In any research at all regarding archery, the theme that will come up again and again is consistency. It’s certainly easy enough to understand. In practice, however, it’s devilishly hard to do. In fact, I’d say it’s hard to appreciate how difficult it is to be consistent, really truly consistent, until arrows start flying.
In retrospect, it’s an easy mistake to make. After all, a good archer, like a good anyone at anything, makes shooting arrows look effortless. Nock an arrow, pull back the string, release, arrow hits target. Rinse, repeat.
But once a bow is in hand with a nocked arrow, it doesn’t seem quite so trivially simple. How should I stand? How do I grip this thing? Do I put my arm out straight? When do I start drawing the string? Two fingers on the string? Three? All three fingers below the arrow or one above, two below? How far do I pull back? Where do I pull back to? How do I aim? When do I release? How do I release?
After the first couple of days, the most notable thing was I was barely hitting the target and I had bruises on my lower wrist below the guard, on my upper forearm between the guard and the elbow, on my inner bicep and on my chest by the arm pit. That was from twanging the string during release. I’m happy to say that I haven’t twanged myself in the past couple of days with the string, so that’s progress.
Additionally, the bow arm wants to be out basically straight but not full-extension straight. Something like 99% straight. Plus, the elbow wants to be oriented vertically such that if you were to bend the arm it would hinge back towards your body, as opposed to hinging up. The grip is as loose as can be, relaxed is a word that comes up a lot, with the finger tips ever so slightly supporting the bow.
As for my string hand, I’m still working on that but for now I use what’s called a split-finger grip with a “deep hook.” The split finger refers to having the index finger above the arrow and the middle and ring finger below the arrow. All three pull on the string during the draw. The “deep hook” means that I curl these fingers around the string so that it’s resting in the first knuckle joint. I initially was drawing the string with just the finger tips, but I found the draw was taking too much effort that way, so I switched. It took a bit of getting used to the release, but I was able to adjust OK after a bit of practice.
Finally, for now I’ve settled on an anchor point where my index finger goes to the little notch towards the rear of the jawbone. I played around with several and this spot just felt the most natural. Pending someone telling me otherwise, I’ll just work with it. I’ll note that most videos of archers I’ve seen, particularly Olympic caliber, anchor up around the chin. I tried this but it felt like I was expending too much effort holding it there. Plus, the string contacts the lips with that anchor and after a couple of releases I thought I was they might get ripped off and sent down range.
So, even having figured all that out where form is concerned, it is still ridiculously hard to duplicate everything from one shot to the next. It turns out there’s a lot of developed coordination in drawing an arrow and minute changes from one shot to the next mean a big variance in where the arrow strikes the target. If it strikes the target.
All told this past week, I probably shot close to 350 arrows. By the end of today, I was at least feeling like I had some consistency in my form. Even so, I was only hitting a 20″x20″ foam target about 50% of the time at 10-15 yards.
Contrast that with Olympic archers whom shoot at a target 70 meters away. The best of them can achieve groupings with 12 arrows within 5 inches of one another. Now that’s consistent to such a degree that essentially it’s the chaotic effects of airflow pushing the arrow around that cause it not to hit the exact same spot over and over again.
All of this is a long winded way of saying, archery is a lot of fun. It’s simple enough that anyone can go out and practice. After that, it’s up to the archer how far they want to go.