The first session was a couple of days ago, and I did it with the wife, who scored 8/13 with her 30 lbs. bow, so she beat me, (which of course she LOVED). I tried to use specific aiming styles and it wasn’t working. I missed the entire target in one set of 6 shots entirely doing that.
Lessons learnt (well… with MINDSET it’s really the same lesson STILL not learnt, rather):
- MINDSET – Worrying about her own learning and trying to impart what I knew and helping her was distracting me from doing my own things and it was only once I reverted back to instinctive shooting I “caught up” with her, so as before, MINDSET is paramount. No matter how much I try to sidestep it in ways I always “got away” with mostly in hand-to-hand or firearms, with archery it really seems to be a main issue. Which is good and probably the thing I like best about it. You can’t lie to the bow. If you don’t calm yourself and focus, you will miss.
- INSTINCTIVE SHOOTING – today instead, I tried to actually put a temporary sight (a red line on the bow riser) and use that to aim. First shot went high. Second shot went low. Third shot I missed high again, and I was trying in each case to hold consistently in the same spot. Obviously it was not working and I was doing something wrong. So I thought that for now I’d switch back to instinctive shooting. No aiming mechanism at all, just a sense of my own view of what I wanted to hit. I didn’t miss the target a single time then, and I came fairly consistently close to the centre 4” bullseye as you can see from the two images below. One shows the three arrows you can see still partially through the box, the next shows you where the ones that went through were in relation to it. In essence, at 20 metres, I will not miss a human sized target that is standing still, and will hit a roughly circular ares of 10-12” in diameter pretty much 100% of the time, just on instinctive shooting.
CONCLUSIONS – I will probably focus on just trying to become more accurate on an instinctive basis and forego the whole trying to put sights on the bow in any way. I am certain it is possible to become as accurate as I want to be just from instinctive shooting, because the human brain/mind/body is capable of doing some amazing things if you unchain its potential, which thanks to Systema training I am better than most humans on Earth at doing. Whether *I* can get as accurate as I want remains to be seen. I am basically 20% of the shots in that I assigned myself at the start and I can hit the target basically 100% of the time at 20 metres, but now I need to hit the 4-6” target 40-50% of the time and presently I have only hit it once, which is mostly random luck rather than accurate shooting. BUT… the accuracy is definitely improving, so I will see how the next say 200-250 shots go if I just focus on instinctive shooting only. If I can get it down to 8” radius 100% of the time, I think I will be fairly well on the road to hit the 4” target some 40% of the time.
I think now it’s just a matter of firing the next 200-250 shots instinctively only. At 20m only. And see how much improvement there is. If adequate (say generally 8” diameter 80-90% of the time) I can then either do the next 200 shots or so to try and get even more accurate (down to say 80% for a 6” target, which frankly would be awesome and I’d be very pleased with) or try to get back to 40-50m distance and see if I can retain the accuracy in line with approaching my original aims (reproduce below for convenience).
FINAL WORD – I know these posts get a lot less readership, and that’s fine. But I hope it is of use/interest to those who do enjoy them.
AIMS – Within 1000 shots total. Currently at 187 shots total
- 70% hit rate of human sized target at 50m – Good. 80% Excellent.
- 40-50% hit rate out to 100m. 40% would be very happy. 50% Outstanding.
- 40% hit rate at 20m for 4” target.
- 60-70% hit rate at 20m for 6” target. 60% – Good. 70% – Better than Good.
This post was originally published on my Substack. Link here
