Target panic, drills and imagery: Priambudi 2023 study

Twelve para-archers from the provincial squad of South Kalimantan, Indonesia, followed a five-week programme combining archery-specific physical exercises (the SPT drills) with visualisation, aimed at reducing the symptoms of target panic. Observers gave each archer a percentage score on four symptoms: flinching of the bow arm, punching with the release hand, freezing on aim or at the clicker, and snap shooting. Anyone reaching 75% was judged able to keep them under control.

At the first observation 3 of the 12 archers passed the threshold, with individual scores between 43.75 and 81.25. After the first cycle, two weeks with eight sessions, there were 5; after the second, three weeks with twelve sessions, there were 10. Of the two still below the threshold, one got worse in the first cycle (from 43.75 to 31.25, then 37.5) and the other rose from 50 to 62.5. According to the authors the most visible change was in the follow-through, which by the end was acceptable in almost everyone; the most widespread problem at the start was aiming, since nearly all of them said they released with the sight still outside the gold, which is snap shooting.

This is action research in two cycles (planning, action, observation, reflection), carried out between the third week of May and the fourth week of June 2023 at the provincial Paralympic committee's range in Banjarbaru. The archers were 9 men and 3 women in the W2 and Standing classes, aged between 20 and 46, ranging from beginners with less than a year of practice to one elite archer with more than nine; they shot recurve, compound and the standard bow of the Indonesian ronde nasional. Sessions lasted 30 minutes, four times a week, within repetition shooting practice. The physical part included flexibility, structure, holding and power exercises, while the visualisation consisted of imagining a well-executed shot. The paper does not, however, describe the individual exercises or the visualisation protocol.

The instrument was an observation sheet validated by experts, with a score for each of the four symptoms converted into a percentage. The analysis is purely descriptive: it counts how many archers pass the 75% threshold at each assessment, with no control group and no statistical test. The second cycle was decided at the end of the first and made a week longer, because in the authors' view the archers had not yet fully understood what the coach was asking of them.

The numbers are small and the design is weak: twelve archers, no comparison group, no measure of score on the target. The outcome is the number of people above a threshold chosen by the authors, on a sheet filled in by eye by observers who may or may not have known which assessment they were scoring; the acknowledgements also make clear that the authors were coaching the squad at the time. Over five weeks of training a group can improve on its own, and the 75% threshold turns small shifts into jumps: three archers move from not qualified to qualified by going from 68.75 to 75, a rise of 6.25 points, the smallest step on the sheet.

Target panic is not defined by any precise criterion: the paper refers to archers who showed at least one of the symptoms. Some figures in the text cannot be reconstructed, such as the 99.98% increase and the 28.58% decrease quoted for the second cycle, and the conclusion speaks of two five-week cycles where the method describes one of two weeks and one of three. The archers were para-athletes with different classifications and equipment, and the authors themselves warn that the result should not be carried over to other groups without caution.

For archers and coaches the study offers a working idea rather than evidence: pairing shooting with physical exercises targeted at drawing and holding, together with visualising a well-executed shot, and observing the symptoms one by one instead of talking about target panic in general. The four-item sheet (bow arm, release hand, aiming or clicker time, moment of release) is the most reusable part, because it forces you to look at where exactly the shot breaks down.

What produced the improvement, though, the study cannot say: it could have been the programme, the coach's extra attention, five weeks of practice, or a sheet filled in by people hoping to see progress. The authors themselves tie the result to how well the archer understands what the coach asks and how consistently the exercises are applied during repetitions. In the registry it therefore counts as a description of a field intervention, with no comparison that measures its effect.