PT Playbook: Archery 101

/ˈɑrtʃəri/ Pronunciation Key – Pronunciation[ahr-chuh-ree]

The art, sport, or skill of shooting with a bow and arrow.

Bored of all the same kinds of exercise? Want a new and interesting hobby that’s fun and inexpensive? The perfect remedy to satisfy your boredom is archery. Even if you’ve never held a bow before, let alone shot an arrow, it doesn’t take long to figure out the basics of archery and start having fun.

Rules of the Game: Anyone who has ever seen a Robin Hood movie has at one time or another dreamed of being an archer. Archery is a truly great sport that is growing in popularity.  It’s relatively easy to participate but to be successful an athlete must develop both mental and physical skills.

Over the years archers have used the bow and arrow for hunting, self defense, warfare, competition and recreation. The sport is first listed in Homer’s “The Iliad and the Odyssey.” It has been traced to all parts of the world in many different time periods and may well be the longest use of a weapon in the history of man.

Equipment: To get started, you first need a bow and arrow.  The two kinds of bows are the Olympic, or Recurve Bow and the Compound Bow. Mastery of the Olympic bow results in better muscle tone and overall archery habits; once that is accomplished most archers switch to Compound Bows.  The Compound Bow has evolved into a much faster shooting, more accurate bow.

Before learning how to shoot any bow it is important to decide which hand will hold the bow and which will pull the bowstring. As there are right-handed and left-handed people, so there are right-handed and left-handed bows.

What decides if you are a right-handed or left-handed archer?

The initial answer is your eye dominance. The stronger eye is usually the aiming eye. A quick way to test your eye dominance is to point your index finger at a distant object with both eyes open, then close one eye and see if your finger appears to move away from what you are pointing at. If your finger does appear to move, then the eye that you closed is your dominant eye. Try again with your other eye and your finger should not appear to move.

A person who is right eye dominant should hold the bow in their left hand and pull the bowstring with their right hand. The opposite applies for a person who is left eye dominant.

Skills: To shoot an arrow, an archer first assumes the correct stance. The body should be perpendicular to the target and the shooting line, with the feet placed shoulder-width apart. As an archer progresses from beginner to a more advanced level an ‘open stance’ is developed. Each archer will have a particular preference but mostly this term indicates that the leg furthest from the shooting line will be a half to a whole foot-length in front of the other.

Normally when beginners shoot a bow, they do just that. Shoot. They don’t aim. But by not aiming, they don’t get any stronger.

Archers need to practice aiming. The better aim, the more control they have over the shot. By practicing aiming archers also build strength which allows them to aim longer. Aiming longer allows them to execute your shot routine better. Without a shot routine they have no recollection of the shot, so they can not ‘play it back’ and analyze it.

There are two main forms of aiming in archery:

Instinctive shooting is the coordination between the eyes and the bow arm. This was the most common method of shooting for many years. It requires large amounts of concentration and practice.

Shooting with a sight is the other most common method for shooting a bow. It is also the most modern method. This method uses pins on the side of a bow to be adjusted for different distances. Since this is much easier to use when learning how to shoot a bow it has become very popular.

Scoring: Okay – you have your equipment and you’re ready to toss a few arrows into targets. The target has ten concentric circles and the score of each arrow depends on where it lands on the target. The highest score, a ten, is achieved by shooting an arrow into the center, or bullseye. Scores go down from nine for the next circle out to one for the outermost circle. Missing the target results in a score of zero for that arrow.

Archers develop techniques to fully control their body movement, their endurance and their mental steadiness, when preparing to meet the challenge of match days.

Competition: Olympic Archery came into its own during the 1996 Olympics when the US Olympic Team took the gold while millions of viewers watched the drama on TV.

Competitive archery is an international sport. Many shooting styles and classes of equipment are used. In the United States 3D Archery is the largest segment of competitive archery.

Shooting Tips

Here are some tips to use when shooting:

●Always focus on form, not on score.

●Remember that the only arrow you can change is the one on your string.  Forget the bad shots and focus on the present shot.

●Always remember to follow through.

●Try not to pluck the string – you’re not playing the harp.

●Focus on what you are doing and what you are trying to achieve, not on what others around you are doing.

●Try to get outside help from either a coach or another archer.

●And most importantly, have fun and do your best!