Meditation and archery accuracy: Nuradila 2024

Ten secondary school pupils enrolled in an after-school archery course, in the Sleman district of Indonesia, went through eighteen meditation sessions over six weeks. Before and after they shot 36 arrows at 30 metres, and the score rose from an average of 260.60 to an average of 276.10 points out of 360 (t = 15.810, p < 0.001).

The improvement applies to all ten participants individually: 13, 15, 16, 11, 15, 12, 20, 15, 20 and 18 points more. Nobody got worse and nobody stayed level. Starting scores ran from 225 to 278 points, final scores from 243 to 290, so the order among the pupils stayed much the same: the strongest and the weakest in the group were the same before and after. The authors conclude that meditation improves archery accuracy, and in the abstract they add balance to that claim.

The design is a before and after on a single group, with no comparison. Measurements were taken on the archery field of the Budi Mulia 2 secondary school and at the Selabora centre of the Yogyakarta sport science faculty, over six weeks: first the test, then eighteen meditation sessions, then the same test.

The accuracy test consists of six arrows per end and six ends, that is 36 arrows, with three minutes allowed per end, at 30 metres, and the score is the sum of the arrow values as in a competition. The analysis is a paired samples t-test in SPSS, preceded by checks of normality (Shapiro-Wilk, p = 0.210 before and 0.052 after) and homogeneity.

About the meditation itself the paper says almost nothing: not the length of a session, not the type of practice, not who led it, not where it took place, not what the pupils did during the rest of the six weeks. In the discussion, meditation is described in general terms as regulating the breath, focusing the mind and introducing positive suggestions. No ages, sexes, bow types, draw weights or years of practice are reported for the ten participants.

This record is short because the paper is short, and its main weakness is the design. Ten youngsters who train at archery for six weeks improve their score even without meditation, because they are training and because they are taking the same test a second time. With no comparison group there is no way to separate meditation from practice, from familiarity with the test, and from the development of children of that age. That all ten improved by between 11 and 20 points makes the result consistent, but not therefore attributable to the meditation.

The programme, moreover, is not described: eighteen sessions of something the text does not define cannot be reproduced. Nobody was blinded to anything, the pupils knew they were in the study, and whoever scored the arrows knew which test they were scoring.

The statistics also carry traces of another paper. The article announces three hypotheses and an independent samples test, yet only one test appears; the table headed as the hypothesis test actually reports the correlation between before and after (0.985), while the value t = 15.810 appears only in the body text; the homogeneity check is reported with 18 degrees of freedom, as though there were two groups of ten. The abstract claims improved balance, which was not measured in any way. The journal is regional and the article is in Indonesian, with an English abstract.

For an archer, this study does not show that meditation gains fifteen points over 36 arrows. It shows that ten secondary school pupils, over six weeks during which, among other things, they meditated eighteen times, improved by about fifteen points on a 30-metre test they had already taken once. The comparison that would be needed, a group of classmates training the same way without meditating, is absent.

What remains is a piece of context about after-school courses: in a group of young beginners, the score over 36 arrows at 30 metres sat around 260 out of 360 and nobody went backwards in six weeks. In the registry this source counts as weak evidence on meditation in young beginners, and the gap it points to is exactly that: for an intervention this easy to organise, no comparison with a control group was made.