Something magical seems to happen when we shoot our bows. One practice
session we’ll be shooting great, smokin’ arrows right in the spot.
Then, the next time we shoot, our groups will be just out of the spot.
In fact, they are such good groups that we finally breakdown and move
our sight. For a while, our groups will be back in the spot. That’s
when the magic happens, and we’ll start shooting groups out the other
side of the spot. And, when it is all said and done, we end up moving
our sight right back to where we started.
Magic? Our tech freak
minds can’t handle that, there must be a logical reason for this
strange phenomenon. So we went looking for the answer.
First, we
had to determine if the bow was changing. We decided to start with the
most temperamental part of the bow, the strings and cables. If the
strings or cables stretch, the arrow will impact in a different place
until they stabilize. Generally, they never truly stabilize. The rate
at which they stretch just slows down.
Using a shooting machine,
we found that strings and cables made of spectra (fast flight) promoted
accuracy problems. The fast flight seemed to always be changing,
requiring us to either adjust our sight settings or our form. This made
it nearly impossible to know whether our form was off, or our bow was
changing. We would spend hours adjusting our form and chasing sight
marks trying to figure out why we were missing. Only to find out with
the aid of the shooting machine, it was the bow that had changed.
We
found that strings and cables made of a spectra and vectran blend
worked significantly better than the spectra. They would stabilize more
quickly and even after thousands of shots there was little or no
change. (Keep in mind that the strings and cables we use have at least
2 twists per inch, which greatly helps with stability and serving
separation.)
Once we got our strings and cables to stabilize the
only thing left to check were our arrows. Using the shooting machine we
were able to cull out any bad arrows. When we finished, our quiver was
full of arrows that all hit in the same hole. Now we were confident we
had equipment that would stay consistent from practice to practice.
So
back to the practice butts we went, ready to dispel any thoughts of
magic. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for us to realize that our
problem still existed. During the practice sessions our groups were
still moving out of the spot. So we would move our sight to bring the
groups back to the middle. But, it wouldn’t be long before we would
have to move it right back to where we started.
This time we
knew our equipment was not to blame. So the only thing left to figure
out was what we were doing to make the shots different than the ones
before. The shots seemed the same, they felt the same, they were set up
the same, and to our knowledge they were shot the same. So obviously we
had some baby form flaws that we were going to have to root out.
After
some long consideration, we decided the flaws had to be happening
between when the arrow was released and when it left the bow. This
presented a little bit of a problem. During that split second of the
shot, the bow moved way to fast for us see what was happening. That’s
when we noticed that we were blinking our eyes during that critical
moment of release. As we learned not to blink our eyes during the shot
(Newsletter #6) a whole new world was exposed. We actually could see
what was going on before, during, and after the shot. With this
discovery we were able to monitor a part of our shot sequence that we
originally thought was impossible to see. By paying attention to this
part of our sequence we realized that we were actually making
nano-second adjustments during the shot.
Nano-second adjustments
refer to any extra variables that a shooter adds in the set-up or
during the actual shot that causes the arrow to hit different than the
machine. (Examples: different grips on the bow, not centering peep, bow
movements, creeping, different follow through, plucking the string,
etc.) If you have ever shot an arrow when your sight has wandered off
the spot and some how the arrow still went in the middle, chances are
you’ve experienced a nano-second adjustment. It would be great if
nano-second adjustments only worked in our favor. Unfortunately they
are not always so helpful. If you’ve missed a shot even though it felt
great and was well aimed, then you have experienced the negative side
of these nano-second adjustments.
We soon realized, that by
constantly moving our sight during practice, we were not only promoting
these nano-second adjustments we were also practicing them. These
nano-adjustments are very powerful and hard to detect. In a stress free
situation they can also be quite consistent. The problem was that
whenever the shot was really important we would try extra hard to do
everything right. However, by doing this we would actually suppress
these nano-second adjustments, and we would miss. So our sight settings
became a major focus point to help detect nano-adjustments.
We
found that if enough nano-adjustments are used, any sight setting could
actually be good. However, the more nano-second adjustment we relied
on, the easier it was for our shot to break down under pressure. What
we truly wanted was a setting that was set for our perfect shot. The
problem was weeding out all of the bad shots. Just because the arrow
hit dead center did not mean it was a good shot.
So we worked on
developing a shooting form and a shot execution that relied on as few
nano-adjustments as possible. There is no true escape from
nano-adjustments. But, by becoming aware of all that’s going on during
the shot, we can chose which ones we will embrace and become intimately
familiar with, and which ones need to be fixed.
Now we set our
sight to hit where it is aimed when we do everything right. If we start
hitting differently we look for the nano-adjustments causing the miss,
instead of instantly adjusting our sight. This way, we can start
addressing the nano-adjustments as they crop up and not continue to
practice them.
P.S. We finally had a better understanding why
our arrows were attracted to those darn black holes. During the
nano-second after we would release the arrow, we would wiggle the bow,
or sometimes just plain shift our aim to funnel those arrows right into
the black hole. Even if we moved our sight settings, the black hole
still caused us to make a nano-adjustment; it was just a bigger
adjustment.
Good Shooting! For the best in no nonsense bow sights: Spot Hogg
