Archery: How To Aim Using the Gap Shooting Method

Hey archery friends, this is Tara. In today's video we are actually going to talk about aiming. I get a lot of comments on how do you aim with a bare bow. Growing up I shot Olympic archery, as most of you already know, and in Olympic archery we actually have a sight aperture. So we look at the target, we place the aperture on the target, if our arrows shoot high we move the sight up, if the arrows shoot low we move it down. So you just kind of follow the arrow. That is great, but when I teach beginner archery I am teaching everybody off the bare bow. There is no sight on the bare bow. We have to figure out how to aim on our own. So there's different methods of aiming. You could do string walking, gap shooting, face blocking, and there's lots of videos on different types of aiming. I find that gap shooting is the easiest method to teach my beginners and so today I'm going to show you how to gap shoot. Gap shooting is using the tip of the arrow to help you aim. Now gap shooting will only work if you have a good consistent anchor. With gap shooting you're always going to keep the same anchor position. You're just going to change where the tip of the arrow is on the target depending on what distance you shoot. When beginners are first learning how to aim, naturally an archer wants to aim at what they're trying to hit. So it's going to be very tempting on your shots to just keep aiming the tip of the arrow right in the yellow. What you might find though, depending on what distance you are, what weight bow you have, what anchor position you have, you may find that the tip of the arrow, aiming the tip of the arrow on the yellow, is not getting you to the yellow at a 10-yard distance right here. And I'm going to shoot. What my recommendation to my students is on the first day is take your first arrow and when you pull back to your anchor position put the tip of the arrow right on the yellow. Shoot it and see where it goes. Take your second arrow, put the tip of the arrow right on the yellow, shoot it, see where it goes. Now as you can see when I do that the tip of the arrow is actually in the top white ring. Now I know on my next shot I'm not going to aim it in the yellow. I'm going to aim it in the low white ring. So let's try that and see what happens. As you can see the arrow is right in the yellow. What you want to remember, and it's hard because you just want to aim in the you just want to aim at what you want to hit, but what you have to realize it depends on the distance you're shooting, it depends on the weight of your bow, on your draw length, it depends on where you're anchoring on your face. That's going to determine where your sight picture is going to be with aiming with the tip of the arrow. So it's going to be different for everybody at every distance. What I would recommend is start shooting different distances. So maybe try 10 yards, try 20 yards, try 30 yards. At 10 yards because you're so close you might be like me where you're having to aim low white to hit the yellow. When you move to 20 yards you might be right on where you can aim the tip of the arrow right at your target and hit it each time. And then when you move to 30 you may find, depending maybe on the weight of your bow or your anchor position, you may find that your arrows are going low if you aim at your target and you might have to aim the tip of the arrow a little bit higher. You're going to have to figure out on your own where do you need to aim the tip of the arrow to hit the yellow each time.