Archery For Beginners 27 Important Things To Know

If you are new to archery, you're absolutely in the right place. This is the beginner's guide to getting started in archery. And if you've been in an archery for a while, I want to warn you that this is for new people. You still may learn something, but let's not argue about the little things today because the goal is to have fun and to help more people enjoy archery. And maybe by the end of the video, you'll be able to shoot something like this. This is a longer video. I basically condensed 27 videos into one. So I have timestamps so you can click around and reference this video later if you need to. My intention for this video is to help more people enjoy more archery, not a massive plug for Shatterproof Archery. So in the beginning, I just wanted to say links in the description to everything talked about in this video. A lot of stuff is my business, Shatterproof Archery, but I also do alternative links to other products that I enjoy using to Amazon and other things in the description. So just wanted to verbally say that once. So feel free to use the links below if they help your convenience. If not, just go get the stuff you need wherever you would like to. Not all bow poundages are the same. A traditional bow works completely different than a compound bow. For example, we've got a compound bow right here. The thing with a compound bow is we've got these pulley systems. So you've got a mechanical advantage, meaning there's a let off. What a let off is, is watch this. As I pull back, it's gonna get harder, harder, harder, and then it lets off easier. What poundage have we got there? 11? We have 11 pounds on a, about a 40-pound bow. So there's a let off, whereas on a traditional bow, it's really useful to know that it just gets harder and harder all the way back. And so we were gonna have probably near a 40, 43-pound bow. 49. 49-pound bow. So we got a 49-pound bow and we have a 40, 45-pound bow, but at full draw, this is 49. This at full draw is 11 pounds. So what does this mean? It means if you're switching from compound to traditional, minus your compound poundage in half and go with that for a traditional bow. It's a completely different amount of weight you have to hold at full draw. Getting the right bow poundage is super important because if you have the wrong poundage, then it can just not be fun to shoot. Or if you buy too high of a poundage, what happens is you can only shoot a couple times and it'd be enjoyable. So you don't wanna buy a bow for your max poundage. You wanna buy a bow that you can shoot 100 times comfortably. I like to think about it this way. I could max out at 10 pull-ups in a row, but I can't do that continually. I could only do one or two sets of that. If I'm trying to do 100 pull-ups in a day, by my last set, I'm only doing one or two pull-ups. And you don't want that when shooting a bow because by your last set of arrows, you don't wanna be sitting here like this. No, you wanna be nice and steady. Got it? Okay, so a good way to test out if you've never shot a bow before is get some of these eight inch bands and you can practice drawing with these. So this is a 40 pound band. Lots of bands will say what their poundage is. And if not, you can get a little scale like the one I have over there for like five to six bucks. Get a fishing scale maybe. Any scale that goes up to 100 pounds. You can use these bands and you're like, oh, 40 pounds too easy. Throw on another 10 pound band. So then you've got 50 pounds and you can see how much feels comfortable. As a matter of fact, you probably want to draw and hold and see how many times you can do this comfortably before you decide what poundage you need. The other option is if you have a local archery shop, there's a ton of awesome people in the archery industry. We get to talk to people all the time. Go to the local shop, ask them, hey, could I test out some bows? Most shops have bows set aside. I showcase bows or as bows that you can use and test out just to see if it fits you well. So that might be worth trying out first and then you'll make sure you get the right poundage for you. If in question, get a lower poundage bow. You can always increase later, but you want to get that form down first so that you can have a great time shooting archery. Traditional bows come in many shapes and sizes, kind of like people's hearts. So this right here is a one piece recurve bow. Now the different shapes and sizes come for different purposes. So a recurve bow will tend to store more energy than a one piece long bow. And that's because it's curved backwards more, but there are downsides to that. And that is that it could have a little bit more vibration when you shoot. And sometimes people say it's harder to be more accurate with a recurve bow because they tend to be a little bit shorter. A longer bow tends to feel a little smoother and be a little bit more accurate, a little easier to be more accurate, shall I say. You also have three piece bows. So you'll see there's these bolts for Allen keys right here and you can take this down to be three different pieces for storage or interchanging the limbs. There's many different versions of this. There's an industry standard version. That's the ILF system. We don't need to get into those details, but there are takedown bows, recurve and long bows. There's many other types of bows as well. Another one I can cover real quick is a horse bow. You can see this is designed much different than the other ones. These things are non-bending tips. They're called Sias. There's so many different styles of bows and my goal is not to overwhelm you, but making such a deep topic simple is easy. I have to miss so many things on purpose. My goal is not to confuse you. So just for the basics of what you need to know at the moment is that you're always trading off speed and maybe smoothness of shooting. And so when you increase the speed, you tend to decrease the smoothness of the bow because you're increasing speed, you're gonna increase how much stored energy is in the bow or how much poundage is in the bow. If you increase smoothness, you're gonna decrease speed because it's gonna be less storage of energy, which will make the limbs go smoother or a lower poundage bow. So that's the trade-off on all bows. Now, a well-made bow, you can kind of find the best of both worlds, which is pretty sweet and that's what we try to do. So how do you make sure you don't get a bow that you don't like? I have two recommendations. One is go to your local archery shop and test out some of the bows they have, but maybe they don't have what you want. So another option would be order from somewhere that allows you to return bows if you don't like it, kind of like a shatterproof archery or Amazon. I know it's in here somewhere. Bow strings, every bow I've ever purchased comes with a bow string. And this bag hidden away in the closet is a bunch of endless loop bow strings. So this is what you can expect will come with a bow when you order it from most bow manufacturers. We like to send a Flemish twist bow string and the difference between an endless loop and a Flemish twist bow string is the method it's made. Flemish twist tends to be the more premium bow string in the traditional archery world. And here's a Flemish twist bow string. It will shoot better. If you want the best bow string you can get without doing any research, go get a D97 Flemish twist bow string and you'll be good to go. But if you want to do a lot of research on bow strings, check out the archery library. On the archery library, there is so much great information and many posts about bow strings. Next, when shooting traditional archery, it's good to consider finger protection. Most finger protection is made from leather and it comes in different forms. This right here would be called a tab. This right here is a glove. The glove is basically a leather glove. Most gloves, you can feel the string more. A lot of people who shoot instinctively, more on that later, use gloves. Where a lot of people who shoot gap use tabs. There's no hard rule which one to use for which aiming method. They'll both work great and with practice, I like to use both of them. But the reason you want to use finger protection is because you'll start wearing down your fingers, you'll get calluses, and if you're shooting any bow above 20 pounds, it's going to probably start stinging your fingers for most of us. I know some of you out there are pretty stinking tough, but for me at least, it starts really stinging my finger when you're releasing the string with your finger. On a compound bow, people use mechanical releases. So that's their method of releasing the string. Our method, we use our fingers, which makes it a little harder to shoot because we're adding more of us into the equation and we're kind of flawed and not very consistent. So it kind of makes it fun. It gives it a bigger challenge, but you do want protection on your hand. So there's hundreds of versions of tabs and gloves that you can find out on the market. But even more important than finger protection is going to be arm protection. Because what can happen is when you shoot the bow, a lot of times beginners don't have the best form, rightly so. If you do something for the first time, you're not supposed to be good at it. And I've seen this with hundreds of people I've been able to teach in archery and thousands of people I've been able to interact with online. The story I hear the most is, oh, I shot a bow once, but man, I really remember it slapped my arm and it bruised up and it hurt for weeks. That happens all the time. So when you're first starting out, I mean, you need some sort of arm guard protection. Again, lots of times leather, but it can come in a bunch of different materials. And when you put an arm guard on, you're just putting a layer of protection between you and your arm so that when you shoot, if the string slaps, it wasn't a dry fire, it was a flick, come on guys. If it slaps, then you're safe. So man, I find that well worth it. The main reason is you're gonna create a negative pathway in your brain if you slap your wrist consistently when shooting a bow, a negative pathway to releasing your shot. So you're gonna start flinching and twitching and doing all sorts of things when you release the arrow, which will cause inconsistency. And consistency causes a problem because then you miss a lot. And then when you miss a lot and you're worse at something, it becomes less fun. And I wanna help more people enjoy more archery. So get some sort of arm guard. If you don't wanna buy an arm guard, throw six hoodies on or something. You just need some protection here so you don't hurt yourself when you're shooting archery. That string doesn't fit. I need a string that fits this bow. As a matter of fact, the thing you want to not do is to string your bow in such a way that breaks it. That would be a bad thing, stringing a bow. The first thing to know is that on a recurve bow, it's recurved away from you. I've seen a lot of people accidentally string it this way. And rightly so, if you're starting out in archery, it looks like the bow should keep bending in the direction it's going. It actually doesn't. If it's bending in one direction, you're gonna string it the opposite direction. The reason it bends away from you is so that it can store more energy. So the first method would be to use what a lot of people call like the floor method or the leg method. This is probably the worst method. I've got a mat down here. So I'm going to use that mat to string the bow. I'm gonna put my thigh in the middle of the handle and then you're gonna bend your bow evenly to string it. The problem with this method is you're driving one of these tip overlays into the ground and you can break the tip overlays quite easily. That's why I'm using the mat, but it's still not a great method. At this point, your bow is strong. You'll see how it's bending the opposite direction of where originally was bending. You want to make sure that the strings are in the string grooves before you pull it back and shoot it. Sometimes you can kind of just pop it like this to see real quick. You just don't want to draw it all the way back and dry fire. That's not the best method. Let me show you the best method. The best method would be to use a bow stringer. These things are phenomenal. Fantastic. They work great. Here's why. Because you can put the bow away from yourself, pull up on the bow stringer, and then easily let down it. It's much safer this way to string your bow than with the leg method. There's also another method. It's called the push-pull method. I don't know how to do it. This is how you string a bow with a bow stringer. I'm going to show you with our Shadowproof Archery bow stringer. So first, grab the top loop. If you're not sure what the top loop is, the top loop is going to be the one that's a little bit bigger than the bottom loop. And I've actually got this reversed at the moment. So we'll grab the top loop. The top loop slides onto the limb. Then you'll move over to the bottom loop. The bottom loop will go inside the groove. We'll grab the pocket of the bow stringer and put it over the side where the bow string's in the groove, which is the bottom side. Then with the other side, you'll put it over the limb. Now make sure your bow stringer's on the inside and your bow string is on the outside. So I'll put that bow stringer right on the inside. From this point, we'll step on our bow stringer and pull up in the handle. It's important to make sure your hand's in the handle. It'll bend the bow the most evenly possible way. So you'll pull up and now the bow stringer is holding the bow that's bent. So you can grab this string on this side and just gently put it into the groove. And from that point, you can gently release to make sure the tension transfers from the bow stringer to the bow string. And there you have a properly strung bow. One of the other things to note is if your bow's too short for your bow stringer, you can spread both legs out to just shorten your string. And then you can unstring it and string it from there. That way you don't have to arch your back so much to pull it up. But a deadlift is much easier than a bicep curl. After your bow string's strung, the next thing to think about is a knocking point. And this is a solid reference for your arrow. Let me grab an arrow quick and show you. So I'll grab this arrow and when you put it on, you're gonna put it underneath the knocking point. And that means when you shoot with your fingers underneath or split finger, there's a hard reference so you can have consistency when shooting. I created a full video on this with three different ways to add knocking points. Some are easier than others and some perform better than others. There's pros and cons of each. If you want more information on knocking points, check that out. That's also in the larchery, larchery, I various. Another thing to consider when getting into traditional archery is the arrows. The arrows are typically the same as compound archery, but the fletchings are not. You generally have feathers on traditional archery fletching where on compound bows, lots of times they'll have veins. Pretty much all the time, basically, you use veins. Now there are some arrow rest for traditional archery bows that can take veins. I'll show you real quick. On this bow, you'll see it's an aluminum riser with different inserts here. So you can add an arrow rest that the veins can, where the veins can avoid hitting the bow. The reason you don't wanna use the veins on a traditional bow is because these are little rubbery plastic pieces. And what will happen is it'll hit the shelf and it'll deflect and it'll bounce the arrow far away. When you use feathers, the feathers gonna fold down for you to create a smoother release than the veins will on a traditional bow. The type of arrow rest used on a compound bow or on some traditional bows are built so that the veins don't interfere with anything and allow it to fly freely. But in most cases, for traditional bows, you're gonna be wanting to get feathers. So you can see the target here. I shot two arrows. One has the feathers and that's tuned to my bow and it shot straight in. Whereas this one with the veins bounced off the riser and so it shot into the target at this ridiculous angle. So the only time you'll want to use veins is if you have a rest that can take it. And you'll see right here, here's a compound rest that can take it. So the way this one works, this one's called a whisker biscuit, is this right here are like little brushes and it allows the veins to freely flow through. In general, we don't really use these on traditional archery bows. So default to fletchings that are feathers and you'll be in good hands. Just a second ago, I mentioned arrow tuning. And with a traditional bow, we match our arrows to our bow. So there's a couple of factors. The first one is how stiff the arrow is. This is called spine. The second factor is how heavy your poundage of your bow is. And we want to match the stiffness of our arrow to the heaviness of poundage and the length of our draw to the force, I guess, applied. We're matching the stiffness of the arrow to the force applied upon the arrow so that it can fly straight. So if the arrow is too weak, it's gonna flex crazy and not go straight. If the arrow is too strong, it'll flex in the other direction crazy and push the knock way to the side. So this is something to consider. I have a couple of videos that go in depth on this if you're interested. But for now, so I've been challenged to explain how to tune arrows in less than a minute. So I'm gonna do my best to try. Okay, you guys ready? Set, go. First, go online and go to an arrow spine calculator for traditional archery arrows. From that point, figure out what spine to buy. Buy that spine. Then purchase a field point test kit and you can use that field point test kit to tune your arrows. How are you gonna do that? Well, grab a friend to film over your shoulder slow motion as you shoot. If your arrow's going to the left, if the knock's going to the left, you need to add on a lighter point. If the arrow's going to the right, you need to add on a heavier point. Match the point to how that arrow's bending until it's flying straight. Done. Did I do it? So we're gonna take a look at archery targets. Now there's a big spectrum here. You could just shoot into a hay bale. You wanna make sure when you're shooting though to have a location where you can be safe. So you can go to archery range, you can go to an archery shop. You can also shoot into your own target. For example, here's actually a really nice target. This is Morale's dice target. This one, if you plan on shooting a ton and you wanna have thousands and thousands of shots, this thing will take a pounding. But if you want a cheaper option, you can get the Block target. That is a bunch of material that's compressed together rather than a foam target. You're not gonna get as many shots out of it, but it's still a great target to start out with and it'll cost you at least half, if not three times cheaper than this one. And if you wanna drop down even lower, there is a target called the Yellow Jacket target and they have a small version of that that is ridiculously cheap. I'm gonna show it to you. I've got it in the other room. Yeah. So we have this Yellow Jacket target right here. It's this little bag target and this thing can take a beating. We use this. Oh man, there's a lot of dust in that. Wait. We use this all the time, but we also have used cardboard. So here I've got a string around some cardboard and this will stop an arrow to a certain degree. Also, you can make your own target. I did that once and made a video on it, although it's not a great target, but it works. And if you wanna make your own target, I think the best way to do it would to be a grab, to grab a stack of cardboard like this, go to like Sam's Club or Costco, they'll give you free boxes, or they did when I worked there, and you can ratchet strap it together in this direction. And if an employee tells you they don't give free boxes, ask for another employee, and then ratchet strap it together this direction. And then when you shoot it, it'll hold it much better. If you go this way, it's gonna be really hard to pull your arrow out of the target. I made a video three years ago on this. The problem is I put the cardboard in my target this direction, whereas this direction would do much better. But if you're getting into archery and you've got the resources, I'd recommend just getting a nice target off the bat. You won't regret it. This is where it gets fun. It's time to shoot the bow. I got some pointers. As a matter of fact, I used to work at a camp, a summer camp where I got to teach people every single day how to shoot archery. And I learned a lot about the common mistakes or the common questions beginners have in archery. And then through this job of being able to post archery content online, it's been fantastic because I've got so much good information from so many different people that hopefully I can say something that'll help you out. So the first thing is get close to a big target and get close to a big target. Because the worst thing when shooting a bow for the first time is to be scared that you're going to miss. So let's say this was the first shot of my entire life. What would I do? Well, first I'm gonna get comfortable. So I'm gonna draw this back a few times. Then after I'm comfortable drawing it back, I'm gonna take my first shot super close to a target. That allows me to not fear. And I get to feel what it's like to shoot the bow before thinking about aiming or distance or anchoring or any of that technical stuff. First, we wanna be comfortable with shooting the bow and then make sure what's beyond the target safe. You wouldn't want a house or anything beyond the target where you know if you missed, it could be dangerous for somebody else. So you want this against a hill. You wanna be at a range. You want it in a really safe location. Next pointer, friends, we're gonna draw back to an anchor point. What that means is a solid location, an anchor. We're trying to get somewhere that's comfortable. Where's it comfortable? Are you comfortable here, here, here, here, here? It doesn't really matter exactly where you pull to, but in general, a lot of people will use one of their fingers to anchor on a specific location on their face, especially if you can get to bone. So you've got this jaw bone here. You've got a little bit of cheekbone here. I draw back to the connection right at my lip. There's a little solid spot right there that I put my middle finger, and that's how I go to the same consistent spot every single time. Next, there's a concept called canting the bow. And so what you do when you cant the bow is that just means angling it. Back to the arrow rest conversation, when we draw back or when we shoot a traditional bow with a normal traditional arrow rest, the arrow is just sitting here. So if we draw back with it straight up, the arrow could fall off that shelf. We don't want it to fall off that shelf, so we do something that's called canting the bow, which is just angling it ever so slightly this direction. And with our bows, what we've done is cut in this arrow rest so that when you're comfortably canted, it's vertical. So you've got kind of this vertical line from the ground and the horizon. So you've got kind of a crosshairs with the horizon and your sight window. So we've practiced drawing back to a comfortable anchor point. We're canting the bow slightly. Next, what we want to do is to think about our grip. Now, this is all before I shoot an arrow. I'm going to grip the bow where the throat of the handle is on the meat of my thumb. You don't want to necessarily grip the bow like a hammer. You want to grip it loosely. My personal favorite way to do this is to connect my thumb and my index finger together. And then as I pull back, I'm letting the tension of the string on the bow pull into that meaty part of my thumb. And then when I shoot the bow, I've got this connection here so that the bow doesn't fall out of my hand. But that's a good way to keep the bow in your hand. Some people will shoot with it all the way open. And I've done that before. The only problem with that is you tend to, upon release, grab the bow like that, which makes you jerk. So if you connect right here, grab the string, cant the bow a little bit, practice comfortably drawing back to an anchor point. Don't release the string if you don't have an arrow on it, but just comfortably draw back and kind of get that feel. You can do that 20 times before you shoot, and you'll be much more confident on your first arrow. There's a concept in archery called dry firing. It's actually something we want to avoid. Dry firing is when you pull back a bow without an arrow and you release it. Let's see what happens. I had a friend once with a compound bow. This was 10 years ago or so. And I had a compound bow and my friend wanted to pull it back. He pulled back my compound bow. And he was like, oh, that's really cool. And he let go of the string, which is dry firing. Well, the entire string blew up. The cam system fell apart. Screws flew everywhere. The bow is not designed to fire without an arrow on it. And so that's what happened with a compound bow. I once, have I dry fired a traditional bow? Yeah, the arrow fell off. Oh, this is great. So I did a video where I was doing trick shots to try to beat Dude Perfect's world records. One of the trick shots was shooting 170 meters or something. Is that right? 123 meters and off of a mirror. So I was looking this direction, shooting this direction. I think the arrow fell off. Somehow I might have, the arrow fell off the rest. I didn't know it. And when it fell off the rest, I think it fell off the nock. And I let go and shot anyway. And the tip overlay flew off. And so the point is dry firing, shooting a bow without an arrow in it will cause problems. And it's something to avoid. I just want to let you know that, just in case you didn't know that and you're getting into archery. Now it's finally time to shoot the bow. And don't judge yourself too hard. If you're competitive like me, it can be frustrating when your first shot misses the target or something, but that's not something that you should worry about. The first time you're going to shoot the bow, don't worry about how the arrow goes, but just get comfortable and have a good time. So how you're going to grip the string for today is to go within the first crease of your knuckles, that first little crease right there. You're going to grab the string there. You can either put three fingers under the string or one finger above and two under, whatever's most comfortable for you. Then you're going to go back to your anchor point. We've already practiced this, so you know what to do. And once you're at your anchor point, the best way I know how to describe it is to not release the string necessarily, but let the string slip through your fingers. So I'm going to come to full draw and I'm going to be using my back as much as I can to add tension right here. And as I continue to add tension, I'm just going to let the string slip through my fingers. So I don't even know exactly when it's going to release, but I'm hovering on the target, so that's okay. So here would be my best example. I'm going to draw back and just let it slip through your finger. I don't know exactly when that moment is of release, but what I do know is that you shoot better with a surprise release. And we don't have surprise release mechanical systems, so we have to create it ourselves. And you can only think about one thing when you shoot. So if you're already hovering on the target, just think about increasing your tension lightly, just let the string slip through your fingers. One last note Kaz was saying, just so I can be extra clear here, when I said increasing tension, you're not pulling the string back further, you're just increasing the tension, or at least for me in the back, how it feels. So I'm getting into a little bit of depth right now, but I call it, or a lot of people call it transfer to hold. So I'm going to pull back, anchor, and I'm kind of transferring until it releases. And so it feels like you're increasing tension in your back, it feels like you're increasing tension, but I'm not pulling the string back and then letting go. I'm just increasing that tension as my fingers slip through the string, or as the string slips through my fingers. The main goal in the beginning is to let some arrows fly and have a really, really good time. And that's it, to laugh, to hit a bullseye every once in a while. But the main goal is to have a good time. Keep that in mind, because then when you come back next time, you'll find yourself improved already, and you're going to have a big fun time overall. A big fun time! And if you're a little bit competitive like me, here's a tip of advice for you wild people out there. Number one, compare yourself to yourself. Number two, compare your averages to your averages. So what I would recommend is shoot your 90 shots for the day and then your last 10, measure where you hit on the target, record that down, and then practice three more sessions, and then record it again on the next session. And then occasionally record with a baseline and you'll be able to get to see your improvement over time. But when you have a day that's worse, and when you have a bad day, don't get discouraged, just keep getting after it. Just don't measure your average. And then eventually you'll be hitting bullseyes like Jimmy John. Hey, now you're comfortable shooting the bow, now it's time to talk about aiming a little bit. There's three main preferences people have when aiming. Stop laughing, I'm not that funny. You've got gap, you've got instinctive, and you've got string walking. What do these mean? Well, let's jump into each one individually. First, starting off with instinctive. I'm gonna describe this in a rudimentary way and hopefully not offend too many people. Okay, number one, instinctive shooting is not really paying attention to your bow, not paying attention to your arrow, and not consciously looking at your arrow to aim. So if I'm going to shoot instinctively, I would teach it this way. Look at the target, focus on a smallest point as possible you want to hit. Draw back, keep looking at that target, and then just release. Ooh, that was a good shot. Release and let it just flow right into the bullseye. Now, this is kind of a good example of like shooting basketball or throwing a baseball. When you do that, you're not like, okay, I need to release it at a 16 degree angle, unless you're my older brother. Sorry, I had to throw that in there. But it's instinctive, it's natural. Your brain's going to compensate for you. I know your brain's aware of your arrow and a bunch of different things, but let your brain do the work and you just dial it in and focus on the target. Now we have gap. Gap is using the tip of your arrow to aim. What I mean by that is when you're all the way back, now I can look down my arrow and I'm going to use this as my aiming point. With the gap, we have something called a point on distance. This is the distance away from the target where when aiming with the tip of your arrow, you hit the bullseye. And generally that's going to be in between 20 and 40 yards for most people. It will depend on how heavy your arrow is and how strong your bow is. But the first thing to do is to find that point on distance. So what I would like to do is I'll start at 20 yards, put the tip of my arrow on the bullseye and shoot it. If I'm missing high, I know I need to scoot back to find my point on. I'll scoot back to 25. I'm now went from eight inches high to three inches high. Scoot back again, 33 yards. I'm hitting the bullseye when my point is aimed at the bullseye. So that's my point on. So now I know when I move closer to the target, I have to shoot low. So I got my point on at 33 yards. Let's move up to 20 yards. I'm going to take five shots. I'm going to put my point on the bullseye. Come here, let me show you what will happen. So after putting my point on the bullseye at five yards, let's say I've got all five of my arrows up here. I'm going to take the center of that group of five arrows. And then I'm going to measure down to the bullseye and I've got four inches or six inches, whatever it is. Now I know when I'm at 20 yards, I need to shoot a gap of six inches below. So I aim six inches below, which will allow me to hit the bullseye. So at different distances, you can know your gaps and aim that far below the bullseye so that you can hit the center as many times as possible. Next, we got string walking. This is kind of a fun method. So instead of changing our point on distance where we aim by aiming lower and then we'll miss into the bullseye, what we're going to do is change how we grip the bow. Now a string walking method only do it with fiberglass bows and the longer the fiberglass bow, the more success you're going to have with it. If it's a bow that's under 58 inches, it can get a little iffy because you're changing the tiller of the bow more dramatically as you move your fingers. So what it is basically is instead of aiming low, I'm going to move my fingers down when I'm closer to the target and I'm going to anchor in the same location. So if I can explain this to you, what moving the fingers down does is moves the arrow closer to my eye. And when the arrow moves closer to my eye, I'm looking more directly down it, allowing me to hit point on at all distances. So for example, my point on is 33 inches or 33 yards, right? So maybe half a finger down, now my point on is 25 yards. A full finger down, my point on is 15 yards. So I'm moving the location of my hand on the string rather than aiming up and down further with the bow. Again, the downside to this is if you don't have a long enough bow, you're going to change how the bow bends, which I'm calling the tiller. And when you change how the bow bends, sometimes I can change how the bow shoots. So some bows are a lot better for this than other bows, but it is a fun way to aim and I really enjoy playing around with it. So what happens if you shoot beyond 33? If you shoot beyond your point on distance, then you would just have to aim high. I've heard some people go to split. I've even heard someone go two over. I've never seen a three over, that's a little odd. You look how high you would be going. Yeah, so in general, people who are going to do string walking are not people who are going to be hunting. So what they can do is have a really light arrow and a light tip weight. So your point on becomes 60, 70, or 80 yards so that you're never really going beyond your point on distance. So I see that more often than hunters using string walking. And if hunters do use string walking, you're not going beyond 30 or 40 yards ever anyway. In general, I mean, with a traditional bow, there's just too much variance of the animal moving if you're moving that far back. So if you're string walking, are you shooting gap or instinctive in addition to that? String walking to add on? Yeah, string walking, you're still using the arrow to aim when you're doing string walking. How to be successful in archery. Success is based on your own goals. And it's good to clarify that. A lot of people like to have the goal of having a good time and having fun as a hobby. That's a fantastic goal and very achievable goal for archery. If your goal for archery is to go hunting, then it's going to change how you approach it. If your goal is competition, if your goal is long distance shooting, if your goal is horseback riding and shooting at the same time, it's going to be different depending on your goals. If you can clarify your goals, then you can make sure that you're not discouraged when you're not accomplishing someone else's goals. One of the coolest things about archery is that, actually, I want to show you this. There's so many different rabbit holes you can go down. So with that being said, you could get into one type of archery and then feel like you're joining a whole different sport almost, getting into another type of archery later on, which is absolutely amazing. So like we said, a horse bow is completely different from a hunting bow. And with that being said, you can totally change the method of archery you're doing for your specific goal. Don't judge your success in the hobby or the sport of archery based on what other people define as success for them. Make it your own and you're going to enjoy it a lot more. This has been my beginner's guide to archery. The description has tons of information, tons of posts from my company, Shatterproof Archery and the Archery Library. We've got an entire series on the Shatterproof Archery YouTube channel that has like 25 or 30 videos of to-the-point videos where we get to the point explaining in depth of a ton of things I've mentioned here. Shatterproofarchery.com. We sell all the products I showed you in today's video. So thank you for watching and I'll see you next time.