When you read the title of this piece, what did you think of? Did you think of some supernatural, spooky radar? Actually the five senses we obsess over: sight, smell, touch, hearing, taste. are just a few of the...
When you read the title of this piece, what did you think of? Did you think of some supernatural, spooky radar?
Actually the five senses we obsess over: sight, smell, touch, hearing, taste. are just a few of the senses we possess, without invoking any supernatural mumbo-jumbo.
Next in line might be:
• Thermoception – the sense of heat (there is some debate that the sense of cold may be a separate sense)
• Nociception – the perception of pain
• Equilibrioception – the perception of balance
• Proprioception – the perception of body awareness (close your eyes and touch your nose. Got it first time? That’s proprioception in action)
And these don’t include the sensations of hunger or thirst as well as others.
Archers tend to focus exclusively upon sight and touch. Sight for aiming and identifying our targets, and touch for monitoring our shots though how they feel “in hand.” And blind archers can trim that list down from two to one! (Hi, Janice!)
So, which “sense” was I referring to? It was balance.
The senses that archers utilize the most are: sight, touch, balance, and proprioception. Proprioception (being able to sense where the parts of your body are in relation to one another; the best example of which is the loss of the ability to speak well when having Novocain administered by a dentist) is almost invisible and is certainly autonomic, so I will focus on balance.
Balance is a complex sense. There are internal organs that provided feedback to the brain as to our orientation in space, as well as our eyes providing such. (When these organs get out of whack, you can get severe vertigo; ask Claudia for details.) If you don’t think balance is all that important, here’s an experiment for you to do the next time you are shooting. Ensuring it is safe to do this, stand on the shooting line and execute a shot, with one foot off of the ground.
Balance is important, your stance is designed around it. I was always shocked when I saw field archers on a target field shoot with their feet almost touching. Standing with your feet together is an acceptable stance in field archery, which might not provide much of a place to stand and shoot from, but on a flat field a wider spacing of one’s feet provides much better balance.
But what does balance provide to your shots? Ah, Grasshopper, a wise question! Balance provides stillness. We want to be still at full draw because if we are moving we have compounded our problem. We want to stand in a space in which our bow and the attached arrow are in the exactly correct position so that the bow can drive the arrow toward the target and our point of aim. But if we are not still, that is we are moving, we still have the space issue but we also have to pick the time at which to execute the shot; the time when our body is in exactly the right position (as it moves back and forth through that position). The problem is much simpler if we are just still.
You can evaluate stillness a number of ways and thus find your best balance. One such method is to draw upon a target (close is good) and evaluation how much your sight aperture moves back and forth at full draw (you can use multiples of the smallest ring as a measure). Then make a change in your stance and repeat. In this manner you can get some feedback on which stance provides the most balance/stillness. Be aware that holding for 10-20 seconds at a time is tiring and you may want to rest between repetitions of this experiment. Also shooting a few shots between experiments will prevent you from becoming locked up at full draw.
You are probably aware of the experiment/drill of drawing on your target, closing your eyes for 5-10 seconds and then opening your eyes. If your aperture has drifted left or right (ignore the up or down), then your body is fighting your full draw position. If your aperture moved to the right, rotate your stance to the right a bit and try again. When you find the stance that doesn’t drift, called your natural stance, then you will not be fighting your body over your full draw position.
Note—Some archers use an exaggerated open stance that requires them to fight their own body. This, they claim, creates tension through their torso which makes the “shooting platform” more rigid and less susceptible to wind forces. Of course, to do this, one must be physically fit and flexible enough to make it work.
