Is Archery Really a “Feel” Sport?

Friend of the website, Coach Ruis had been thinking about the great evil ... golf. <shudder> .. He wrote this for us with some thoughts: 

It is often claimed that archery is a “feel” sport (in science speak, a kinaesthetic sport), but is it really?

I was reading a golf book (I know, I know) and the author, Raymond Floyd, said this: “I’d sum up the role of the mind in golf with one operative phrase: ‘getting out of your own way.’ It means not cluttering up the messages of the brain to the body with a lot of unnecessary information, but rather having simple thoughts and trusting your instinct and the power of the unconscious to guide the body to perform. You have to know enough and observe enough to make the right judgments, but once you’ve made those judgments you have to put the conscious mind aside and let the knowledge flow through you.” (The Elements of Scoring, 1998)

I hope you can see from this and other comments made by golfers and golf coaches is why I read their works. There is a great commonality between golf and archery. So, how does this work?

I am glad you asked. I have claimed often enough that one’s shot sequence, aka shot routine, is a guide to an archer’s attention. One thing after another, one attends to the things on one’s list and voila, a shot is executed. But I have had students take that and translate it into a list of things to think about. Argh!

To "attend" is not necessarily to "think about", it is "to be aware of" mostly. In fact I think that instead of “think” we should be focused upon “attempting to feel.” Some steps on the sequence involve thought process, lining up your sight pin or arrow point with your point of aim, for example, but you should be emphasising awareness while you work your way through a shot. How good are you are recognizing the “feels” of your shot? Do you practice this? The best time to focus on feels during practice is when you are shooting really well. You do not want to focus upon the feels of bad shots, do you? So, for a sequence of shots, focus on how your bow hand feels while making them. Focus on your bow arm. Focus upon your release fingers. You don’t have to do anything in particular. You shoot good shots, you recognize certain feels. Your subconscious mind will associate one with the other. You don’t need to memorize anything.

Along the way, you may discover some things. For example, whether you shoot “fingers on the string” or with a handheld release aid, there may be an unusual feeling during the process. Ideally we want the hand to be relaxed. The muscles making your fingers curl are in your upper forearm, not your hand. If your hand is tensed, it becomes more variable and harder to relax if trying to execute a clean finger release of the string. So ...

The next time you are shooting, notice how your string hand feels through the draw and hold. If your hand is truly relaxed, it will feel as if it is stretching. It isn’t really stretching. (If it does stretch, it is small and early in the process.) I believe the feeling of your hand stretching is an illusion. Whenever stresses are placed on our bodies, we are set up to resist them. If a friend gives you a gentle push you don’t just fall over. You automatically resist the push. The forces on your string hand are unopposed, that is you don’t “muscle up” to oppose them and so your mind believes that if the stretching force is unopposed, it must be causing your hand to stretch.

If you can feel this you will have identified a sign! (Dear God, show us a sign!) If you feel that illusory stretching, you know that your string hand is relaxed. Ta da! Once identified it becomes “ordinary” and only pops into your shots when it does not happen. Every archer has experienced executing a letdown without know what is the cause for it. This is an indication that your subconscious mind is doing its job. Something didn’t feel right, so a letdown was appropriate.

Spend some time investigating the feels of your shot and you may just make yourself more consistent without really trying or, egad, thinking about it!

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Steve Ruis is the author of many books on coaching archery and maintains a blog for archery coaches at https://archerycoach.wordpress.com. He is the former editor of Archery Focus magazine.