The Power of Mindfulness
Have you ever watched Olympic pistol shooting? If you have, you’ll remember the extravagant eye wear, noise cancelling headphones, and unique positions that the athletes stand in. However in 2024, Turkish shooter Yusuf Dikec took the world (and internet) by storm. He didn’t have any fancy eyewear (except for his glasses), wore no headphones, and stood as nonchalantly as possible, hand in pocket.
His result? An Olympic silver medal for his country.
So how did Dikec compete at the highest level without following the same norms as all of the other elite competitors? Mindfulness may be the answer.
Guo et al. (2025) article titled “From Mind to Marksmanship” aimed to investigate the mechanisms underlying mindfulness meditation on shooting performance.
The authors recruited 119 novice shooting athletes, assigning them to a mindfulness training group or a control group. For 18 days before shooting practice, the mindfulness group conducted a 15 minute mindfulness training procedure while the control group simply went about their business as normal.
The authors measured participants’ mindfulness level, attentional control, subjective sleep quality, perceived stress, and state anxiety before and after the intervention each day. Overall, the shooting performance was assessed after the 18 day period.
Results showed that the mindfulness group saw significant improvements in:
Shooting performance
Mindfulness level
Attention control
Stress and anxiety
Analyses of these results concluded that the change in attention control was the most influential predictor of post-intervention shooting performance improvements. The authors posit that attentional control plays a crucial role in our ability to maintain focus while filtering out distractions. Therefore, mindfulness training has significant performance benefits for precision-based sports like shooting and darts.
TLDR, what does this mean for you? Mindfulness training can improve competitive precision-based performance primarily through attention control development, the ability to maintain focus while limiting distractions. Furthermore, mindfulness training can help alleviate stress and anxiety while also boosting mindfulness levels.
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Guo, J. H., Zhou, X. N., Huang, C. W., Hu, T., Wang, M. Y., & Jiang, C. L. (2025). From mind to marksmanship: Harnessing brief mindfulness meditation to enhance attention control and performance in novice athletes. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/10413200.2025.2495569