OK- here is another question that i thought would be good to post for you all. This will be a lengthy reply but take the time to read and hopefully it helps you out. FB follower Question: John, when you go through a mental check list while Shooting, I know there are dozens of little things you do consciously or with sub-conscious? Could I get you to post something on FB or something going through ALL the little DETAILS when taking a shot. Duds(forgive my errors in spelling ect.) There is nothing better then heading out for a day’s hunt and being rewarded with a trophy animal. Likewise, there is nothing worse than not recovering an animal that was shot. We as hunters have an obligation to be as accurate as we possibly can. In a previous article I talked about ways of improving your accuracy as a bow hunter. What I would like to do in this article is expand on that and teach you the importance to making your shots repeatable. Look at the top athletes in nearly any sport. You will see a repeatable sequence from all of them. Do you really think Ernie Els could hit a golf ball as well as he does if he didn’t have a repeatable swing every time? The same kind of sequence is needed in archery and should be done before you fire your arrow to assure the repeatability of your arrows impact. The sequence that I am referring to is a shot routine. The reason a shot routine is so important to you as a hunter is because when the pressure and excitement of making that trophy shot it is very easy to forget a small thing that will have a big affect on where you shoot. For example, I have hunted with many guys that tend to be more involved with looking at horns instead of looking through their peep sight. That will cause big missed to the left and right of the animal. What I would to do is help you in building a fundamentally sound and repeatable shot routine that includes six steps tailored to the bow hunter. When you practice at home you should count through these steps in your head every arrow that you shoot. When the moment of truths finally arrives you should do the same and your rewards of practice will be shown on a great animal and clean kill. For hunters the first part of the routine is really easy to remember. Know the distance! This may seem obvious to you but you would be amazed at how many hunters don’t pay detailed attention to what the distance is. Some say they just use one pin and aim off high or low. That is in no way going to be accurate or ethical. Bows, regardless of how fast they are shooting are not a bullet. The ballistic drops of arrows are in no way comparable. The best investment a bow hunter can make outside of the bow he is using is having a quality range finder. They have come a long way over the past decade, both with consistency and with sizing. My little Nikon 400 fits in my pocket and isn’t much larger than a deck of cards. I keep it in a holder on my belt. If I have pants on then I have it there. Make sure you take it with you all the time and before you even think about pulling back the bow make sure you check the distance and also check your sight to make sure it is set properly. For those of you that hunt the same spot all the time, you may just have pinpoints in your mind of where certain distances are. This is a good habit to have and you should continue it whenever you go someplace new. For step one of your routine you should know the distance to the target then consciously be thinking of what pin you need to use to shoot that distance. Most of you veteran bow hunters have made the mistake of using the wrong pin. I wish I had a dollar for every time I have! If from now on you are in the habit of ranging the target then saying “ok 30 yards, second pin, second pin, second pin as you then move into step two of the shot routine you will be less likely to make the mistake.. Once you have the distance and know what pin to use you will need to go to the next step of the routine looking at your stance. I am no architect, but I do know that every good structure starts with a good foundation. Likewise, every good shot will start with a proper stance. Before every shot start out by looking down at your feet and making sure your stance is exactly where you need it to be. There are many different views on where your feet should be positioned. How far to space your feet, open stance, closed stance or neutral stance? I personally prefer a neutral stance which is slightly open with the front left toe being in line with the ball of the rear foot. I like to see compound shooters with a stance that is about shoulder width apart. The same width stance is fundamental in almost every sport. What I do to build a repeatable stance with my students is to trace my feet on a piece of cardboard and let them stand in the feet prints to get an idea of not only where to position their feet but also to learn to stand in the same place every time. This is a quick step to take that will make a big difference in how steady you hold. Make sure that you are in a good position and not twisted all around or one foot cocked up on a log like most hunters end up doing. Do what you need to so that your stance is balanced and will be comfortable before the animal is where you want to take the shot. Once your feet are in place the next step will be to position your hand correctly on your grip. Where you place your hand will have so much impact on how a broadhead tunes and flies. Not to mention the faster your bow shoots the more critical the hand placement is. To be consistent with your grip you need to make sure you place it in the position before you have put load of pulling the bow back onto your hand. Let the weight of the bow rest against your bow sling and then place your hand in the place you need. Too many times have I seen people pull their bow back and then move their hand around at full draw until they are in the position they want. This builds so much torque into a bow and will give you missed arrows left and right. I believe in a relaxed bow arm from the front elbow all the way to the finger tips. If your knuckles turn white when you shoot then ease up the tension. There is no reason to put t a death choke on the bow. It will hurt you way more than help you. Also, in my opinion the bow handle needs to be placed between the thumb joint and the lifeline wrinkle in the palm. You should not be so deep into the grip that the handle is past the center of the palm. For a tension free grip, let your natural human bone structure support the bow weight. Think of when you lean on something, you will naturally just let you bone structure support you. It should be no different here. Just place your hand in the spot that you know can feel the same every time and do so before pulling back on the bow. So to repeat myself, know the distance, look at your feet and get a grip. You are now half way done with your shot routine. To continue you will need to next draw the bow and think about the anchor. Your anchor point is so important and without it you can forget about being consistent. Many people anchor in different ways and in different places and especially with bow hunters that shoot several different kinds of release aids. I know that a wrist strap is the most preferred among bow hunters. When I shot one I always had a place just under my ear where I would put my pointer finger knuckle. It allowed me to know my anchor was the same all the time. There are also a growing number of hunters using hand held release aids, like the Carter releases. For these people I teach to utilize the spacing between the pointer finger and middle finger knuckles. The V shape between these fingers when holding a hand held release will fit perfectly along your jaw line. This will give you a very repeatable anchor that you can feel. I personally use the Carter hand held releases now and for me it is comfortable and I like having a release always clipped to the string when I am sitting and waiting. As long as I am feeling my anchor on the jaw line then the arrows fly true. Believe me that this can single handedly cause you to miss high or low and right to left if you don’t do it the same. Learn a spot that you know you can feel every time you mentally go through your routine and think of step anchor point. So once again, know the distance, look at your feet, get a grip, and anchor. Step five is something that you may have thought you should have done with the last step. However I believe it needs to be separate because it is so important. After you have anchored your release hand you will need to align the peep. Coming into your peep is part of anchoring however, I like to anchor with my hand and then bring my nose forward to barely touch the string and thus be able to look thru the peep sight. I don’t draw the bow and bring the peep to my eye, which I see a lot with struggling archers. If you pull back and bring the peep to your eye first then most likely you won’t have a consistent anchor. For us hunters it is an easy mistake, because when we are about to take a nice trophy all we think about is putting the pins on the animal. So the natural habit is to pull the peep back to the eye so we can see the sights. But this is not right, again it will have major impact you hits/misses. When you shoot a rifle do you look through the scope before you get the gun stock against the shoulder and the arm tight around it? No, defiantly not, we anchor in and then look through the scope. So with your bow, anchor first and then come into the peep! Once you are into the peep you will need to align the scope in the center of the peep, level the bubble and get your pin (that you should have repeated to yourself mentally in step one) onto the animal. I don’t like to waste much time getting my scope onto the target. My whole shot routine can be done in about 10 seconds consistently when I am practicing at home. Depending on what an animal is doing and how much time I have may have minor affects to it. For the situations in a hunting blind if you are able to get a routine that is under 15 seconds then you will be ok if you add a few seconds when you get nervous or tense. If you don’t think you can do this when an animal is there, just remember, knowing the distance, and checking your stance can be done well before you need to pull back. To be honest the hardest part is now done. Again, know the distance, look at your feet, get a grip, anchor and align peep. Ha, the last step is obviously to shoot the arrow. I would like to call it something other than that. I like to teach people to engage! Engage your shot by starting your motion to activate the release aid to fire. Everyone has their own way of activating the release aid. I’m not going to go into how to shoot the release aid or how to properly use “back tension” because I just don’t have space in this article. What I would hope you have is some method of firing a surprise shot. A surprise shot is having the pin on the target and it remaining there as you squeeze until the shot fires. Not punching or certainly not flinching. This proven by today’s top shooters and is what I focus nearly all of my breaths talking about with students. Sure the release needs to be activated, but doing it so that you are able to practice without fear of having the pin on the target is so important. Buck fever can get really bad and cause a lot of poor mistakes. That is why it is so important to do things correctly and practice some year round to engrain this shot routine into your hunt. That discipline is what the best archers have and is what separates them from the rest of the crowd. Load it into your mind, know the distance, look at your feet, get a grip, anchor, align peep and then engage the release. Since there are so many different disciplines of archery there are slight differences between the hunter and the competitive target archer. I personally consider myself both a competitive shooter and a serious hunter. I started shooting competitively to improve my hunting skills. I wish I had gotten some lessons early about what I needed to do to be better or what I needed to start doing correctly. These are six easy steps to help assure that you can become like a machine and just climb in the tree stand or blind and make successful shots. But like anything it does take some practice to have it memorized and to the point where the subconscious allows this to happen naturally. Remember how I said I draw my stance for my students to stand in on a piece of cardboard? Well I also write down the steps between the feet so as they start the routine they are able to look at it as well as do it. You should consider doing the same to become as systematic as possible. Visualization is a great training aid and I use it in several ways in my training. You can just as easily do this sequence in your mind and engrain into your memory, know the distance, look at your feet, get a grip, anchor, align peep and then engage the release. Hopefully once you perfect this you can ad a seventh step….. Calling the taxidermist! Good Hunting, John Dudley
Posted on: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 17:30:00 +0000
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