Hill style of shooting, It's all in the approach Pt. 3

     What does Basketball and the Schulz teaching of the Hill style of shooting have in common?  Read on...

     But first...please look to the left of this Blog page and see the places to visit.  There are two references to Performance Archery.  Select the top one (a discussion on Automatic Skill) and please read it carefully.  This is an Archery specific sports psychology coach of some reputation telling the why and how it works to shoot in a fluid, subconscious muscle memory type of shooting, in specific regard to the points I've discussed in shooting a longbow in the Hill style.  Alistair tells it very well.  

    Let me insert words from John Schulz in his first book "Hitting 'em like Howard Hill" Intro...."it is not my intent in this booklet to set down the technical aspects of archery. Neither do I intend to deal with the multitudinous styles and form or target and tournament shooting.  Many are the authorities on those subjects.  We will leave that phase to them.  The things I wish to expand on are in the area for which the bow was originally intended, the procurement of game".   That's my intent as well.  My words are not to be an approach to shooting a longbow for target shooting, shooting tight groups on the range or in the backyard (although that can well be an effect of proper shooting form) but in the shooting at game animals and bringing them home to the cookpot or freezer in a consistent manner.

     So...basketball.  What does it have to do with the approach to shooting a longbow, Hill style?  Firstly, lets talk form.   Then concentration and accuracy.

      During one of my phone conversations with John Schulz, he was discussing the importance of being fluid when shooting in the Hill style.  This is absolutely paramount to the system and what gets lost in the shooter's efforts to emulate Hill or Schulz.  The shooter gets mired in the trying, forever trying.  John told me to watch a basketball player during a game, making a play down the court.  He is dribbling the ball using either hand, going around his back or between his legs, while running, then suddenly he pulls up when the shot opportunity arises and he performs a beautiful jump shot and makes the basket.  Schulz said to notice how fluid the entire play was...all the parts flowed together seamlessly.  There was no stutter to his step, no missing of the dribble even though he wasn't watching his feet or hands.  The switch from dribble and run to jump and shoot was a fluid motion that had no stop motion, no mental checklist or switch of gears to a static shooting form.  Everyone watching gets lost in the physical prowess, the natural athletic beauty of the play and no one thinks about the thousands of hours performing drills of dribbling, ball handling, jumping and shooting.  Over and over the motions are performed. At first it's static; a thought-through process which gradually becomes more automatic as the player gets more accustomed to the steps and allows those steps to become ingrained into muscle memory and consequently, trusted.  Trust.  That place the player eventually arrives that allows him to perform the motions during pressured activity.  Like Alistair mentions in the Performance article.  Trust.  Eventually you have to trust the form and get on with the shot and let it happen and accept the outcome, good or bad.  The beautiful thing is that the more the form is performed and trusted to perform properly, the better and better it gets.  That's how our bodies and hand and eye coordination works.  The more we trust it, the less we think about it and the easier and better it works.  

    John was stressing to me that the steps of shooting form he showed in the video was to be practiced over and over, slowly and methodically until eventually the entire motion became fluid and fast. (Like the basketball player) He says so in the video, to keep an even rhythm and getting faster "until you're finally, fast"... but shooters get wrapped up in the nuances, the attempts to get two anchor points before releasing the arrow for example, and they lose the fluidity.  Schulz said to me that he wished he'd never mentioned the two anchors.  He said the thumb behind the ear anchor was more of a residual effect of the first anchor and release, to keep the hand from flying away from the face.  But in talking to shooters and customers over the years, he realized that they were trying to get both anchors accomplished before releasing the arrow.  This created too much thinking and a static approach to the shot. The opposite of what he was trying to achieve in the lessons.

     Shooters trying to follow his instructions get wrapped up in the details to where they are constantly thinking about them, instead of letting them be absorbed into muscle memory subconsciously and repeated through hand and eye coordination.  Like Alistair says, the motion has to be learned, then allowed to happen without a thought during the process.  There can be a triggering thought to start the motion, but then the motion is performed without conscious thought.  A golfer performs a forward press to start the golf swing. A baseball player twirls his bat prior to swinging at a pitch.  Schulz shows a slight downward motion of his bow hand before raising it on the swing draw...the same kind of mental trigger to start the swing draw motion and once started, there is no interruption.  ALL the concentration is on the target "boring a hole" as we've discussed previously.   Each of these things are wrapped up in the approach to shooting a longbow in the Hill style.  Think about them and apply them.  Keep it fluid and the shot relegated to smooth muscle memory and TRUST it to happen correctly.  It will if we allow it and trust it to happen.

      What about the basketball and accuracy?  Well, during the bowhunting class Schulz taught, there was lessons in aiming at a "deer" and where to put the arrow.  He referred the vitals (chest) of a deer to the approximate size of a basketball.  He stressed the chest is 3D like the ball, not flat like a target and can be shot from many angles. He said the arrow goes through the ball and the animal is down.  Simple as that.  He also said that there are many ways to kill a deer (many angles) that are not the typically accepted broadside or quartering away angle.   He said anyone saying otherwise hasn't shot as many animals as he.  He wasn't being obnoxious, just was stating the fact that an arrow can kill when going through the ball/chest from any angle other than broadside or quartering away.  His approach was to get the shooter thinking differently.  To start thinking about shooting an arrow "Through" instead of "At".  Remember "bore a hole through it" in the video?  This is where it ties together with his class teaching.  We need to get to the point where our concentration on the ball/chest...the exact place on the ball/chest we want the arrow to "go through", is all we think about during the shot.  Everything else is blacked out.

    If our concentration is that intense on the ball...which is a target without really any aiming points, and that concentration is of "boring a hole THROUGH it", then we actually start feeling that we are the arrow itself going through the ball.  It's a strange feeling, but it's a projection of self into the shot.  Byron Ferguson calls it "becoming the arrow" and he's right on in regards to this part of the Hill style.  We cannot think about boring a hole through the ball and also think about where our arrow tip is pointed, or where our elbow is rotating back to, or whether our 2 pt. feather touching the nose and finger touching the tooth anchor is correctly accomplished prior to aiming or releasing.  No,  this part of the Hill style shot process...the boring a hole through the basketball trains us to only think of the aiming the arrow and allowing the rest of the shot to be done automatically, without conscious though as Hill and Alistair talk about. 

    If we work on shooting an arrow through a ball, learn to see a spot on the ball to shoot through, projecting our thought through the ball, then shooting at the chest of a deer from any angle is much easier.  Some people have trouble finding a spot to shoot at on a deer's nondescript side. They are used to shooting spots on a target face, two dimensional.  That's target style shooting.  Instead, learn the way that Hill and Schulz taught to shoot in the hunting style.  Shoot through your target, "bore a hole through it, look right at it, concentrate on it and you'll hit it, most of the time".

     Keep remembering to be fluid, trust your form that you've ingrained at the blank bales to work in the field, and, Shoot Straight.