On Learning the Wrong Things Well
I recently watched a young, self-taught archer shoot. His form was…interesting. It was inefficient, strange. I sat and watched him shoot for a while, not paying attention to his target, but just watching him shoot. “You see him?” Another archer said. I nodded. “You see his group?” I didn’t need to look. For all the weirdness, I saw consistency. Yes, he shot strangely, but he shot strangely the same way every time. I knew he was grouping well. “Man," he said. "Can you imagine how good he’d be if had started archery with a coach?” This is a thing I commonly hear in archery. I hear it in other ways too: the constant repetition that you shouldn't learn bad habits, that bad habits learned are harder habits to break later.
Honestly, I'm unsure about that sometimes.
I started archery like most folks: self-taught in the backyard with a knock-off Sammick Sage, winging ridiculously stiff Amazon carbon arrows at a cheap bag-target. I’d stand in our backyard for hours and hours, experimenting and playing, noticing what caused what, what felt right, and what put the target in the middle(ish). I was inquisitive and experimental. At the time I didn’t do much in forums or otherwise, and I wasn’t interested in that. I just wanted to shoot a bow, plain and simple. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I didn’t really want to to know. I just wanted to play.
Eventually I did get “serious” with archery, not in that I started practicing more, but I started actively researching the theory of it all. I started reading, watching videos, talking to others, and meeting coaches. I still remained in that exploratory state, but I started experimenting on a path better traveled. My form remained eccentric in its own right–in reality, because of old injuries and my body’s limited mobility, I just couldn’t shoot like others wanted me to–but now it was informed and tested, and was getting profoundly efficient. I was learning, and it felt like I was learning easily and quickly, and it was showing on my targets.
I think a lot of archers would argue the growth happened because I finally started getting advice, and of course that absolutely was a factor. But I think if I had started formal education right away, it would’ve been overwhelming and killed all the fun of it for me. I would’ve been perplexed by the jargon, felt constrained by the movements, overwhelmed and frustrated knowing the scope of what I was tasked to do relative to what I could do. I feel confident in this because that all happened once I tried to dive into archery, and because I unfortunately watch it happen to new archers often.
I often watch new archers, especially in barebow, struggle with target panic right out of the gate (I have theories on this that I’ll write about later as well). Often, I’m struck that it’s the archers who seem to be doing it right: they’ve read the books, they’ve got a coach, they’ve watched all the videos. Yet, they talk about feeling an immense confusion, a powerful inability to make all the steps mesh together, a constant awareness that they’re not doing it right, and they’re worried they’re learning a bad habit, maybe one they don’t even know about. And every time I wonder: okay, so maybe you’re not in alignment, maybe you’re not expanding. But can you feel where your finger tip is on your lip at anchor? Can you feel the nock point nuzzling against your nose, have you moved it around to different places? Have you tried different stances, and felt how they balanced or made you sway? Have you played?
Looking back on it, I realize in my backyard was where I actually learned how to train to be an archer. I know now I learned archery backwards from how we often recommend it: I learned nothing about the formalities of stance, form, theory, or equipment, but standing in my backyard I learned to be brutally consistent. I learned to pay attention to cues in my body in subtler and subtler ways. I learned to experiment and to notice what I saw, to write down what I found and record it so I could try it next time. When it came time to learn how to “actually” shoot with something that could be mistaken for proper form, I took to it quickly, and in a matter of a day or two could integrate a new technique. The reason for this wasn’t because I was particularly adept at it, or a quick learner. In fact, it was quite the opposite: it was because that in my experimenting, I had learned how to learn, and had figured out how to be consistent on my own time. Would I recommend this for a new archer? Not necessarily. Talking to others would’ve saved me a lot of time and aches in some ways. I would have avoided the normal pitfalls: being over-bowed, shooting with a thin glove, shooting too stiff of arrows, that sort of thing. Absolutely, we should always try to help new archers avoid things that can lead to injury or undue frustration. And am I recommending every archer just do it on their own, just shoot from the hip and go by their gut? Not at all. One of my biggest frustrations with barebow is an entrenched attitude that archery should be purely instinctive and thoughtless, something you just do and feel and don’t think about. I think there’s absolutely a time and a place for thought, for instruction and guidance. Rather, what I propose is maybe we can start with the feeling and movement, then move to the thinking and form. I think every good archer needs a little bit of both, one part cowboy, one part scientist. Maybe becoming familiar with our body, even in goofy ways, isn’t teaching us bad habits, but teaching us how to move, and how to move however we can. Maybe learning intentionally is the key, regardless if our intentions are useful or not at first. Maybe learning a habit, even a bad one, is better than learning no habit at all. Watching that young archer shoot, I thought about all that. I thought about all the times people had said to me: “But can you imagine how good you’d be if you’d learned it right from the beginning?”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
Comments