Lessons from an Olympic Archer

So I had a pretty unusual experience this week. I’m a member of my local archery club, and by local I mean the underground range is around 50 metres from my flat. I’ve been shooting for a few years, and recently joined the advanced group lessons to get consistent lessons. I wouldn’t say I’m very good, especially in a club of our calibre. The arrows often end up in the wall, generally the one that I was aiming at, and sometimes even point-first!

So it is very odd for me as a novice archer to end up training in my local hall with a 2-time olympic silver medallist, Jake Kaminski. Jake is someone well known in archery circles, as he has branched out into coaching, and makes some of the best & most informative content going on his YouTube channel.

I jumped at the opportunity, though I limited myself to three-and-a-half hours training, as I feared that the full weekend might well have been too physically taxing for me. Saying that, Jake was very open in the class that if we weren’t used to shooting that many arrows, we should rest as needed and that he was there for us to get what we needed from him. That’s a great attitude for a coach in my humble opinion.

So, on a cold Friday morning, I took advantage of work flexi-time and my company’s allowance of an hour for physical activity a week, and made the dangerous trek to the hall. I mean that quite literally as after a few days of bobbing around freezing point, there was a big dump of snow. Lots of fresh snow that was covering slippery ice, so a classic “Finland’s trying to kill you” day in winter, and another reason why I’m happy being 50 metres away…

To start the morning, Jake introduced himself and asked about us. He then asked what we wanted, and my request was to learn more about the mental side of his training. To me, someone operating at Jake’s has likely forgotten more about sports psychology than I will ever know, and has experience training and coaching at quite literally the highest level. We sat drinking coffee and talking for about 45 minutes, and there were some great insights.

We then went to shoot, and alternated between personal coaching and Jake bringing us together to share information with us all. Obviously a lot of this was very physical training, and doesn’t translate to the written word well. I can say now that a 2-time olympic archer spent 10 minutes adjusting my left-hand grip to be better than it was, which is a crazy sentiment.

Beyond that, there were some great takeaways that do translate.

• The human brain can only focus for 2-3 seconds before another thought comes in, so you need to be mindful of this in your practice. Trying to focus for longer than this will lead to intrusive thoughts.

• The human brain is lazy, and will naturally relax back to the easy way. The metaphor used was that you can spend years wearing a well-trodden path in a forest. If you want to create a new path, you have to spend the time and effort machete-ing the plants back. If the previous path is right there, you will be very tempted to go back to it, and it takes determination and deliberate action to stick to the path you want.

• Archery is a multi-stage process, and you can’t shortcut it, especially when you are beginning. This is something I have been guilty of, shooting rounds where I’m focussed on one topic, and pay scant attention to the others. This leads to you recognising shortcuts as “successful”. Rather, one should do the whole process, but make sure you focus on the stage you want to, when you get there.

• To ensure that you do all stages in a process, say an associated word out as you do it. “Draw”, “Grip”, “Slump”, etc. I have to say that this reminded me of the concept of “Pointing and calling”, made famous by the Japanese rail industry.

• Archery is very much about one’s own internal feeling, and one needs to correlate the feeling with the result. This is something that I will need to dwell on, but it reminds me of the concepts of interoception and proprioception. Hearing Jake talking about the level of detail he would go to for this was truly astounding.

• In some sports, one can focus adrenaline and nerves into increased performance. Archery is not that, as it is about fine control. It beggars belief thinking about the mental control for someone to shoot a target 70 metres away in the olympic final, when their heart rate is going through the roof. Again, this is something that one can only hear about from someone that has done it, and I was thinking about a similar story I heard when I was the former formula 1 world champion Nico Rosberg talking recently.

• Final lesson is that I was prepared to take notes, or I would have forgotten all this. I also had a backup, as it’s fine to have a clever technical notebook that you can erase the pen from to re-use it, but when that pen runs out after half a page, it’s good that I had my phone.

Overall, the opportunity to learn from anyone that operates at the highest level is always welcome. Someone like Jake has such a firm understanding of so many principles of sports, physiology and psychology, that picking his brain and getting his feedback was a great learning experience. Some of his lessons, concerning coaching and mental toughness, will be of value to me away from archery.  

Many thanks to the club & Robert for organising, and to Jake for taking the time to visit.

(Title image taken via creative commons from the US Embassy of London Flickr page https://www.flickr.com/photos/usembassylondon/6211520116/in/photostream/)