Lots of archers blame "the mind" for screwing up shots. Others keep telling you not to mend what ain't broken. They like to leave their techniques well alone... especially aiming techniques.
I have a different take on that. I like the mind and think it's a powerful tool either God or evolution (depending on your beliefs) gave us for a purpose. I'm not very willing to limit that purpose just to save myself some tedium or because some guru tells me to go with the flow. Or because some other guru didn't put enough pages in his book.
As your hunting season in the US draws to an end, perhaps some people will find my ideas and recent experiences interesting. I'm still very much a developing archer, but so are many others here. And there's one thing I've noticed about the way our resident champions talk: Nearly all like to be on auto-pilot in competition. But none advocate mindless shooting on the practice range.
I think a technique that 'simply works' is fine for your immediate purposes, but if you can't pinpoint and understand its details, you're probably sitting on a time bomb. If it breaks at any time, you can't easily fix it. You may not even be able to diagnose it. It's like a car. It will fail at some stage... may that day be far off. And you will most probably lack the expertise to mend it when that happens. Unlike a car however, it doesn't lend itself to professional care. There's nowhere to take it when it stops working.
Periods when you don't need to be at the top of your shooting abilities are a good time to take things apart. Not necessarily things that are broken, but also things that work well - yet work without your full understanding. If there is something undefined in your shooting sequence, now may be a good time to pinpoint it and get a more explicit grasp on it. Then if it breaks at any time, you can restore it with little ado. You then have the plan and the parts... all you need is to put them together again.
I just spent two weeks dismantling one part of my aiming and sighting sequence (not my aiming system, just the way I implement it). After two days of that, I could hardly shoot anymore. I was spending more time retrieving arrows from the field behind my garden than loosing new ones. I really tried every variation and emphasis I could imagine. I subdivided steps and rearranged them countless times. I spent hours doing research on the Web or optical experiments without a bow.
Then I began to reconstruct things... carefully putting everything that made sense back into a defined sequence, one I could even write down (six or seven steps for something that takes a couple of seconds). It doesn't take very long to re-ingrain that kind of thing. And now, I'm shooting about the same as beforehand... perhaps a little more consistently, but only a tad so.
Not worth the trouble?
Perhaps not. If I were competing tomorrow and it were a good day, I'd probably do no better or worse than a few weeks ago.
BUT: I could now diagnose more mistakes than beforehand. And repair them at very short notice. If it were a bad day for me, I could probably make it work better than a bad day last month.
Best,
Martin
I have a different take on that. I like the mind and think it's a powerful tool either God or evolution (depending on your beliefs) gave us for a purpose. I'm not very willing to limit that purpose just to save myself some tedium or because some guru tells me to go with the flow. Or because some other guru didn't put enough pages in his book.
As your hunting season in the US draws to an end, perhaps some people will find my ideas and recent experiences interesting. I'm still very much a developing archer, but so are many others here. And there's one thing I've noticed about the way our resident champions talk: Nearly all like to be on auto-pilot in competition. But none advocate mindless shooting on the practice range.
I think a technique that 'simply works' is fine for your immediate purposes, but if you can't pinpoint and understand its details, you're probably sitting on a time bomb. If it breaks at any time, you can't easily fix it. You may not even be able to diagnose it. It's like a car. It will fail at some stage... may that day be far off. And you will most probably lack the expertise to mend it when that happens. Unlike a car however, it doesn't lend itself to professional care. There's nowhere to take it when it stops working.
Periods when you don't need to be at the top of your shooting abilities are a good time to take things apart. Not necessarily things that are broken, but also things that work well - yet work without your full understanding. If there is something undefined in your shooting sequence, now may be a good time to pinpoint it and get a more explicit grasp on it. Then if it breaks at any time, you can restore it with little ado. You then have the plan and the parts... all you need is to put them together again.
I just spent two weeks dismantling one part of my aiming and sighting sequence (not my aiming system, just the way I implement it). After two days of that, I could hardly shoot anymore. I was spending more time retrieving arrows from the field behind my garden than loosing new ones. I really tried every variation and emphasis I could imagine. I subdivided steps and rearranged them countless times. I spent hours doing research on the Web or optical experiments without a bow.
Then I began to reconstruct things... carefully putting everything that made sense back into a defined sequence, one I could even write down (six or seven steps for something that takes a couple of seconds). It doesn't take very long to re-ingrain that kind of thing. And now, I'm shooting about the same as beforehand... perhaps a little more consistently, but only a tad so.
Not worth the trouble?
Perhaps not. If I were competing tomorrow and it were a good day, I'd probably do no better or worse than a few weeks ago.
BUT: I could now diagnose more mistakes than beforehand. And repair them at very short notice. If it were a bad day for me, I could probably make it work better than a bad day last month.
Best,
Martin
