, but an explanation offered after the fact. The interviews were analysed by the same authors who had delivered the programme, with the risk that the boys said what they thought was expected of them. For at least two of the three this was a first World Championships, so the change in what made them anxious may owe more to the new experience than to the programme.

For an archer, the study describes a way of working more than a result: a mental programme built with the coaches, fitted into the training timetable, ending with three personal statements and a written routine for competition. One archer's routine, given in full, runs from arriving at the venue through to the competition ends: checking arrows and sight, relaxing while seated, picturing a good competition, drawing the bow without an arrow to feel the shoulders, and returning to a single point of focus after a poor shot. It is a concrete example of what a pre-competition routine can contain.

The study does not show that the programme raised scores or lowered measured anxiety: the questionnaire did not move, and the excellent Championship results of three of Korea's best juniors cannot be separated from their ability. The interviews leave one candid finding: even after eight weeks of mental work, anxiety at critical moments still showed up in the body as before, and what changed was what the archers did when it arrived.