Originally posted by Jess Minish:
For those who insist that you have to aim to hit your target with your bow, do you also believe that you have to aim when you throw a baseball or football? What about an atlatal, sling, bola or speer. When a quarterback thows a pass, is he aiming at an imaginary point ahead of the receiver?
To me they are fundamentally different actions. Archery is more like firearm shooting than throwing. In firearms and archery, I am using my body to operate a machine in a consistent way. If I'm shooting a handgun, I can do well enough from 0-5 yards by point shooting. Much more than that and I need to use sights to deliver any sort of precision. Same with Archery, although I'm probably better with the bow than I am with a pistol. I can shoot instinctive out to about 12 yards well enough but not nearly as good as I can while aiming. Accuracy is improved the less I interfere with the shot. Judgment is the least reliable variable and especially so when under stress. So I try to eliminate it as a variable as much as possible by gapping. Rifle hunters do the same thing by setting a maximum point blank range (MPBR) and keeping their shots within that range when hunting. Longer ranges are dealt with through ballistic tables and dope charts. Even expert marksmen will calculate their ballistics when shooting at long ranges rather than risk an errant shot at a live target. Intuition and judgment can be a liability here. I know of no firearms instructors who advocate instinctive rifle or pistol shooting for accuracy. Not even one. It's always sight picture, sight alignment, trigger control, repeat.
But when I throw, I am no longer operating a machine -- I am the machine. I'd like to be able to set the exact point of release from my hand but I can't. I also can't know exactly how much force I'm applying. So I am forced to exercise judgment. It takes tens of thousands of repetitions to master throwing and even then it has its limits and there are a lot of mistakes along the way. Some have more natural abilities while others (like me) have to work pretty hard to even get mediocre results. If I had to rely on my throwing arm to get food, I'd be a dead man.
Furthermore, most predators don't succeed with each hunt. Wolves, for example, will chase several prey animals before succeeding with a kill. Spears (by this I assume you mean javelins since spears are mostly hand-held weapons), atlatals, etc. aren't accurate long-range weapons in the hands of most people. But with enough trial and error, they can convey a survival advantage to those who keep using them -- even when most attempts fail on average. I suspect that our hunting ancestors failed on more shots than they succeeded. They also probably wounded more often than I'd be comfortable with. But there were enough opportunities to succeed often enough to keep trying at it. Hunter-gatherers also had better woodsmanship to compensate for less effective gear. Even the best hunters in this group are probably on the opposite end of the spectrum with better gear than woodsmanship.
I don't doubt some people's ability to shoot instinctively. But I also don't have much faith in my ability to shoot that way any more than I have faith that I could have been a star quarterback. And I also doubt that most people can do it as well as others. For me, gapping is the best method for most people while instinctive is the best method for those who are truly gifted at it. Even if all of the best shooters shot instinctive, it wouldn't matter since these are already exceptional archers (selection bias). I want the best method for the average joe and, for me, that's gapping.
This is a general sense of my own thought process and it is not a criticism of instinctive shooters. It is just an explanation of why I use and would generally recommend gapping over instinctive. A gapper can get proficient, have success and move on to instinctive if they have the interest and ability. But starting with instinctive is a quick way to frustration. I'd rather see folks having fun than giving up by trying to learn something that is, in my opinion, more difficult and time intensive.
Topic: hitting high (Read 877 times)
