What really concerned me though was that I thought I should have been shooting well. I was shooting the bow in the backyard and I would release, what I thought would be the perfect arrow. Everything would feel perfect. The bow felt comfortable. The target picture was vivid. The release was almost perfect. And the arrow would miss the target by a metre. What was going on??
I was missing the butt either to the right or to the left and no matter what I tried, I might as well have been using a shotgun. There's wasn't any accuracy there at all, yet everything felt so good prior to release.
I focussed on my release, thinking that was the problem. Yes, the odd release wasn't perfect, but most of them were good. I focussed on maintaining skin contact between my anchor and my hand. My releases were close to perfect, yet the arrows continued to fly all over the place.
I just knew those arrows should have been landing very close to the spot, so why weren't they?
I then decided that I must be moving my bow arm. That was the only possibility left. I've often been guilty of dropping my bow arm on release, but usually it only took one bad shot for me to realise and adjust. This might have explained the odd low shot, but not missing the target by a metre, both to the left and the right.
If you move your bow arm before the arrow has left the bow, it will influence where the arrow impacts. That's pretty basic stuff, so I decided to hold the bow very solidly (not hard in my fingers, but in a fixed position in relation to the target), from full draw, to release, to the arrow impacting. I wanted to watch the whole sequence through the sight window of my bow.
It didn't take long before I realised that I had developed a really bad habit. A bad habit that I hadn't even noticed. At the moment of release, I was giving the bow a little 'flourish'. It was a little flick of my wrist and it had become ingrained in my technique. The 'flourish' wasn't even consistant. No two of them were exactly the same.
It took me a long time at the butt, concentrating solely on keeping my bow arm solid, before my little habit started to disappear. I wasn't worried about where my arrows were going, I was just concentrating on my bow arm.
I ended my day by shooting some very tight groups.
My new technique is to hold my bow in the same position right through the sequence, to watch the arrow impact into the 'spot' with the bow in the same position that it was when I was at full draw.
There's always something to adversly effect your shooting. It seems to me, the longer you shoot, the more likely you are to have nasty little habits forming. The hardest part is recognising them.
Mick
