It’s that time of year. Many of us will be waiting for Santa to deliver an archery wish. Maybe it will be new arrows. How about a new riser, or limbs? Perhaps a coveted new sight? Heck, maybe Santa will shoot his Christmas bazooka and deliver all of the above.

Now what? The elves will have to put everything together without too many missing pieces. What things should you elves be aware? Get the equipment set up properly and do not worry about bow tune.

1. Fit the limbs to the riser, making sure they are straight. This can be an involved process, but let’s simplify it. Using limb gauges, or masking tape, mark the middle of each limb. Then eye the string to bisect both limbs and the riser. If they are not aligned, use the riser’s limb pocket adjustment to get alignment. Done. Do not overthink this.
2. Measure your tiller and set it to 0. Taking your bow square, place it where the limbs meet the riser (both top and bottom limbs) and measure to the string. You want to adjust the tiller bolts (these are the same bolts used to adjust weight) until the measurement is the same length on the top and bottom limbs.
3. Make sure your string is of proper length to get to your desired brace height and affix a nocking point 1/4″ above center. Please note, your string should be long enough to twist into a round bundle.
4. Place your rest on the bow so that the arrow is aligned with the middle of the plunger and there is a very slight up-slope to the rest.
5. Adjust the plunger so that the point of the arrow is slightly to the left of the string. (right handed archer)
6. Adjust your sight so that it bisects the string.
7. Assuming Santa brought properly spined arrows, you are done. If the arrows are over spined, you will have to adjust your sight far to the left to hit the middle of the target. If they are under spined, you will have to adjust your sight far to the right to hit the middle of the target. If this has happened to you, send the elves back to the archery store to buy the properly spined arrows. Please note, new archers shooting arrows not perfectly spined happens quite frequently. Don’t worry about it too much unless you can’t adjust the sight enough to hit the middle, or the arrows are flying horribly down range.

Ok you elves, you’ve done yeoman work to make Christmas just right for the archer in your life. Have an egg nog with an extra shot of what trips your trigger and bask in the glee you’ve brought your archer.

Filed under ‘Stuff Happens’. Enjoy.

Well, here you are, a fairly accomplished shooter who is looking to get better and better. Where do you focus? Perhaps the first thing to do is take stock of where you currently are with your form and if that form is supporting the scores you wish to achieve. What do your videos reveal? What does your coach have to say? What information can you get from your groups? Are your misses close, or egregious?

All of these things will lead you to focus on a certain area of your shot. More likely than not, it will all boil down to something very fundamental. Perhaps this is not what you want to hear, but good archery starts and continues with solid, repeatable fundamentals. It is very easy for someone who has put many thousands of arrows down range to lose sight of some of these building blocks.

Write your shot sequence down on a piece of paper. Check every piece of the sequence. Look at all the static positions. Evaluate all the dynamic moves. Poor dynamic moves are almost always a result of poor static positions.

I think by now you’re saying to yourself, ‘This is a lot of work!’ and of course it is. It’s not sexy. There are no miracle fixes. And constant vigilance must be undertaken to maintain a sound shot.

The heart of the matter is that advanced shooters should pay as much attention to shot fundamentals as beginning shooters. Perhaps even more, as those things learned many years ago are taken for granted and perhaps have changed over time. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, The price of archery excellence is eternal vigilance.

Inertia is a powerful force in nature. It is natural and easy to be complacent with success. As it relates to archery, making a change that will move you from relative competency to a higher level is extremely difficult on a few fronts.

Firstly, if an archer is shooting good scores, given where they are in the sport, why change? Is it not reasonable to think there will be a continued progression? Perhaps the answer is yes, but sometimes a resistance to change can limit how far one can progress. I think Tiger Woods is an excellent example. After winning his first major tournament, at the Masters in 1997, he retooled his swing. Why would he do such a thing as his career was accelerating? In this particular case he wanted to control his iron shots better, so he could be more precise approaching greens. Yes he could have continued on just as he was, but he knew in his heart that he could become even better if he undertook the change. Well we all know how his career flourished after that change and he reached a new and better level of performance.

There are also many stories of accomplished performers making changes and never attaining their previous level of performance, so there are pitfalls to taking apart something that is working.

I think change can be more readily accepted by archers in a formative stage, as mechanics are not all in place and performances can vary wildly. As a coach I am very cognizant of making changes to archers with a certain level of competence. There needs to be a specific thing you are trying to accomplish. It can be a static position, a dynamic move, or any number of shot keys. Communication between the archer and coach has to be quite good. Feedback from archer to coach and coach to archer is emphasized, so a change can be effected properly.

Secondly, no one wants to go backwards. Often times when changes are made there is not an immediate positive result. Scores can be uneven and there can be a period of time where an archer can be challenged mentally about whether the changes are going to work. Again, communication between archer and coach is essential.

So in the end there are two possible outcomes. One, the archer improves and moves to a different level of performance. Two, the archer does not benefit from the change. What happens in case two? Depending on the changes that were made, the archer can opt to go back to what had been working in the past, or the archer can modify the change. There are no easy answers when a change goes awry. Did the archer truly buy into the change and work hard at changing? Was the change not appropriate for the archer? (Yes coaches make mistakes.) It is helpful to have a review of what you are doing with your coach. Put some reasonable time/arrow count, time frames together and be honest with yourself about your effort and ‘buy in’ to a proposed change. One thing is a certainty. An archer willing to keep exploring how to get better, will.

I’ve written about the transition from outdoor archery to indoor archery in the past. Things have changed recently and we as archers need to be smart to adapt to these changes.

The biggest change I see is the lack of transition time between the two seasons. In the not too distant past, most competitive archers had at least a month or two to transition to indoor archery. These days, at least in the Chicago area, there is almost no down time between the two seasons. This is a good thing for our sport, but it requires some additional smart planning for archers.

Every one of us needs some time to regroup both physically and mentally. The natural break from outdoor to indoor archery is a perfect time to scale back training and take a bit of a break. Just because there are tournaments on the docket doesn’t mean you need to shoot in all offered events. Yes, we want to support our sport and the organizations which keep archery vital locally. Yet we owe it to ourselves to step back from time to time and give our bodies time to recover and our minds time to pause from training and competing.

Now it’s time to plan the break. What tournaments will you shoot and which will you skip? Depending on where you live and your present standing in the archery community, this can be a tricky thing. Just try to make sure you do give yourself the needed competitive break.

What type of break will you take? This can be anything from a complete cessation from everything archery, to a highly modified and truncated schedule for practice. I’ve always subscribed to cutting practices way back without actually completely stopping. This keeps my muscle memory intact to a large degree.

I’ve also used this time to think about what equipment I’ll use for the competitive indoor season. Will it be the same as outdoors? Will it be what I used last indoor season, or perhaps something else entirely? This process is very invigorating and gets me excited to start in earnest after I’ve had some ‘off’ time.

How often have you had a revelation about any issue after not thinking about it for a time? We’ve all had these ‘aha moments’ after reflection. Breaks in activity can lead to creative solutions to issues you’ve not even considered. Breaks in activity reinvigorate you. Breaks in activity make you realize just how much you enjoy that activity. Planned breaks are important to keep moving forward in archery. Have a conversation about it with your coach!

The last major event of the outdoor season has concluded with the Buckeye Classic. As I’ve previously chronicled, each major event demands a critical review of performance. What went well? What opportunities exist to improve? Look at everything from, equipment, form, nutrition, hydration, mental game, routine, fitness, supporting activities, etc. Everything that contributes to competing successfully needs to be evaluated. Neglecting a thorough review is a wasted opportunity to improve. One cannot simply say, ‘I wish to improve’, without putting some actionable process goals together. And yes, those actionable goals are derived from your tournament performance review.

Let me highlight by breaking down my own performance from the Buckeye Classic.

What went well? I started the event shooting very effectively in the hardest conditions. My shot was fairly consistent and I was able to execute my sequence well. My mental game was fairly sharp and I was able to stay in the moment and just shoot shots. I never thought about my equipment. Every piece of my equipment was thoroughly vetted.

What opportunities exist for me to improve? My score faded as the day wore on. I’ll need to explore fitness AGAIN. It seems to be a recurring theme in my reviews. I also neglected any strategy to refuel during the day. A review of photos taken showed my release to be less than ideal. I got in very late from dinner on Saturday evening, which led to a very slow start on Sunday morning.

Now I have a basis to put an actionable plan together. More PT. Ugh. That’s tough for all of us, especially me, it appears. I’ll also put in quite a bit of blank bale time to work on the back half of my shot. Packing adequate food to keep me fueled shouldn’t be too much of a chore, but it has to be written down and actually done! And for Pete’s sake, you’d think someone with a few years experience should know not to stay out too late just ahead of competing.

Well, there is the good, the bad and the never should have been. How many of you actually take the time to break down your tournament performance? If you haven’t, I encourage you to do so in collaboration with your coach.

As I watched shooters from our JOAD club this past weekend I was pleased to see the progress made, however, there was a distinct lack of focus on the shot. Everything appeared to revolve around hitting the 10 ring. Well of course that is the object of the game, but that objective will not be consistently met with substandard shots, shot routines and mental focus.

The way most of us tend to look at performance is by objective score. If we are able to score a 10, that is ‘mission accomplished’. Most of us will score 10’s from time to time. The more evolved archer will probe deeper. Was the 10 scored with a good shot? If not, we cannot assume that poor shots will lead to anything more than an occasional good result.

Job number one is to put the focus on the shot and not the result. A well executed shot will produce a desired result. Well how does one do this? Become less target centric. Focus on what is happening at the shooting line with your own routine, execution and mental preparation.

Let’s take this apart. Routine is what we do on every shot. Do you do the same thing every shot? If not, why not? A defined routine should be broken into many steps. You know, fundamental positions on the bow, the string, how we come to anchor, how we actuate the clicker and how we release/follow through. It only appears flowing when executed by a skillful archer. All skillful archers are subconsciously doing what less skilled archers have to think about consciously. The point is to go through all your positions, make sure they are correct and then work to make the correct moves and positions an ingrained part of your shot.

During an event, good archers focus on repeating a routine and executing the same sequence over and over. After a shot, there is a quick evaluation of what happened. If it was sub optimal, why? The result is only to verify the good or poor execution of the routine. The result is then put aside and the next shot is executed. This happens 72 times a tournament. There are 72 evaluations, 72 routines, 72 opportunities to perform what you do in practice on a day in day out basis. Of course each evaluation could reveal that something is not consistent with what you have been doing and you then can correct this when it is identified.

What good archers do not do, is make changes because he/she shot a poor score. Score is only an affirmation of what your shot routine and sequence is currently. Changing your shot because you experienced a poor end, or even a poor few ends, is a sure fire way to frustration. When things do not go as expected, fall back on the fundamentals that make you the shooter you are. Speaking of which, you will not magically become a better archer in a tournament. Understand what your current scores are and strive to shoot how you shoot in practice. Expectations can limit us and frustrate us. Allow yourself the freedom to shoot well and keep your mind off the score card.

Ok, now let’s get ourselves to the range and work on making our routines and shot sequences better! I rarely see archers working on their shots using a blank bale. Why not? There is no pressure to shoot a 10. There is much good work which can be done without a target. You can then take that shot and see if you can replicate it when there is a target face to distract you.

Go out there and work on making good shots instead of hoping to shoot 10’s.

This year 4 of our JOAD students went to Outdoor Nationals for the first time. As is generally the case, I learned as much from the experience as they did.

All of our shooters have a lot of experience shooting local and regional events, but coping with a multiple day event, with all its twists and turns was certainly an eye opener for the crew.

On the practice day there was much excitement and star gazing. Kids got autographs and pictures with the stars of the sport. There was lots of energy and the buzz was palpable. Oh and I think there was some practicing as well. I didn’t ride herd on practice, but the advice was to get acclimated, find a sight mark and shoot just enough arrows to feel comfortable without wearing yourself out. It was blistering hot out, so I believe all of our shooters heeded that advice.

On the first day of competition, one of our shooters broke a nock during scoring and had a semi dry fire. The arrow went about 2 feet forward and 3 feet to the left. I happened to be behind the shooter and she shot her 7th arrow with no penalty, as the arrow had not crossed the 3 meter line. Unfortunately the shooter next to her was negatively affected. Her coach thought she had dry fired and had her shoot a 7th arrow. Of course she was not entitled to do so and incurred a penalty. The incident left both shooters in tears. It was just an unfortunate archery incident. It took some time for both to refocus, but both did. Our shooter went on to shoot a personal best on day two. That is very cool stuff and just shows you what is possible with a positive attitude.

On day two of qualifying, both of our Cub archers had high expectations because of their performances on day one. Well, stuff never works out quite like you plan and the both started the day struggling. It took a while to find some equanimity but both did in time. As in all endeavors the people posing the biggest obstacles are ourselves. And the bigger the stage becomes the more we expect of ourselves. It is something adults have trouble with and kids even more so as they don’t have the experience. Having a less than average day at a tournament can be instructive, or destructive, if you allow it to be so. I’m happy to say our kids found the perspective to allow them to bounce back.

Day three found all of our shooters in a good frame of mind and each performed well during elimination rounds.

Day four was team rounds and two of our archers were part of Bronze medal teams. What a thrill for them. Their first Outdoor National competition and they are bringing home hardware. Those will be memories for a lifetime.

Juggling coaching and shooting was big learning experience for me as well. I could have used a better strategy for energy conservation. Thank goodness for the rain delay on day one. I was just about out of gas when they called what turned out to be a 4 hour rain delay. That afforded me the opportunity to get out of the sun, get something to eat and recover enough to compete later on. This coach will have to plan much better next year when we expect to have even more shooters attend Outdoor Nationals. Long days will be the norm and there is a cumulative effect on ones body in a multiple day tournament.

Even though I didn’t earn a medal, I consider this to have been an excellent tournament experience, with lots of fond memories. Thanks to our great JOAD families and shooters for letting me on the ride.

With apologies to Neil Young, yes, rust never sleeps. Our bodies are in constant need of training and practice to remain competitive. And even with the most robust program of fitness training and an excellent practice regimen, father time wins every time. So it has been with me. I had to drop draw weight to remain effective at archery. And I have to say my ego took a hit. But given a choice of competing effectively, or puffing up my chest, I choose to shoot well.

So sourcing new equipment was a primary concern. The subconscious is a funny thing and I bought new limbs months ahead of making the conscious decision to drop draw weight. I kept the poundage drop small enough so that I could continue to use  my current arrows. So it might be of use for you to know that those arrows went from slightly weak to slightly stiff. If you do a bit of planning, you too can make a smart arrow choice based on what poundage your next set of limbs may be. For me it was a move down, for those on the correct side of the age bell curve, it may be an increase in poundage.

Next, I stripped my bow and started the set up from scratch. Yes, I even checked limb alignment and plane, set center shot, made a new string and made absolutely no assumptions when putting the bow back together. Was it time consuming? Sure. Was it necessary? Absolutely.

The next step was to tune. And with apologies to those who paper tune, I’ve found over the years that paper tuning a recurve to be a substandard way to go about shooting good groups. I start by bare shaft tuning. Next I group tune. Those last two sentences could and should be multiple posts, but for the scope of this post, let us just say they are necessary. One note about tuning. You can only tune as well as you can shoot. If you can’t shoot consistently good groups, forego tuning. Make sure your bow has a good initial set up and go practice until you can shoot consistently tight groups, then tune your bow.

Finally, I had to acquire new sight marks. i spent a couple of hours shooting all the distances I needed for target and field archery.

As you can see, making a poundage change is a bit of a drawn out process. The pay off is an archer/equipment combination which maximizes your talents.

I really enjoy this time of year. The indoor shooting season has largely been completed and now the focus turns to outdoor archery.

The first arrows of the outdoor season represent liberation. Watching arrows arc their way towards a target 70m away is pure joy. Feeling the sun and the warming breezes of Spring remind me of why archery is so much fun. It’s kind of like being a kid at the end of the school year. There is anticipation of fun to come and all the possibilities of Summer.

But just like all good things archery, nothing beats properly preparing for a successful outdoor campaign. Never take anything for granted. If you are shooting a dedicated outdoor set up, check it! Some of the things that often change are clicker position and brace height. Yes, in the course of shifting equipment around those things can get accidentally moved. Never take your tune for granted. Make sure to take the time to group tune your kit. After checking the tune, it may be necessary to adjust your sight marks for your yardages. I put this off until I get a fairly large number of arrows down range. I want to be sure I am shooting consistently before noting where my sight marks are.

If you dropped draw weight for the indoor season, training to shoot your outdoor weight should have already begun. Try to cross train, while keeping your arrow count reasonable for the state of your current fitness. It would be a crying shame to over train and injure yourself at this time of year.

Do not worry about scores. It is the beginning of the season. Things have a way of sorting themselves out. You’ll get back to where you were at the end of last outdoor season in time. And if you allow yourself some mental freedom, there is every reason to believe you will exceed your performances of last year.

Anyway, It’s beautiful outside and time to look at flowers blooming, the sun warming and arrows flying.