Meditation and focus in archers: Valentine 2024

At a university club in Medan, Indonesia, six archers did about ten minutes of mindfulness meditation at the end of training sessions and six others did not; before and after, all twelve took a paper-based concentration test, the Grid Concentration Exercise. The archers had been chosen from the club's 30 because their concentration ranged from very poor to good, leaving room for improvement.

In the meditation group the mean score went from 16 to 21.67, and all six improved, by 3 to 8 points. In the control group the mean went from 15.67 to 16.33, with individual changes between minus 1 and plus 2 (the table and the text give 16 at the start, but the individual values come to 15.67). On the Wilcoxon test the improvement in the meditation group was significant (p = 0.027) and that of the control group was not (p = 0.157); after the programme the two groups differed (p = 0.027).

The twelve archers were split into two groups of six by matching them on their starting scores, so that both groups began at similar levels; the baseline comparison showed no difference (p = 0.414). The Grid Concentration Exercise is a grid holding the numbers 00 to 99 in random order: within two minutes the athlete has to find and mark them in sequence, and the score is the highest number reached minus errors. The authors report a reliability coefficient of 0.978 and the approval of a sport psychologist.

Meditation took place after physical and technical training, for about ten minutes per session, and included attention to the breath, relaxation and verbal suggestions about concentration. The control group did nothing in place of the meditation. The paper does not say how many sessions there were or over how many weeks.

The sample is tiny, six people per group chosen precisely because they had room to improve, and allocation was not random. The outcome is a paper-based concentration test, not shooting: there is no score on the target. Those who meditated also received attention and an extra dedicated slot, while the control group received nothing, so part of the difference may come from motivation or effort in repeating the test; nor do we know whether whoever marked the grids knew which group each archer was in.

There are errors in the figures. In the table archer F goes from 14 to 21 but the gain is given as 6 instead of 7, so the mean gain is 5.67 rather than 5.5; the control group's baseline mean is 15.67, not 16; and the abstract gives a control gain of 0.76 where the table says 0.67. The duration and number of sessions are not reported, and some titles in the reference list have nothing to do with the subject.

For an archer the study is weak evidence that a few minutes of meditation after training may improve a paper-based attention test. It says nothing about what happens on the shooting line, where the concentration required is different from the kind used to hunt for numbers in a grid, and it says nothing about how long the effect lasts.

As a practice, ten minutes of breathing and relaxation at the end of a session costs little and takes no time away from shooting; this paper, however, is not enough to say that it does more than any other quiet moment, or that it improves score.