Going for a ramble.....verbally

Hi all, so been a few weeks since I posted anything on here and I just thought I would have a little ramble.
So good news, yesterday was our club championships and I managed to lift the freestyle re-curve cup, the only fly in the ointment was that the four people that I would really have like to beat to take the cup did not shoot, but hay ho I am the CHAMPION!  :)

while we were shooting I encountered a mystery to rival Loch Ness.
There was an archer who was bemoaning the fact that their sight marks were not working and that they were fine just a few days ago so something must be wrong. I try to say to him that if the bow had not been altered and the weather was not a big factor ( it was  a lovely  day with just a gentle breeze), then the biggest variable was the big fleshy bit hanging on the end of the bow. He was insistent that he was doing exactly the same as he always did and would not contemplate that it could be him, but he also insisted that he had not altered his bow in any way. So what could have caused this apparent loss of performance?

Well I think we all know the answer, it was those little green me...........

No it was the archer of course it was, but why did he not realise it?

Well I think it was that although we all notice things that make a big difference to our shooting, like a pull or a sprain that we can feel, we don't always notice the small things that can effect our shooting. We are not static our bodies are constantly changing, when things are not working as they should your first port of call should be you. Stop check that your sight mark is right and everything is tight, think about what you are doing, go through your shot cycle in your head, for me this is :

Nock arrow.

Relax shoulders and look straight ahead (for me that is at the archer to my right as I am right handed).

Turn head to look at target and focus on the gold.

Lift bow to put the pin on the gold keeping the shoulder down and the arm relaxed.

Open the bow hand as I start to draw slowly towards my anchor, loading the weight onto my back muscles.

As I reach my anchor my draw slows right down to a crawl but DOES NOT STOP ( this way lies creeping). Remember I do not use a clicker .

Let the pin settle on the gold (let it float a little).

Roll the draw arm shoulder back and relax the fingers just a little bit so they are pulled off the string and the hand comes back to brush my ear lobe (just cos I like it!).

Hold! don't move until you hear the arrow land.

 Then take your next arrow from the quiver.

 This might seem a very long winded cycle but by focusing on the minute you can exclude anything that is distracting. The whole of the above only takes me about ten seconds to run through in my head, about half the time it takes me to actually shoot an arrow. About ninety five percent of the time my second arrow goes right where it should.

Aiming without aiming?

Ok so I went to the club on Sunday and tried out my old Winstar with the Tomcat limbs on it and it was fun.

The idea of instinctive shooting appeals to me and it is as far away from sighted target as you can get, with string/face walking and gaping you are still using a distance reference and adjusting to compensate for it. With instinctive the idea is to shoot at the target almost the same way you would throw a stone, with no conscious thought about adjusting for distance. This is not something that happens overnight, it is a case of shooting lots of arrows at a target and your body/brain should gradually learn where to aim.
 I recently had a chance to see some instinctive shooting at the club, our field archers asked if there is a way to have a classification system as there is in target so that they can gauge their progress. The solution that was put forwards is a set field course that will challenge even the most experienced archers and that we can setup again exactly the same any time we want to. A lot of thought went into how high a score would be needed for each classification and we needed as many archers shooing as many styles as possible to shoot the course to see if these were right. One the day I was shooing with my targeted recurve and just felt so out of my depth, each target is set at a different distance and height often partially obscured by leaves or long grass, all making it very hard to judge the distance. On most of the targets I was withing ten meters with my first guess and when my first arrow was high or low my second shot normally hit (usually not in the kill zone), but by the end of the round I was really feeling uncomfortable shooting  not knowing the distance. The three people I was shooting with were all shooting instinctive and all did much better than me.

Even though we have quite a few barebow archers at the club, I decided to just setup and see how I got on. So I set up a boss on the ten yard line over on the practice side of the field and had a go, just drew up focused on the gold and released....straight over the top of the boss, tired it again with the same results. OK so it looks like I need to aim a bit, or as it turns out find a sort of neutral position to start from. Once I worked that out I started putting nice groups of six arrows on the boss, well it was only ten yards and soon they were getting to close real arrow bashing stuff. So I pushed the boss out to twenty and then thirty yards, now things started to get a bit more interesting.

The first thing I noticed at the longer distance was that I kept looking for a sight or at least a reference point on my bow and had to really work  at just looking at the boss, the second was that as I relaxed and stopped looking for a reference my arrows started to group up again but as soon as I start to 'try' harder things went awry including arrows flying over the boss again. By the end of my little session my group was  moving in towards the gold almost of it's own accord. So not a bad start going to keep at it and see how I get on.

A better perspective.

Just a quick one today thinking about Mike's bow being a bit buzzy and not a quiet as he expected it to be.

While I was shooting on Sunday one of our newer members commented on my "Professional" bow, I explained about the reasons for the strange design of the Revolution and asked if he would like to try a few shots with it. He is a beginner who started shooting in October last year and his current bow is an SF with 24# limbs, he had also spent the last hour consistently shooting four and five gold ends at fifty and sixty yards.
So after I had finished shooting my round I pulled the boss into thirty yards and let him loose, the two things I noticed were that he shot six arrows into a group about six inches across (you know how sometimes you just hate people), the second was that my bow sounded much quieter than when I am shooting it. Just being four feet away made such a difference.

Hello again,

I went out and shot an Albion round on Wednesday my second long round of the year so far and I was quite pleased, my score was 607. Last season I had managed to get to a personal best of 701 but then I did not shoot for about eight weeks and that put me back a bit and the winter set in and well you know how it goes. But now it is a new season and I am going to get my first class classification this year ( I think). I managed to get some groups of three four and on one end five arrows out at 80 yards, which is nice because now I can start to get my sight setup properly. I see so many people adjusting  their sight almost every end and sometimes every arrow, what is that about?

You cannot get you sight adjusted unless you have a group, otherwise it just does not work and all you do is chase your arrows around the boss. Once you have a group (all your arrows don't need to so close that they are touching as long as they are all in an area maybe a foot in diameter that's a group) you are shooting consistently and  then you can adjust your sight so that they are centred around the gold.