Bowie’s sung about it and TuPac has rapped about it, yes I’m talking about changes. The regular reader (not a typo) of this blog will know that I’ve been mixing my archery up recently in order to try and inject a little more consistency and to get out of my archery slump.

A new bow has been purchased, the shooting glove has been put aside and a tab has been picked up. So what affect has this had on my consistency? At the moment, if I’m honest, I’d say that I’ve had some really nice groupings of five or six arrows, I’ll then go and collect those arrows and the next set of arrows will be all over the place. Mentally, however, I’m feeling a lot better about my shooting, the frustration has gone and I feel that the consistency and the ability to accurately change between targets will come… eventually. The one thing that I have noticed is that if I’m aiming at a small sticker on a blank boss I can hit it or get very close but as soon as a bigger target comes into play the groupings open up. Perhaps there’s a little target panic creeping in?

The next step on my path to being a fairly decent archer is to work on my form by ensuring that my anchor point is locked in place on every shot. More importantly I really need to start concentrating on my aiming. Since I’ve been shooting I’ve tried to go down the instinctive path and I’ve pretty much ignored all other methods of aiming. Looking back now this was probably a mistake as understanding the basics of gap shooting may have given me a reference point to unconsciously build on for the instinctive shooting. With that in mind I’m going to start to really think about my aiming, I’ve ordered some longer arrows which will make it easier to reference them on the target – my current ones are right on the riser edge which makes them difficult to aim with – and I’ll see if I can mash the gap and instinctive together into something that may make me a little more consistent. Time will tell I suppose!