High Tech Nonsense

Lots of archers spend a lot of time – too much -- on the "high-tech" side of archery. They believe in quick fixes and try to "buy" their scores. They worry about "cosine of angle" and "angle in degrees", etc. A beginner simply doesn’t have the archery knowledge to weed out the technobabble from the basics to make archery fun and learnable for him or her.

Every Easton arrow you’ll ever shoot is already in better shape to do its job, right out of the box, than you are. If it goes in the middle, mission accomplished.

The point is, keep it simple. Don’t allow yourself to be caught up in the high tech language that some people so fluently speak. All they are doing is inventing more excuses for their poor performance. By having something else to blame, they are sidestepping the real solution to the problem - practice.

If you want to become more proficient with your archery skills, here is a solution. Spend 90 percent of your time on you and 10 percent on your equipment. I guarantee your equipment is more "machine like" than you can ever hope to be. The secret to being a good competitor is to be repeatable and to know how your equipment performs under certain conditions (i.e. uphill, downhill, rain, and wind). The only way to become repeatable is to practice. Shoot hundreds and hundreds of arrows a week. Develop your muscle memory. When you can honestly say that you are making better shots than your bow, then tune up your equipment. Knowing how your equipment performs in adverse conditions means you must shoot under adverse conditions. Go shoot in the rain and wind. You don’t need a computer to tell you how much to take off on an uphill shot. Go out and shoot a variety of uphill or downhill shots. Don’t be tempted to take the "easy" way out by using a computer. There is too much room for error. The more you know about your equipment the better shooter you become.

Don’t worry so much about your arrows. Your arrows should be the same length, and have the same fletch, nocks, and points. You need to periodically inspect them to be sure there are no cracked nocks, loose fletches, or dinged up shafts. The bottom line in defining arrow accuracy comes from shooting the arrow. You can number each arrow so you can keep track of its performance. Dedicate a target to each individual arrow, or mark a target with each arrow’s hit point and shoot until you see a pattern develop for that arrow. Disregard any "bad" shots. Occasionally you may find one arrow that consistently hits slightly off its mark, even if it weighs the same. Don’t over analyze it. You may not want to shoot it in competition but it’s still safe for leisure shooting. By the way, it takes a pretty bad fletching job to screw up an arrow’s accuracy.

Don’t waste too much time and energy on the technical aspects of the sport. Equipment set up and maintenance is easy when compared to the physical and mental roadblocks we need to overcome to refine our skills. If you want to help a new archer, then send a clear message that it’s just like any other sport - you get out of it what you put in. Buying the latest gadgets will not improve your score a lot and there are no substitutes for hard work and practice.

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