In 1976 the United States Olympic Archery Team coach was Al Henderson, who at the time was recognized as the world's most successful coach in the 1970s. He wrote a book that to this day is still available in many archery circles, Understanding Winning Archery.
I came back to this book just recently when going over some old photos with some new archers and ran across a section from the book. The article was very interesting at the time and the reason I know this is because I underlined the important sections.
The best part about this whole article was the comment, “Don’t let your concentration waiver during the shot.” It goes on to explain that 'learning to win' begins with good preparation, further to that is to not allow your concentration to leave the task at hand when at full
draw.
Finally, if the shot is not the way you wanted it, you need to accept it and try to do better next time. Once it is shot let it go, because you can’t change it and harping on it only will make you upset. Accepting the mistake is a positive move that allows you to maintain emotional control and the ability to move to the next shot in a confident manner.
When you think about it, you spend hours and hours shooting arrows for practice. Arrows in the bank, under the belt, whatever it is called. All this time is so you can train your body to do the job. The job is to shoot good arrows and know the feel. Once you have trained the body to feel the shot it becomes subconscious. Then you learn to let the subconscious mind take over and let the body shoot the arrows. How often have you heard a good archer say, “I was thinking to much.” As odd as this sounds it has it’s merits.
We often talk about concentration on the target, not averting you attention, keeping your eye on the target even after releasing the arrow, until you hear the arrow hit the target. So you ask why is this so important? The answer to this may be hard to completely understand or even believe, but here it is. When you aim your attention at the target and work on pulling through the clicker or squeezing the trigger, you are working in a subconscious stream of thought. The instant that you have something else cross your mind, like, you think about the travel in your release, or "I should let down..." or most commonly the command release or “let Go”, that is the instant that you should stop, let down and start again. That split second, although very short is just enough time for the form to fall apart because you have interfered with the subconscious stream. Now you will tell your coach that you are concentrating, but you may not even realize that your concentration is broken because it occurs during a movement segment of the shot.
So the next time you are at full draw and that tiny little voice in your head can be heard, if it changes direction even for a millisecond, the best thing I can tell you is to let down and start over. Don’t force the shot, you are not doing yourself any favors by continuing on that path because the results will not be your best.
FULL CONCENTRATION HOT TIP
Meditation practice - Stare at an object or point in space for a long time and see if you can lose track of your surroundings, lose track of time, ignore sounds around you. You probably do this all the time when watching TV or texting on your phone anyway, so the trick is to learn to use all your concentration even when just staring at a blank wall - or something equally boring. Learning to use all your concentration on a task is an important step on becoming a great archer.
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