There are three steps in learning any hand/eye coordination sport:
1. Cognitive
2. Experiential
3. Inspirational
The first step in learning is cognitive, where you read, hear, or see the required steps. You think about them in words, and may repeat the words to yourself as you perform the steps. This is a crude, but necessary way to learn to perform the activity. Words are a poor substitute for feeling the movements, which is step two.
The second step is experiential, where we learn the feeling of performing the movement correctly, and to distinguish that feeling from the feeling of performing the movement incorrectly. There are so many hundreds (thousands?) of variables in making an archery shot, you could spend the rest of your life trying to describe them all, but there is no need for that. You can become aware of many physical sensations simultaneously that you could only describe in words sequentially. When you ask someone for help, and they see you performing a movement incorrectly, they will try to explain the correct movement with words, which is back at the cognitive level. But you only "own" that movement after you become aware of the feeling of performing it correctly, which is non-verbal. After your awareness of the movements grows to the point that you can reliably execute them without having to repeat the steps to yourself, then you enter the experiential period where you shoot a lot of arrows, sometimes well, sometimes not so well. During this period, you're trying to expand your awareness of what your body is doing during the shot, so you know what you need to correct when you make a bad shot.
While you're shooting all these arrows and expanding your awareness of what your body is doing, you may stumble on something that dramatically improves your shooting. Maybe you finally get in alignment, or maybe you discover what back tension really feels like, or maybe you notice that you have been moving your head during the shot, which you had previously been unaware of. When this happens, you have experienced the third step in learning: inspirational, where something finally clicks and your skills increase.
Once you master the fundamentals and start experiencing the shot, your progress will probably be like stair steps from then on. You won't get much better for a time, or maybe even get a little worse if you drift away from the fundamentals, followed by occasional inspirational leaps to higher levels.
Topic: Being instinctive (Read 1535 times)
