I took my first archery lesson… 8 years ago… But it didn’t take at first. I thought it was cool, I just didn’t have the patience for it yet. I’ve come back to it irregularly over the years, but the past 2 years it stuck a bit more. I haven’t had another lesson yet, but I remember my first instructor really focused on breathing.

You might be breathing wrong

What a concept. You might be breathing incorrectly right now. If your mouth is open at all, it’s wrong. If you only fill up the top of your lungs, wrong. There’s a chance you would never know either because it’s normal. A lot of us are out here breathing wrong and wondering why we feel cetain ways.

It’s true, when you’re upset pay attention to how your breathing changes. Over the past 5 years I’ve spent a lot of time really sick. The thoughts and emotions that come with that are something you have to learn how to handle quickly if you’re going to make it. For me, when I’m getting upset I notice how my breathing pattern gets shorter and shallower. Try forcing it back to those deep, slow breaths.

When you’re trying to aim a recurve bow and you need to balance the amount of force you put on the string and how the arrow lines up with the target over the distance, you have to be in control of your breathing.

Shuddery, choppy breaths will always have you off target. You have to learn how to inhale on the draw and exhale on the release. Of course there are a lot more technical skills that go into this practice, but breathing is one of the most subtle.

You have to get out of your head

While archery takes a fair amount of practice, once you have the main skills down the rest is intentional refinement. During your training you’ll concentrate really hard on the alignment of your shoulders, how you need to rotate your arm so you don’t get smacked by the string, and where your eyes are supposed to be focused.

Like with anything else you do, you can practice for years and still find ways to improve these skills. It’s easy to get hyper-focused on proper technique to the point where you end up holding your breath the whole time! Eventually you have to trust that your training was good and you know what you’re doing.

That’s why the exhale on releasing the arrow is so important. Once the arrow nock is off the string, there’s nothing else you can do to influence where it hits. If you reflect on when you release the arrow, there’s a brief moment when you don’t have a single thought. I’m sure the better you are the longer that moment becomes.

But don’t think about it. Just breathe.

Back muscles are important

While this point has nothing to do with breathing, it’s true. I’m still surprised at the different draw weights will give you a good workout. They aren’t all hard to draw, but depending on the distance you want to cover and the type of arrows you want to use, it can get heavy.

Early on I would hold the string until my instructor corrected my posture. That hasn’t changed a whole lot yet, but it’s not as long as it used to be. Archery is a sport that’s wildly technical, but hard to see the little adjustments that make all the difference.

Just imagine holding a 40 pound weight and trying to keep it straight and aligned with a point 20 yards away. Eventually you figure out how to move into position faster and more consistently.

I’ll let you know when I get to that point.