INSTINCTS OF THE TRADITIONAL ARCHER

Slumps and How to Deal With Them

EDITOR'S NOTE: As a big 8-point whitetail moved into bow range, Travis Fryman of Cantonment, Florida, stood in his tree stand and waited for the shot. Fryman, the former shortstop and third baseman for the Detroit Tigers, who now plays for the Cleveland Indians, recalled later that as soon as he saw the buck, his heart seemed to jump up in his throat. "My adrenaline was pumping, and I could hardly swallow I was so excited. To get off the shot, I knew I'd have to collect myself and calm down." To prepare for the shot, Fryman, who had a .275 batting average in the majors, went through the same mental processes he always had gone through before he stepped to the plate to take a pitch that could win the game for his major-league baseball team.

At times a major-league hitter will go through a slump and can't seem to hit the ball for some unknown reason. When Fryman hits a slump in baseball, he starts practicing with his recurve. "I've learned that when I'm not hitting the ball as I should, I need to get my mind off hitting completely," Fryman explains. "The best way for me to do that is to go out in my backyard, shoot my recurve bow and free my mind. Then when I return to the ballpark, I can refocus on the game and hitting the ball and break my slump."
"Traditional archers also occasionally go through slumps when they can't seem to hit targets and have no muscle memory." According to Fryman, "Don't practice bad habits. I believe you can train yourself to shoot inaccurately with traditional archery if you continue to shoot when you're shooting badly. I've found that to improve my ability to shoot, I have to lay the bow down, and do something else for a day or two. "I believe I either shoot badly or hit poorly because I start thinking and trying to make a conscious correction to an unconscious phenomenon. If you have to think to hit the baseball, the process takes place so fast that while you're thinking about what to do, you'll miss the ball. When I think about why I'm shooting poorly with my recurve and begin to adjust, then I'm attempting to retrain muscle memory, and I won't shoot correctly. For instinctive shooting to be instinctive, you must depend on your body to do what it's trained to do without going through a conscious thought process. You can't learn to catch, throw or bat the baseball in only a week or two of practice. To play baseball well, regardless of the level of your play, you must practice until you can perform the skills required to make the play or hit the ball."

Fryman considers learning the sport of traditional archery exactly like learning to play baseball. If you can play baseball, you can shoot traditional archery. The more you practice the game of baseball, the better you'll play. The more you shoot traditional archery, the more accurately and consistently you'll shoot and the better archer you'll become.