Mindfulness in elite archers: Terzioğlu 2020

Eleven recurve archers from the Turkish national team, at the preparation camp for the Rio 2016 Games, attended eight weekly 90-minute mindfulness-based sessions between January and March 2016. Before and after the programme they completed two questionnaires: the OMSAT-3, which measures twelve mental skills, and the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, which measures five aspects of mindfulness.

Four of the twelve mental skills increased: relaxation (from 20.64 to 22.36), activation (from 20.73 to 23.18), competition planning (from 14.91 to 16.82) and refocusing (from 13.09 to 15.91), with p between 0.005 and 0.044. The other eight, including self-confidence, focusing, fear control and imagery, did not change significantly; imagery came close to the threshold (p = 0.072). Four of the five mindfulness facets increased: observing (from 28.64 to 32.55), describing, acting with awareness and not reacting to inner experience (from 16.73 to 20.00). The fifth, non-judging of inner experience, did not rise and in fact fell slightly (from 21.09 to 20.27). Shooting score was not measured.

This is a single-group study measured before and after, with no control group. The participants were 5 women and 6 men aged 16 to 25 (mean 20.27), who had taken up the sport between the ages of 3 and 15. The programme was delivered by the first author, once a week during the camp, and at least one session came after a heavy day of training. Sessions combined elements of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy: diaphragmatic breathing, body scan, attention to breathing and bodily sensations, progressive muscle relaxation, exercises for noticing and letting go of negative thoughts, work on cognitive distortions and, finally, happiness cards carrying sentences to read before training and competition. There was homework every week.

The Turkish OMSAT-3 has 48 items on a seven-point scale, the mindfulness questionnaire 39 items on a five-point scale. The first test was taken in the first session and the second in the last. Differences were analysed with the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, which suits small samples.

Without a control group the effect of the programme cannot be separated from everything else going on in those two months: the camp, the approach of Olympic selection, the normal development of young athletes, and familiarity with answering the same questionnaires. The paper acknowledges this and notes that there is no follow-up either. The programme was delivered by the study's first author, and the answers are self-ratings given in the last session, when the archers knew perfectly well what was expected of them.

Eleven people is a small number, and with 17 statistical comparisons (twelve skills and five mindfulness facets) and no correction, some significant results may arise by chance. Some OMSAT-3 scales in the Turkish version have low reliability: 0.55 for fear control and 0.56 for imagery. Above all, the programme was not linked to shooting, either through training scores or competition results, as the paper itself admits.

For a high-level archer the study shows that an eight-week mindfulness programme, one session a week, was taken up by a national team in the middle of Olympic preparation, and that by the end the archers described themselves as better able to relax, to raise their activation when needed, to plan a competition and to regain focus after a distraction. These are skills that matter in shooting, refocusing between one arrow and the next above all.

What the study does not say is whether any of this changed the way they shot or their scores, or whether the change would have happened anyway. It is also telling that self-confidence, focusing and fear control did not move: anyone looking to mindfulness as a tool against fear in competition finds no support for that here. The description of the eight sessions is detailed enough to serve as an outline for a sport psychologist.