Show Me? Show You!

There are veritable oceans of bushwah (Noun, North American informal: rubbish or nonsense) floating around in archery, especially in equipment. Advice is bandied about without consideration of who it applies to. Ask an elite archer what they do and if you copy them, you will probably be wasting your time. For example, back when I was serious about competing I would build a set of arrows, a competition set (of 6 arrows as I often competed in NFAA rounds) that had at most a range of 2 grains in weight. My thinking was that I wanted their weights to match so well that no suspicion of irregularities could undermine my performances. So, I weighed shafts, vanes, glue, inserts, points, etc. (If you want to know how much the tape or glue on your arrows weighs, weight the shafts and fletches before gluing them up and when they have set up, weight them again.)

Rick McKinney (two time Olympic silver medalist) was a mentor of mine who was in the publishing business. Claudia and I took over publishing Archery Focus magazine from him and, as such, I had access to him. His company headquarters at the time was in the same city I worked in, so I could drop by from time to time to learn, sitting at his feet. Not actually, I sat in a chair in his office, but metaphorically. Here is one thing I learned:

“A simple test is to take the heaviest and lightest arrow in a group of 12 arrows. Without knowing which is the heaviest and which is the lightest, mark them as 1 and 2. Then go to 20 yards or even 50 if you want to and shoot them. Plot their impacts and do this about 5 or more times. Then go weigh them to determine which one is the heaviest and which is the lightest. Usually if the arrow is 7 or 8 grains difference you will probably not notice much impact difference at 50 yards, unless you are one of the top 50 archers in the world. Thus, the gimmick of weight deviation is just that, a gimmick to scare you into believing weight has a huge difference on impact. You can't even aim good enough to determine the weight differences!”

99.8 grains .. OH GOD ITS 0.2 OUT!

Clearly my heroic efforts to get sets of arrows within 2 grains weight was probably not a good use of my time (I have never been close to being one of the top 50 archers in the world and probably not the top 500 archers, in my style and age categories. So, are you doing the same thing? Are you recommending to newer archers to do the same things?

Also according to McKinney, “you will note that most arrows that are sold in dozen groups, but only 6 to 8 arrows will group and the rest will not. Again, this is due to the spine more than anything else.” Did you know that spine degrades over time? Also according to McKinney, “Depending on the wall thickness spines of an aluminum arrow can break down as fast as 10 shots! This has been proven time and again by some of the best archers world wide.” With regard to equipment I now have a mantra and that is “Show Yourself.” My friend and coaching colleague, Simon Needham (UK Olympian), goes so far as to make many (Many!) bowstrings for his recurve bows. To find out which factors affect his scoring to most: weight of string, numbers of strands, type of material, sizes of loops, etc. Of course Simon was an Olympian, and often those with what are considered to be lesser chances of success go the farthest looking for any tiny advantage that might move them up a notch on the final standings.

So .. Show yourself! If you think arrow masses are critical, shoot some arrows that different in mass and see what the effect will be. And … and the vast majority of your student-archers will probably not be so good as to see the effects of some the finer points of their equipment adjustments. This is why practice shooting and the mental game are the best foci for up and comers.

Please note: I am not one of those who say “You can’t buy better scores,” because obviously you can. Replace a set of bent aluminum shafts with even a new set of aluminum shafts that are straight and your groups and scores will improve. When I got restarted in archery, I was using a rather decrepit borrowed compound bow. My mentor at one point gave me a bow 6-7 years old, of higher quality and my scores immediately jumped up, noticeably so. But once you have a kit of high enough quality, tuned in, then getting higher scores doesn’t come from making frequent equipment changes.

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Steve Ruis is the author of many books on coaching archery and maintains a blog for archery coaches at archerycoach.wordpress.com. (its free and well worth a visit) He is the former editor of Archery Focus magazine.