ADVANCED ARCHERY SHOOTING TIPS – GETTING OVER THE HUMP

So, you went out and bought yourself the best archery equipment possible. You’re at the archery range all the time. You read every online article about archery shooting. You watch every YouTube video you can find. As you shoot, you find yourself improving and shooting new personal bests pretty frequently. As time goes on, however, your scores seem level out and you can't get over that dreaded hump to the next level. You're not improving. This can be very frustrating and leads to many shooters giving up on archery. 

This article will outline some archery shooting tips that may help you get over that hump and gain those few extra points that we all desire. While indoor archery will be discussed, this can be directly related to any style of archery. A scenario of a 295 Vegas shooter will be used but the process is the same, whether you’re hung up at 250 or a 299.

The Better You Shoot, The Tougher it is to Improve

The first thing to realize is that the better you shoot, the tougher it is to improve. If you started out as a 270 shooter, then you had room for a 30 point improvement. If you are now a 295 shooter, you only have room to improve 5 points. You will have to work harder for each of these next 5 points than you did for the previous 25. At this stage of the game, if you can shoot 25 good archery shots during your target practice, there’s no reason you can’t shoot 30.

Advice for the Advanced Archer

My most common archery shooting tip is to tell the novice and intermediate archery shooters to forget their misses. I am going to go a different route here. When you’re at an advanced archery level, you need to identify why your misses are misses in order to eliminate them:

• Are the majority of your misses caused by the same thing? 
• Are all of your misses in the same location on the target during your archery practice rounds? 

Keeping a detailed journal can really help to identify things like this. The main thing is to see if your misses have something in common. From there, it’s easy, fix it!!!

Other Issues

• If you find that a lot of your misses are to the left on your #3 spot, it could be as simple as just being more aggressive on that last shot. 
• Do you find yourself holding onto shots too long? 9 out of 10 times you can get that shot to go in, but its #10 that haunts you. Learning to let those shots down can improve scores in a hurry. 
• If you find that all of your misses are either in the first two ends, or last two ends then it’s most certainly a mental issue.

Be Honest with Yourself

As an archer, you need to be totally honest with yourself. Take a step back and look at your archery shooting from someone else’s view. What would you tell yourself you need to do in order to improve? 

Bad Shot Improvements

One of the biggest things I try to achieve is getting my bad shots to stay in the 10 ring. Our good shots will always go in the middle, but if we can get our bad shots to go in, we’re golden.

The Little Things

Sometimes a single evening working on little things like these can pay off big time. Some of the more frequent issues that I see neglected are:

• Creep tuning
• Bow balance
• Peep size
• Aiming in general

I will go into each of these archery shooting tips more in depth in future articles.

I hope this article on archery shooting tips has helped to make a little sense of the frustrating side of indoor shooting. As with most archery shooting there is no magic formula, but at this stage of the game, one little tidbit of info can be a game changer. 

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