Autogenic training in archers: Sybil 2025 study

Sixteen Ukrainian archers, all men around twenty (5 masters of sport and 11 candidate masters), were split into two groups of 8. For two months the experimental group did a form of autogenic training designed for archery before every session: 10 to 12 minutes a day, 5 or 6 times a week, with a relaxation phase, a stillness phase and, once shooting began, a mental rehearsal of the shot with eyes closed before each arrow. The control group trained as usual.

The outcome was the concentration of lactate and urea in urine collected before and after training on two occasions: a training session and an official competition. In the training session urinary lactate rose after shooting in both groups, by 14.4% on average, and the text reports a 14.5% greater rise in the experimental group than in the controls, but treats it as no effect of the technique. In competition, by contrast, the experimental group had lactate 9.7% lower than the controls. Urea rose after training in everyone, with no difference between groups. Using analysis of variance, the authors attribute 21.4% of the change in lactate in competition to the autogenic training, and a non-significant 12.2% in training. No shooting scores are reported.

The study took place at the Lviv State University of Physical Culture between September 2023 and March 2024. Allocation to the groups is described as random, without saying how it was done. Urinary lactate was measured with a colorimetric reaction (the Barker and Summerson method of 1941) and urea with a spectrophotometric method using a commercial Lachema kit.

The groups were compared with Student's t-test and with a one-way analysis of variance, from which the authors derive the share of the change in metabolites attributable to the technique. Values were also set against reference ranges for healthy people (0.8 to 1.2 mmol/L for lactate, 3.3 to 5.8 for urea), counting how many measurements lay above them. Results are given as percentage changes and in charts, with no table of absolute values for each group.

With 8 archers per group, and no account of how they were randomised or whether whoever analysed the urine knew the groups, the study can at most suggest a direction. The main weakness is the outcome: urinary lactate depends heavily on how concentrated the urine is, and so on how much the archer has drunk, and the paper does not say the measurements were corrected for creatinine or urine density. Archery also produces little lactate, and attributing a 9.7% difference to the psychological load of competition is a step the data do not support.

Several details do not fit. The abstract and the methods give the groups the same mean age but with the standard deviations swapped, and an age range of 19 to 22 with a standard deviation of 0.24 is hard to believe. The ethics committee appears to have approved the study in May 2024, after the measurements had ended. The text says the technique had no effect in training, yet for the same occasion it reports a significant 14.5% difference between groups. The discussion claims that lower lactate goes with better performance, though no scores were published. That urinary lactate marks psychological state remains the authors' hypothesis.

For an archer, the study does not show whether autogenic training improves shooting: the score was not measured, or at least not published. What it does describe is a concrete mental routine, with relaxation before training and mental rehearsal of the shot before each arrow, much like routines many coaches already use, and an attempt to measure its effect with a urine test rather than a questionnaire.

The idea of a biological indicator of competition stress, collected without needles, is interesting, but urinary lactate has not been validated for this purpose and the data in this study are not enough to change that. In the registry it counts as exploratory work on mental training in archers, with an indirect outcome and several figures that do not fit together.