Archery is often reckoned to be a mental game, and this corner of the site covers some of that.

According to current practice, the mental game can be subdivided quite a bit, into different psych skills that you can develop and use. That's why there's a sub-menu on the left, there. Starting with the self-assessment is one interesting way to decide where to look next.

Does this stuff work?
I wouldn't put stuff on this site if I didn't believe it worked. There's good experimental evidence that it does (serious sports psych students could do worse than check out  Brent Rushall's excellent collection of sports science abstracts to look at some of the objective experimental evidence). Most champions nowadays also say they use at least some of the techniques here to good effect. But see here for a personal opinion on getting the balance right, and don't get lost in your own head at the expense of building great shooting technique!

New Stuff
latest: 12 Dec 2000. All-new pages on Confidence building.

21 Nov 2000: New material on visualisation - so there's now something to see there... :o)
10 Nov: More on handling distractions, including mind clearing and a visual widget on the thought stopping page.
New 5 Nov: With the Concentration topic now in progress, there's a new page on Focussing with a little visual demonstration, and a trivial but quite tricky live concentration exercise to play with.

New 16 Oct: Arousal control is a new menu item on the left, there; it now includes some material on mental warm-up and psyching up as well as pointers to arousal/performance models, practical relaxation and anxiety control.

- Links to other pages in Psych and elsewhere will be added as I get them done.

PS: This page is clearly a building site! You may fall over some empty pages... Also, the psych self-assessment ('profiler') is working for IE4+ browsers, but has a bit of a problem with NetScape right now... don't try unless you like JavaScript errors!