Why you aren’t getting better (probably)

Conduct, if you will, an experiment. Next time you are talking to archers, about archery, substitute the word “archer” for “athlete”. See what reaction you get. It’s usually laughter, right? You’ll have heard that laughter before. Maybe at an Archery GB event where their stoic use of the word “athlete” to describe us, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, always draws a snigger from someone. Usually the same someone who says a brew is all the warm up they need, shakes like a leaf at full draw, and always shoots “much better than this in practice”. Let us call him Mr Shaky.

Then you’ve got the yin to that guy’s yang, Mr Technical. Mr Technical gives a running commentary on the minutiae of his shot execution, like some kind of perambulatory black box recorder. He obsesses over his technique, forever tinkering with different ways to draw or execute, looking for that magic pill to fix the flappy fingers or the collapsing shoulder.  He does his drills religiously, wafts his arms around in the approved style before he picks up his bow, studies slow motion footage of all the pros. He doesn’t get better.

We know these people, right? If we are honest, sometimes we ARE these people. Strangers to the gym, we labour under the weight of our bows, muttering instructions to ourselves, sure that if we just concentrated more on contracting our rhomboids just so we would be flawless and everything would be easy.  It doesn’t work. We don’t get better. Here’s why.

Archery is not complicated. The movement it requires from you is simple. Simpler than a golf swing, simpler than striking a cricket ball, simpler, even, than taking a penalty kick. Except in very rare circumstances your movement doesn’t need to alter in power or path the way it has to when a golfer fades a drive, or a footballer spins the ball to curl it in the air. All you need to do is get energy into the bow, centre the sight or point of aim, then get the string hand cleanly and quickly off the string. There are ways of doing this to make it as easy as possible, but as anyone who has ever watched Michele Frangilli shoot will know, you can do it any way you damn well please so long as it is the same every time.

Why, then, if this movement is so simple, do we struggle with it so much? Is it lack of technical understanding? In my experience, in the vast majority of cases, no. Mr Technical, along with most experienced archers, knows a textbook shot. They can see it in their heads, describe it, even teach it. If they don’t already know it, they pick up the understanding very quickly when it is explained to them right. They can often do it perfectly with no resistance or with a stretchy band.  But return Mr Technical to his bow and the hand flaps again, his shoulders head north into his ears, despite the incessant flow of instructions in his head. In these cases the problem isn’t technical, it is physical. Fundamentally he lacks the strength to make his body do what he wants it to do, and no amount of self-instruction or technique coaching will change that fact.

Now, I’m aware that the subject of strength is a bit of a red rag to a bull in archery circles. Many people insist that you do not have to be strong to be a good archer, and that shooting good scores is all about technique. I don’t agree. If all you do is shoot your bow, Mr Shaky style, not treating the sport as a serious athletic endeavour, your muscular adaptation will be unnecessarily slow and extremely asymmetric, leaving you injury-prone and needing to shoot thousands of arrows to show any sign of improvement. Nor, however, do I think we should all look like Arnie and be able to bench twice our own bodyweight. The key to successful execution of technique is proportional strength. If you want shot 144 to be as good as shot 1, you need to be strong enough to draw your bow weight 144 times over a day without fatigue forcing your technique to change. Simply put, you need to be stronger than your bow. The stronger you are compared to your bow, the easier your movement. The easier your movement, the less you have to think about it and the more perfect the repetition.

Sounds good? Come back next time to find out how to measure proportional strength, and how to use that data to shape your training for the better.