Coach’s Corner
PERFECT PRACTICE, PART 1
by Bernie Pellerite ©2008
The Do’s and Don’ts of An Accelerated Learning Curve
D
ue to the length of this subject it has been broken down into 3 parts. The other two parts will appear in future issues. Consistently hitting what you aim at with a bow and arrow is really hard to do! This “predictable accuracy” that eludes so many of us is an attainable goal, but it’s never really achieved or maintained without endless hours of practice. For those of you who would rather “pray for luck,” here’s an old archery saying . . . “It takes a lot of luck to succeed with a bow and arrow . . . the more you practice, the luckier you seem to get!” It follows that if we’re going to have to practice, we might as well make
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it count. Like most good archers eventually discover . . . practice does not make perfect . . . perfect practice makes perfect! The best way to do that is to have a qualified coach keep you on track. By the way, besides teaching the shooter’s school, I also do private and group lessons at my home. The following is an outline of a uniquely productive and accelerated practice regimen. These “super sessions” are for serious bowhunters and target archers only. With the proper dedication, these do’s and don’ts will greatly accelerate your learning curve and your level of understanding and accuracy with a bow and arrow. • DON’T try to practice while you are worried about a piece of equipment that is about to fail or is not in order . . . you have enough to think about! Fix it first! • DO make sure your bow is tuned properly (or as good as you think it should be), your arrows are matched to the bow and are identical, and nothing is loose. Silicone, rubber cement, or LocTite™ all nuts, bolts and screws that don’t have to be moved frequently. • DON’T spend hours timing, tuning, and making adjustments at home, only to have something move or fail at a tournament or in a treestand, and have no idea how to put it back, exactly the way it was before (now, let’s see . . . how far was the peep from my nocking point?). • DO keep a log book! A small 3” x 5” spiral notebook will do. Record your bow’s poundage, axle to axle length, brace height, tiller mea-
surements, nocking point position on your bow square, distance of the peep sight from the nocking point, arrow speed in feet per second, arrow weight, total and individual pin gap (trace them if possible), and your exact draw length. Sooner or later a string or cable on your bow will break or stretch, your serving will separate, unwind or break, or your peep, pin sights, or rest will move. When it happens, you can avoid a disaster by referring to your log book. You can repair or reset the affected part back to its original specs without altering performance or wasting hours retuning or sighting in your bow again. This same farsightedness should also be standard for other critical adjustments. For instance, marking the position of things like limb bolts, overdraw, arrow rest, peep site, pin sights, center serving and cam roll-over position with correction fluid (Wite-Out®) can save you, by quickly identifying and correcting one or more items that might move from their original position, for one reason or another. • DON’T try to pull your bow (especially heavy poundage), when your muscles are cold. Not only will this start the wrong set of muscles into action (usually shoulder, arm and chest muscles), which gets you off track immediately with a shaky sight picture, but you are asking for tendonitis or possibly rotator cuff surgery later. Try using an exercise band to warm up. • DO stretch and warm up your muscles with a length of rubber tubing or rubber stretch band. This lower stress start-up allows you to
A
B
C
A) LocTite™ all nuts, bolts and screws that don’t have to be moved frequently. B) Record your bow and arrow’s vital statistics because it will save you, if you have to re-cable or replace a string. C) Marking the cam roll-over point can tell you instantly when something moved or stretched.
key on your back muscles (rhomboids), and allows the arms and shoulders to relax, which facilitates a much steadier sight picture, from arrow number one. • DON’T start shooting a small target at 20 to 40 yards right away. You’re often so intent on hitting the target, your form goes to pieces right from the start. Your “tip off” to this condition is, for example, when you’re hitting in the middle on Monday, Thursday you are shooting to the right and on Saturday you are shooting left. This, among other things, can be caused by a lack of “muscle memory.” At the beginning and intermediate level, usually the very first arrow we shoot in a practice session sets up our subconscious and short-term muscle memory, for a “first impression” of how the shot should feel, and therefore be executed. Since we’re so preoccupied with “trying to hit the target,” we usually don’t maintain good form, and shoot a “bad first shot.” It can sometimes take hours or dozens of shots to straighten out this bad first impression that we gave our subconscious. • DO shoot the first few arrows at five or ten yards, so you don’t have to worry about missing. This
enables you to concentrate more on perfect form . . . and perfect feel . . . which sets up the right “first impression” for our subconscious to try and duplicate. (This is like a golfer, tennis or baseball player taking a few practice swings to re-educate their muscle memory about a good swing.) If you can, close your eyes after you come to anchor, and shoot several shots at three to four yards with no tar-
get, or use my bow simulator. This lets your subconscious experience how a good shot should feel. If you are really serious, schedule a whole practice session each week on an empty bale or with the bow simulator. Shoot for half an hour with your eyes closed, and a half an hour with your eyes open. With your ego “unplugged,” scattering your arrows and no target, you can continued on pg. 20
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