Visualisation and archery scores: Zervas 1991

Four weeks of relaxation and visualisation did not improve the scores of nine archers on the Greek national team any more than those of nine archers who only trained as usual. The study was run during the indoor season, using two real tournaments of equal importance, four weeks apart, as the before and after measurements.

The treated group went from 498 to 513 points out of 600, the controls from 434 to 454. With an analysis of covariance taking the starting score into account, the difference between the groups at the second tournament is nil (F 0.11). Nor did the three scales of the competitive anxiety questionnaire move: somatic anxiety (F 0.85), cognitive anxiety (F 0.48) and self-confidence (F 0.85), all with no significant difference. The only measure that changed is the feeling of tension, collected on a 1 to 10 scale before and after each relaxation session (F 4.25, p below 0.01): after the session participants felt more relaxed.

Outside the statistics, the authors note that in the second tournament the treated group broke one national record and two personal records, and that seven of the nine reported having felt totally involved in their shooting many times, two always. They also add the argument that raising a score from 498 is harder than raising one from 434: that is an observation of theirs, not a correction applied to the data.

Eighteen athletes, six women and three men per group, aged between 13 and 44 (mean 25.0) and with three to five years of competition behind them (mean 3.8). The nine in the experimental group were all members of the Greek national team, with international experience; the nine controls were chosen from among the best archers who had not reached the national standard. None had previously been through any mental training. The controls did the same physical training as the treated group and nothing else: there was no sham condition, and the groups were not allocated at random.

The programme is what the literature calls visuomotor behaviour rehearsal: centring attention on the breath, brief relaxation and rehearsal in imagery. Eight meetings over four weeks, two a week, the first of two hours, the second of an hour and a half, the other six of an hour, plus daily practice at home. The archers learned to see themselves performing six phases of the shot (preparation, loading the bow with grip and fingers on the string, addressing the target with anchor and aim, release, follow through, recovery), first one at a time and then in sequence, with the option of staying longer on a phase they wanted to correct. For the kinaesthetic side they worked in pairs, describing to a partner what they felt in the present tense, and they used a stopwatch because the rules allowed 150 seconds for three arrows. The national team's head coach attended every meeting.

The measures: the score over 60 arrows at 18 metres, out of 600, with a 4 cm centre; the competitive state anxiety questionnaire in its second version, given 15 minutes before each tournament; a test of imagery ability on entry, which everyone passed; the 1 to 10 tension scale; and, in the final week, a written report from participants on their own commitment to the programme.

Nine people per group are too few to find anything other than a large difference, and the authors did not calculate in advance how many were needed. The two groups started from very different levels, 498 against 434 points, and they differ by selection too: on one side the national team, on the other those who had not made it. The analysis of covariance adjusts for the starting score, but it does not make the two groups comparable on everything else.

There is no random allocation and no sham condition: the treated group received eight sessions of attention, in the presence of the national coach, who voiced his support for the programme by citing champions who used similar strategies. That is part of the treatment, and it cannot be separated from the relaxation and the imagery.

The authors themselves put the null result down to the shortness of the programme, four weeks, and explain that they could not extend it because the second tournament was the last indoor event of the year. That is one possible explanation among others, and the study cannot distinguish it from the possibility that the treatment does nothing.

The national and personal records mentioned in the discussion enter no analysis: there were only two tournaments, and in any tournament records fall without an intervention. In the copy of the text we read, the score table is laid out in such a way that the standard deviations cannot be assigned to the four cells with confidence: this record gives the means only.

For an archer the useful finding is the negative one: a structured programme of relaxation and visualisation, eight meetings over four weeks with daily practice at home, did not shift competition scores any more than ordinary training did, and did not lower the anxiety measured by a questionnaire before the event. That holds for already trained archers, shooting indoors, over a four-week window.

What did move was the subjective sense of things: after each session participants felt more relaxed, and in their final reports several wrote that they had learned something they also used off the shooting line, in exams or in difficult situations. That is a reported outcome, not one measured on the target, and the study does not link it to the score.

The study does not show that mental training is useless: it shows that this programme, in this format and over this length of time, produced no visible difference in eighteen people. The authors themselves point to the duration as the weak point, and in the registry this remains an open question rather than an answer.