Shot in the Dark

Today I want to show what has always been one of my favorite archery training exercises: shooting in the dark.

The shooting lane pictured above (in my family’s garden) is ideal for this exercise. It has decent distance of ~23m maximum and sufficiently insufficient light. What? xD

The point of this exercise is to be able to aim without looking too much.

The minimal light’s purpose is to show where the shooting lane is, we do not want arrows in the neighbor or his garden.

What should be used to aim is body posture, combined with the fact that you know where the target is in your mind. When this mastered, precision and posture coordination will greatly improve.

Start with a little light at the target and at the shooting line. The light should be just enough to make out the target but no details. Remove the light at the shooting line as soon as you can nock your arrows blind, something recommend  all archers to learn (and the next step is to string the bow blind).

Use a target that makes a distinctive noise when hit, so you know when you did well. If you can see your arrows, it is too bright.

Learn to use your other senses for shooting too! Having good eyes certainly helps to aim well, but you can also listen to your arrows, for example, to know their trajectory! Something I definitely want to try one day is to have a target making noise in darkness, and aiming must be be based on the sound.

It may be frustrating at first but do not give up! It is very good practice and eventually you will make it ^_^

kitty hugs + happy shooting~

Joouna

Archers are never bored, #7

Oooh look, coach hung a tiny marshmallow in front of the target, its probably a dry one, and oooh so tiny! Challenge accepted >ω>

1st arrow little too high, 2nd one a little low, 3rd one…

*splurt* aaaaaaah yuck!!! wasnt dry =△= oh well i got it before any of the sight- using recurves did :3 *goes triumphantly to clean up arrow*

Double Shot How-to :3

here is how to do a double shot, 2 arrows at the same time 😀 as seen here.

First of all, you will need a bow that fits the following description:

1. Either no arrow rest (finger shooter) or a simple shelf arrowrest like on this one for example.
2. No button or clicker or any other gadget sticking out in that area.
3. Your nocking point marker should be as small and unobtrusive as possible, or ideally nonexistent.

If you don’t have a bow like that, you can also make a really primitive bow such as this one here, it is very easy, cheap and fast to do.

Secondly, there is a safety precaution: Start from a short distance, 8m or 10m is enough. The reason being is that your bow is now launching twice the mass so the arrow trajectory will change. Slowly increase the distance while practicing to learn the new trajectory and avoid broken arrows.

Now, how to shoot!

Loading the arrows:

The first arrow goes as normal. The second one goes on top. Make sure the fletchings are not in the way for eachother, leave a gap. You might want to tilt your bow so the arrows do not slide around at first.

Gripping the bowstring:

-If you have click-nocks: proceed as normal but leave a bigger gap between your fingers so the nocks do not get pushed together.

-If you have sliding nocks: Put your index finger on top, middle finger between the arrows, ring finger below.

The Draw:

The torque of your fingers on the bowstring should be enough to push the arrows against the bow and prevent them both from rotating away. In the case that your nocks are very loose, you can grab them between your fingers and exert that torque manually. This may result in some fishtailing in the release but that can be minimised with practice.

Release: proceed as usual.

How to aim!

Up/down/left/right movement of bow will steer both arrows in the respective directions.

To increase vertical distance between the arrows, push the nocks closer together. (Beware, only few milimeters difference on the bow = ~0.5m on the target at medium distance)

To induce a horizontal distance (eg. shoot multiple enemies running toward you, etc) tilt the bow sideways. Be sure to take into account lost draw length if you do this.

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have fun with the double shot ^_^

kitty hugs to all~

Joouna

Archers are never bored. #6

Did you think that the double arrow shot of Legolas in LOTR was all cgi? Well, you were correct 😛 but it is not the only way. It can be done 100% real, and it is completely safe and aimable! 😀 Stay tuned for the next post where I will describe in detail how to do it! After all, archery is all about “do try this at home”!

kitty hugs to all~

~Joouna

Outdoor competition 18m and 25m

I just returned from an outdoor archery competition, 18m and 25m, 36 arrows each. It was a huge open field with songbirds and gulls…. and flies and spiders and everything else, oh well ^_^ It was a really nice place and also nice weather with lots of participants who brought camping chairs and party tents with them, so it had a funny summer camping feel to it. xD

In the warmup phase there were some 25 and some 18m targets and everyone shot wherever they wanted. I always shot 6 arrows, 3 on 18 and 3 on 25, then forgot which targets they were on so spent some time running around in panic mode “where are my arrows???” xD xD

The competition did not go as well in terms of score as I hoped, then again this was my first ever outdoor competition, and a long time since is last shot outdoors. There was also an annoying wind that always changed direction. Still it was not too bad, and I still managed to earn the compliments of my lane mates and a couple of spectators who thought I was very good at barebowing :3

taking aim at 25m

After the 25m round I was at 2nd place barebow. Unfortunately my 18m did not go too well because there were some fantastic rounds but also some big disasters, so the rival behind me managed to catch up. Still I ended up 3rd place barebow in the end ^_^ I respectfully accept defeat by the two barebows that beat me, they were both decades older men than me with clearly lots of experience and practice, something to look up to.

I also ended up with a sunburn xD oh well. It was a very nice day and lots of fun.

kitty hugs to all~

Joouna

New challenge

After the win of Sunday I decided to score myself on something else for a change yesterday. There is another competition coming up in little more than a week and coach says there will be some seriously good barebow shooters there. Better up my game… I decided to shoot at 3spots because 1) there was randomly a 3spot target there yesterday when I arrived and 2) Shooting at smaller things increases accuracy.

So here is my first ever attempt at scoring myself on a 3spot. 10 rounds, 3 arrows each…

small 3spot, 18m

I’d say this was not too bad for a first try. I missed 3 times because because ummm nevermind I have no excuse xD I need to improve still and hopefully reduce that number to 0 soon!

kitty hugs to all~

~Joouna

1st Place :D

Yesterday was a competition of 25m 1 arrow, 32 rounds… this was last round:

The one in the middle is mine :3

aaaaand I got first place barebow!! 😀 with quite a decent score.

The competition was quite challenging fpr concentration, always shooting 1 arrow at a time and having to wait so much in between. On top of that, the first half took longer than I expected and I was starving in the end >w< the last 3 arrow of the first half were not too good and I thought I doomed myself to some mediochre score and place. Then in the second half I did very well so not only did I manage to balance out the first half but also rise above the others! Yay!!! And it was also a lot of fun.

Wish all fellow archers good shooting, and kitty hugs to all~

~Joouna

Unstuck, yay!!

Woohoo! After a week of rigorous mistake-hunting and form-correcting, I was forced to miss a training on monday (heeeeh?! you missed a training?!) because a load of mandatory homework descended on me… I was scared I would lose my progress again. But nope ^_^ my form stayed good ^_^

I scored 228/300 , which is my usual score when I’m alright ^_^ yay~

I’m also going to be competing on sunday which I’m really excited about 😀

kitty hugs to all~

~Joouna

Stuck

Not gonna complain because my scores are not *bad*… but I seem to be stuck. I cannot seem to move past the average of 7-not yet 8 points per arrow…

Mostly it is due to this:

Unfortunately that arrow in the top left is also mine… thatonearrowagainasdakjlfgrrrrrrrrrr aaanyway it is not always the same one, so equipment flaw is not an excuse. There is something with my technique that allows for occasional freakish mistakes. Meh.

I feel like I am nearing one of those big “aha!” moments again. But to get there, I should get my nerves together first I guess.

Scatter Plot

The first go-to way to track skill and progress in (target) archery is to write down scores for a set amount of arrows. A nice alternative to this is to make a scatter plot of *all* shots over a longer training, in order to get a clear picture of the current skill level.

Something like this:

The most primitive way to make a scatter plot (as pictured above) is to secure a lane for yourself and make sure that the target paper is only shot on by you. If that doesn’t work, there are also plenty of nice scoring apps available for phones, or it can be done on paper by hand.

In order to get the most out of these plots, it is a good idea to write down everything about the session that resulted in the plot. For example for the plot above: I was shooting for 2 hours, 18m, practicing to shoot instinctive, ~6s per arrow, 6 arrows per round. I didn’t count my arrows xD (I never do unless an app does it for me) but I know I should.

The nice thing about the scatterplot is that not only does it tell you how you are scoring on the target, but can also reveal any regular mistakes. If the cluster of arrows is shifted in a certain direction, it can say a lot about where the mistake is.

I definitely recommend this to be done regularly, especially if you are still in the stage of lots of learning and posture adjusting.

Kitty hugs to all~

~Joouna