AI transcript
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of
The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, to tease
out how they do what they do, the routines, the belief structures, the training programs that you
can apply to your own life. And I say training programs because my guest today is one of the
best teachers and trainers I have found in the last several years in any discipline whatsoever.
His name is Jake Kaminsky. Jake Kaminsky is a two-time Olympic silver medalist in archery and a
longtime member of the U.S. archery team with more than a decade of international competition
experience. He is very well known for his technical precision. He is meticulous with gear and tuning,
also with biomechanics, his deep knowledge of the sport. And with all of that, Jake helped lead the
U.S. to team silver medals at both the 2012 London and 2016 Rio Olympic Games. Since retiring from
Olympic competition, Jake has become a leading voice in the archery world through content creation,
product innovation, and educational events. He runs a successful YouTube channel, which is kind of the
de facto archery technical channel. People from all over the world have seen this over and over again. He is
like the Taylor Swift meets, you name it, Brad Pitt of the archery world when I’ve gone to events with him
because he was my coach and is my coach in archery. I had my first competition end of January. We’ll talk
about that. So he, in addition to that, writes training guides and develops high-performance gear,
which he manufactures in Austria. It is as precise as you expect Jake Kaminsky to be
under the Kaminsky Archery brand. You can find him on YouTube, Jake Kaminsky at Jake Kaminsky Archery.
Kaminsky is K-A-M-I-N-S-K-I. Website, jakekaminsky.com. And on Instagram and Facebook,
Jake underscore Kaminsky on Instagram. Facebook, Kaminsky Jake. We’ll link to all that stuff,
but really the big two are the YouTube channel, Jake Kaminsky Archery, and then the website,
jakekaminsky.com. And we go all over the place in this conversation is really a close examination
of real world learning because he and I had to work around and towards all sorts of things together.
I’ll explain how I chose him, how I found him and much more in just a second after a few words from
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Optimal, minimal.
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
Can I ask you a personal question?
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What if I did the opposite?
I’m a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.
Me, Tim, Ferris, so.
Jake Kaminsky.
Nice to see you, man.
Yeah, nice to see you, too.
So glad to be doing this. We’ve had, I was joking before we recorded, that we could just
treat this like conversation 678, something like that. We’ve had a lot of conversations.
Might be double that.
It might be double that. It’s probably double that. If we count texts and the many, many
thousands and then videos, it just goes on and on. So let’s give people some context.
We’re going to do a deep dive into the world of archery. We’re going to do a deep dive into
the world of high performance, which transcends archery. So if you think to yourself,
archery, man, I’m not interested in flinging arrows, still listen, there’s going to be a lot
here. And we’re also going to talk about your coaching and our experience, coach and student,
and what we did with that, which I think is pretty special and fun to unpack. So we’re going to go in a
lot of different rabbit holes, but let’s start for people who are not familiar with Olympic
recurve. What does that mean? What is the sport?
Sure. So the sport of Olympic archery, as I grew up, it was just called recurve because that was the
discipline, but now it’s known as Olympic archery because there’s many different disciplines that have
spun off from that kind of bow. But essentially what it is, is a sport of hyper precision. It’s just how
good can you work with a machine, your bow to produce the exact same result every single time
at an extreme distance. So when I grew up, we shot up to a hundred yards, which is easy to see. It’s
end zone to end zone on a football field. But now the Olympic distance is 70 meters or 77 yards
or 237 feet. So that’s, you know, about three quarters of the way down the football field.
So we’re shooting an arrow that distance, the arrow reaches 12 to 13 feet in the air in an arcing
trajectory to the target. No magnification, zero magnification, no rear sight, in fact. So you don’t
even have something to align up in the back other than a string. You’re using a blurry string that is
very imprecise in your reference. And for people who are trying to get an idea of what it means to
perform at a very high level, the center of the target. How large is that? And what does that mean
for the amount of motion that is permissible at the arrow point? The 10 ring, the maximum scoring
ring is a 12.2 centimeters or about the size of a CD. You have to not only take into consideration
your alignment with that arrow and that bow, but also you have wind. So there’s a lot of factors.
Or precipitation or yeah, anything, anything but lightning. And to hit that 10 ring, that 12.2
centimeter diameter ring, it is the margin of error to hit that repeatedly is the diameter of a extra
fine ball in an extra fine ballpoint pen. So just to put this in perspective, if you’re not watching the
video, you’ll still get it. But if you’re watching the video, all right. So you’re trying to hit a CD.
For those of you remember CDs, it would be like the type of dish you might have under a cup of coffee,
maybe something like that. It’s small. And then the amount of variance at the arrow tip
that will allow you to hit that consistently is smaller than the point of this pen, not the pen,
the diameter of the pen, the actual rolling point in a ballpoint. Correct. It’s insane. Correct. And now
how often or how many arrows do you have to do that for it? It’s because it’s not just one. It’s more
than that. We shoot for a ranking round to seat us in our brackets for the Olympic games. We shoot 72
arrows. Your average, like really high score, you’re hitting that 10 ring probably 40 plus times out of 72
times. Yeah. So it’s insane. That’s the level. I’ll give one more bit of trivia that I did not know
until we were literally just walking down this hallway, which is that you have also hit the 10
ring from three quarters of a football field away while standing on an indo board. Yeah. For people
who don’t know what that is, it’s like a balance board. Imagine a skateboard deck that you could stand
on and there’s basically a huge rolling pin underneath it and you place it on the pin and
then you have to balance as you wobble. And if you see someone try this for the first time,
it’s disastrous and comical. And so to be able to stand on that and hit the 10 ring, you guys can put
the math together. It’s just, it is just an extra planetary accomplishment. It’s wild. So let’s back up
and share some context on how we first connected. So the world of archery is, I’m not going to say
it’s opaque because it’s not opaque, but it can be difficult to navigate. And when I was first trying
to find potential coaches, and I can come back to why I was doing that, I went where? I went online,
I went to YouTube. But one of the challenges, as most people recognize, is that let’s just say for
trick shooters, and there’s some amazing trick shooters, which is not to discount that as a
discipline, but people can take a thousand attempts and then show their best outcome.
And we were talking about this earlier, but when they actually go to retrieve their arrow,
look at the rest of the target face.
Not only retrieve their arrow, just look at the target in frame behind them. Oftentimes it’s like
there’s a burlap wrap over the target because people use bag targets. That’s what they’re
called. And you know how worn out they can get. Yours are nowhere near as worn out as 90 plus
percent of those trick shooters. And yeah, they show you that one impact, but look at the target
behind them.
And what I think what you’re alluding to is that if you’re hitting the center of the target
consistently, you’re basically going to carve out a sweet spot and then you have to replace
that portion of the target face if it’s replaceable. There’s a lot of, I suppose, selection and
highlights online and it can make it very, very difficult, particularly if you’re coming
in as a novice, you don’t know how to sort or separate fact from fiction. You don’t know
where to go. And so what I ended up doing was asking myself a question I ask a lot. And for
people who’ve read The 4-Hour Chef, which is actually about accelerated learning, this approach
will sound familiar, but this is a chance to see it unfold in recent history and sort of
in real time because we’re still training. How can I find an objective measure for this
sport, for this discipline? And there are almost always options. For instance, I’ve had Susan
Garrett on this podcast. She is a multiple-time agility champion. So dog agility champion. She’s
a multiple national-time champion. And that is an objective competition with set scoring, with set
penalties under time, and there’s nowhere to hide. So that is how I ended up having Susan Garrett on the
podcast versus a million celebrity dog coaches where it’s impossible to actually know what you’re
buying because you don’t have any of the outtakes. You don’t have a lot of objective measurement.
And in this case, I was like, all right, well, I think Archery’s in the Olympics. Let me look this
up. Oh, it’s in the Olympics. Great. Let me try to use that as a sorting mechanism. And that is how I
found your amazing YouTube channel. You want to give it a plug?
Yeah, it’s just Jake Kaminsky.
I mean, when we’ve gone anywhere related to archery, it’s like trying to move around with
The Rock or Lady Gaga or some combination of the two. You just get mobbed because in a world where
it can be very difficult to decipher what is legitimate, you offer the bona fides and a lot
of really good technical instructions. So that’s how I found you. Then reached out, and then lo and
behold, here we are. And it’s really worked out incredibly well. And my background, just
quickly, it’s not that extensive, but I’ve been bow hunting for at least 10 years, a bit more than
that. Did rifle prior to that. First hunt ever was with Steven Rinella during the writing of The
Four Hour Chef. So thanks to Steve Rinella. People can check him out. Everything Meat Eater. Also an
amazing writer. And I’ll give people a bit of a flash forward, and then we can talk about all sorts of
stuff, including your kind of training regimen for yourself and development and so on. But began taking
barebow archery. We can talk about what that is, but it’s effectively, for the purposes of this
conversation, it’s a competition classification. And it dictates that you basically strip off
all the stabilizers, the clicker, don’t worry about these things, the sight, et cetera, from an
Olympic bow.
Essentially, all the aids.
Yeah, all the aids.
Everything that makes it.
Yeah, you take off all of the performance aids, and then you shoot with that particular bow.
And I became interested in barebow for a few reasons. I saw it online on YouTube while I was
tooling around trying to find something, and there is something called Lancaster Classic.
Happens in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Or Lancaster.
Lancaster, yes, exactly. And Lancaster Archery Supply is a huge distributor of archery products,
and they hold this competition once a year. And it is, for the barebow discipline, I suppose it’s the
largest in the world.
I think so. Yeah.
I mean, it’s at least the most prestigious, I suppose, has the biggest reach, so it gets the
most exposure, and I think actually the most participation now, at least as of this last
year. And a couple of years leading up to this, it’s taken off, and it is, I believe it’s almost
the biggest, if not the biggest class, as far as the amount of participation.
Yeah. So you’ve got barebow. They also have compound. They also have Olympic archeries,
Olympic recurve.
They have hunting.
They have longbow now.
Yep.
They’ve got all sorts of stuff. So many different classes. And barebow is interesting to me for a few
reasons. I have not done any real physical competition. Well, now I have, but in 20 years,
probably. Last thing was Tango in Argentina in 2004, I suppose it was, a long time ago.
And I wanted to compete. I love competing. But I thought to myself, all right, I want to take a bit
of an oblique approach here, which I think is a misunderstanding about what I do sometimes, or what
I often focus on, even as early as the four-hour workweek. The goal is not to find the cheap shortcut.
The goal is to look for oblique, maybe uncommon approaches to various problems or goals.
That’s it. And in this case, I looked at the number of people competing in barebow. And I was
like, all right, it’s a smaller population at the higher levels. And it is sometimes nicknamed
the struggle stick for folks. And part of the reason it has so much viewership online compared to some of
these other disciplines is, as they would say, like in barebow, anything can happen.
Literally at any moment.
At any moment. And if somebody lets their nerves take control, if there’s any number of issues,
they could really fire on the target, but out of the bullseye, let’s just say, by a substantial margin,
which opens up the possibility for comebacks, surprise turns, reversals of fortune, and it makes
it fun to watch. And I thought, okay, well, that seems like a fun place to bookmark as a possible
competition and ended up competing end of January. We will come back to that and had, I suppose,
about six months of real training, real focus training. And so we’ll come back to what that
looked like. But let’s talk about Jake. So how did the archery thing start? And why don’t you just
take that and run with it? And then I might pepper in questions along the way.
So I grew up in a very small town in Elman, New York, kind of south of Buffalo, New York. And my dad was a
volunteer fireman at the local fire department. And they have a spring and a fall gun raffle every year.
And, you know, they raffle off guns in a canoe full of beer or whatever else. Right. And one of them was
a bow and he won the bow gun raffle. And this was, I was five years old. And of course this was a, you
know, hunting bow for an adult. So there’s no way a five-year-old is going to use that. So we found,
I think we went to Kmart and bought a bear hunting compound for a kid, just fiberglass, super cheap,
very basic. My parents bought me that for my sixth birthday. So on my sixth birthday,
after we got hay bales from a local farmer or whatever, threw up a target. And I shot my first
arrow at 20 yards and 20 yards is more than double the distance that you would really want to have any
person, not just a kid shoot their first arrow. I vividly remember my very first arrow I ever shot
because I literally shot an inside out X on my very first arrow. You should explain what that is.
So inside out X, meaning if you have your 10 ring, like the maximum scoring ring inside,
the 10 ring is a X ring. It’s about the size. It’s like a, between a diamond and nickel about that
size and inside out, meaning I put the arrow in the dead center of the target where it did not touch
the ring of the X. So it was inside of a dime, roughly my very first arrow. We won’t talk about
the next several hundred arrows. I mean, thank God for that first arrow, right?
Yeah. I mean, I was hooked. I mean, it’s kind of crazy. I’ve heard this story to think
like if your first 20 arrows had been all over the place, would it have been a different story? Like
maybe, you know, maybe it’s crazy. Yeah. Who knows? Yeah. Really no way to know. And, uh,
I was with my brother, Matt, he was out there shooting with me. Yeah. I don’t know if he shot before
me, but after I shot the X, he’s like, give me that thing. And of course, yeah. And then it just
kind of started from there. We found that local club that was down the street. It’s a Joe ad club,
a junior Olympic archery development club. There’s many of those around the country and the U S they’re
at local hunting shops. Basically, if they have a junior development program, we found that club
because that’s where the bow was bought for the gun raffle. And luckily it was about a five minute
drive from our house. And so every Saturday mornings they had a junior development program.
And so I’d go there and start shooting with them. And so every Saturday morning I’d be there
no matter what, because I enjoyed it so much. The progression, it went from shooting compound.
So I shot compound for about six years. Let’s pause for a second. Just for people who have no
archery context. And by the way, my not too secret agenda for this is I want everybody to go out and
try archery. It has been such a godsend for me to have that constant for a million reasons turns into
a form of meditation. It can also be just as frustrating, if not more frustrating than golf,
but let’s put that aside for now. It has been such a gift to my life to have archery and to be able to
train with you. It’s really been tremendous. So I have this not so secret agenda of getting as many
people as possible who are listening to try archery, which by the way, is very much within reach for
basically everybody listening. If you have a smartphone and you’re listening to this, you can
try archery. You do not need to buy anything, but let me explain a term. So longbow is about the
simplest thing you can imagine. It’s a, let’s call it a stick. It’s bent. And then you have a string
attached to it. And you’ll see this in many different indigenous hunting cultures. You’ll see it all over
the world recurve. You will also see all over the world because they figured out, well, you can make
the bow a lot shorter and have the ends of the bow recurve out. That’s kind of towards the target
to apply more tension. It’s like a advanced longbow using laminations of wood instead of just a stick.
Right, exactly. So now you have this laminated bow and you see that all over the world,
all over the world. And there are different iterations of that. You’ve got the slightly
different idea, but horse bow, which I’m, of course I’m, I’m in love with. That’s a whole separate
podcast and so on and so forth. So if you imagine like a Robin hood bow in your mind, I think it was
a recurve in maybe the cartoon, at least made out of fancier materials, whether it’s carbon or aluminum
or something else. Then you have the idea of what I’m shooting when I’m doing say a bare bow.
And then a compound has various cams. You can think of them almost like cams on a weightlifting
machine.
Or like pulleys.
Yeah, pulleys, pulleys and cams. So it’s like when you are in a gym using a machine, pushing or pulling,
there’s a strength curve. So the amount of exertion required changes over the course of that full range.
And in the case of a compound bow, very similar. And what makes it such an efficient, amazing hunting
tool, there are a few factors. One is in the beginning, it’s hard, it’s hard, it’s hard. And then
there’s a let off. So you might have, I’m making up these numbers, but 60 pound draw weight. And then
you’re holding, what would you say?
Maybe between eight and 12 pounds.
Eight and 12 pounds.
Depending on if it’s a hunting or a competition.
Yeah, right. So eight or 12 pounds when you’re at anchor. And to define that, that’s when you have your
very simple terms. Your hand that is attached to the string, whether you’re using fingers or
a mechanical release, when your hand is kind of glued to your face and you always glue it to the
same place to set up the rifle barrel, so to speak. And that’s one element of what makes compounds so
interesting. The second is when you have these additional mechanical aids, let’s just say,
the speed of the arrow is just dramatically, dramatically, dramatically more.
The main difference in the compound versus everything else is there’s one string on every
other bow called a single string bow, whether that be a trad bow, a stick bow, a traditional bow,
a recurve, a bare bow, whatever that is. Whereas compound has three strings, essentially. When you
look at it, you can see multiple strings because the string tension, as you pull it back, it builds,
but then it transfers that tension into the cables, which are the other two strings that
the arrow is not attached to. And so that then catapults the arrow at an incredible rate of speed
when you let it go.
Yeah. And when you go to your local range, which we’ll get to, and I recommend, you can try all of
these different options in a lot of places. And if you can only start with compound, great.
Absolutely. That’s where I started.
Maybe you stay with compound.
Yeah.
And at the highest levels, they do some absurd, absurd things.
Yeah.
Actually, I just have to give credit where credit is due. So also have had some fantastic conversations
with Joel Turner, shot IQ, his son, Bodie. Do you want to just explain what he’s capable of doing?
Sure. So, you know, that X that I shot the inside out on my first arrow. So he will shoot that X.
So that same hitting that dime for about 120 arrows in a row, essentially under pressure when there’s
$100,000 plus on the line. And you would not know just looking at the kid, he is just stone cold,
ice in his veins. You’d have no idea that he even had a heartbeat just watching him shoot because
he’s incredible to be able to hit that thing repeatedly with so much precision and repeatability
under pressure. Most importantly, it’s just, it’s ridiculous. We’ll get to talking about a little bit
about compound and how there’s a, I guess, a less deep learning curve. You get really good,
really fast as far as precision, but still to win with a compound in a competition,
it still requires immense amounts of effort and energy and training.
So we’re going to come back to your trajectory in a second, pun intended, but let’s mention that
briefly because I didn’t really fill in the gaps. The compound bow that I used for hunting
was fantastic. I thought it was a great transition for me because I was more familiar with rifle and
so on. It was actually a fantastic transition and I would hunt once a year. Let’s just call it something
like that. Use everything, eat everything for those people wondering. And the hop from rifle
and so on to compound was actually quite easy. I needed to brush up on a few things, obviously learn
some technical details, think about back tension a bit, etc. But for someone with a sports background,
it was pretty straightforward. And if you’re thinking about the target size, right, the kind
of kill zone on whether it’s a deer or an elk, I mean, certainly a lot larger on an elk, but you can get
to a point if you have some kinesthetic awareness very quickly, I would say within a week for a lot
of folks, maybe. Yeah. So to be like ethical as a hunter to, you know, know that when you take the
shot, you’re not going to do the animal any suffering. It will be a very, very painless and fast end.
Yeah. It takes more time to get to that point.
Well, depends. It depends on the distance that you’re shooting. So say, we’ll say 20 yards.
So what I was going to say is 20 yards, just as people can imagine.
So 20 yards, your average person, I could get them to hit that pie plate. It depends on the coach,
of course, and depends on explanations and the individual person as well. But I would say
easily within a week, you’re going to hit that thing nine to 10 times out of 10 every time within
a day, you’ll hit it probably six to eight times out of 10 because it’s just easy, relatively speaking,
to get to that level. Yeah. And there are a lot of reasons for that, right? I mean,
you have the let off, you have the peep, which is a rear sight, which is basically a rear sight.
It’s a tiny circle affixed to the string itself. You have a level on the bow.
You have a level. There are many things that allow you to do that quickly, but then to
get to the highest levels, we were talking about this at lunch. It’s kind of like, okay,
let’s get you down the hill on a snowboard. Yeah. Within a week, we can probably get you
down some easy terrain on a snowboard. Okay. Now you want to compete in the X games. Yeah.
All right. Well, good luck. That’s going to take about 10 years, right? I mean, that’s a rule for
a reason. Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s Bodhi and anyone who performs at that level.
Absolutely. So not to take it away from them, like their proficiency level is insane. And to be able
to do it all the time under pressure is even more insane. You know, it’s one thing to do it in your
backyard, right. And be that backyard world champion that so many people claim to be right. But to do it
in front of other people on a stage with crazy lighting, cheering crowds, money on the line,
potentially putting food on your table or not at the end of the day too, that’s just a whole lot
of added pressure. And so it’s different. We’ll probably end up talking about Korea later. And
maybe we can just give a sneak peek. I know we’re going all over the place, but I remember you said
to me at one point, and please correct me if I’m getting this wrong. If each country could field as
many athletes as they wanted for a given sport, that Korea would probably place one to a hundred.
At minimum, bare minimum.
Yeah. It’s basically their, let’s just call it basketball, football, baseball, all wrapped into
one.
Yeah. It is their national sport.
I mean, they are obscenely, obscenely good. And you said to me before, if you or I were scouted and
assessed early on, we wouldn’t have made the early cuts.
No, you would have immediately.
Because I’m cross-eyed.
Because of your eye dominance.
Yeah, I’m right-handed, but my left eye is my aiming eye. So I would have been gone.
And I get a little bit too excited.
Yeah.
So I would have also been-
You’d have been cut.
A hundred percent.
So what are some maybe good decisions or habits that you made early on, let’s just say before
you ended up in San Diego, that you think helped you to perform the way you performed in those
early stages? I think I can think of one example, but I’ll hold it for now, which is where you’re
placing yourself in the gym and how you’re training.
I would say for me, one of the biggest advantages as a human, not just as an archer, but as a human
was the same kind of thing that you saw was a meditative escape, right? Because when you’re
shooting archery, that’s the only thing you can focus on. Because if you’re thinking about anything
else, your scores go down, your groups open up.
Yeah. You know if you’re meditating poorly, very quickly.
A hundred percent. So I think for me, that gave me a place to kind of go to. Like I escaped to
archery. So I feel like that was definitely a big factor as to what led to that. Just it naturally
worked for me. It wasn’t difficult for me. It is hard. It’s hard to stay focused on something so
simple and repetitive over and over again, but it was very enjoyable because it’s just me,
the bow and the arrow. I love competing as well. I used to play baseball when I was a kid and that
competed with my archery time because I was trying out for the state team in baseball or about to and
winning nationals shooting archery. So it’s like kind of had an easy decision there to make because
I was already winning nationals in archery. So I went with that, but the overall just enjoyment of
shooting archery and enjoying that me and the bow and no one else is going to prevent me from beating
someone else. It’s not like they’re interfering with me or trying to prevent me from shooting my
arrow. It’s very nice. And it’s also a hundred percent objective. There is no subjectivity. There’s
no way for anyone to influence the outcome other than maybe at some weird position, a judge to make a
bad call, but it’s almost never happening. It just doesn’t happen because it’s such a small community
and everybody holds each other accountable, which is also another amazing thing about the community of
archery. So I think that was a big factor there as far as, you know, what you’re alluding to and
bringing up and saying is I choose to make things as difficult as possible when I’m practicing.
Like say if I’m out at a range, I’ll choose the lane nearest the wall. So I have the least amount of
space. And we’ll probably get into why we do that in a little bit here, but I would suggest you to do
the same thing as we were working together. And you at first were like, why, why would I do that?
It’s much better to just stand by myself out in the open and have no influence. Well, it’s because when
you’re shooting on a line in a tournament, you have 24 inches of space roughly for yourself. And you’re,
the next guy’s 24 inches, then the next guy. And so you’re stacked in there like a can of sardines.
Yeah. We get a photo of me at Lancaster for people who want to see what it looks like.
Yeah. It’s like, it’s like a Tokyo subway car. Oh, you just happen to all be holding bows with
arrows. Yes. It’s very crowded. It is. It is. It is. So anything you can do to make things more
difficult to shoot in the rain, to shoot in the wind, to shoot in the heat, I would do because I
don’t know, maybe I just enjoy torturing myself. I don’t know, but I found it to be really important.
And once I got to the training center, listening to some of the other successful athletes,
giving talks at the training center about their success and how things went and what made them
successful, a lot of them was leaning into the same kind of thing, training hard to make competition
easy. Yeah. Well, it’s very much an echo of the more you sweat in training, less you bleed in combat.
Sure. Absolutely.
Like you, you want to try to make your training harder if possible than your competition. There’s
there are limits to what you can do sometimes. Sure. We’ll talk about that.
But even still like the range I grew up on, I would go there more than just Saturdays and I’d shoot there
by myself because no one else is there and I’m just shooting. And my coach slash mentor at the time,
Harry Stabell would come downstairs because it was down in like a secondary level below and he’d have a
metal ashtray back then everybody smoked and he would just throw it randomly on the concrete ground.
When I’m at full draw and I have to regain composure and shoot a shot. Right. So there’s all sorts of
weird stuff that happened all the time. Mr. Yagi. Yeah. Action going on.
There’s a lot of stuff that happened that definitely would not fly in today’s day and age. So it’s like,
oh, you’re dropping your bow arm. That’s like a thing that when you shoot the shot, you have to
maintain the bow up. You don’t want to drop the arm. So he’d take his pocket knife out, flip it open,
turn it upside and say, don’t drop your arm. Put it under your arm. Under my arm. Or you’re grabbing
your bow. Something else you don’t want to do is hold on to it. There’s a grip on a bow, but you don’t
want to grip it. You just saddle it. Right. And you’re kind of pushing into it. Correct. And so you’re
grabbing your bow. Guess what? Thumbtacks were double-sided taped on the front of my bow. Didn’t
grab it anymore. That’s so intense. Yeah. And it worked. I mean, look, I’m not recommending people
do that with their kids, but the also supplement to our conversation, we’re going to put a number of
videos up on my YouTube page and we’ll link to Jake’s YouTube page with Archery 101, both Archery
Gear 101, just laying out the anatomy of a bow and then Technical 101. So you have a couple of
pointers, which you may not get at some ranges so that when you have your first, second and
subsequent lessons, you’ll have some really good solid fundamentals at least to use.
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All right. So you mentioned Thumbtack Billy. I forgot his name, Harry, right?
And if I’m skipping any important chapters, let me know. But I want to know when KSL entered your life
and who or what is KSL. Sure. So quickly, before we get into KSL, I started shooting compound.
Yep.
Easier sport to get into. Shot that for six years. And then some other of the friends that I developed at
the archery range that I was going to were going to the Empire State Games. It’s like a mini Olympics,
and it’s for all of the regions of within New York State. And they compete against each other,
different events. You go to a place, there’s opening ceremonies, closing ceremonies.
They have this for a bunch of sports.
It’s amazing. I wanted to do the archery thing, but compound wasn’t in it. Only recurve. And I had
really debilitating target panic, basically dealing with aiming in the middle and the irrational fear
to aim in the middle with the intention of shooting the shot.
Which is quite common.
It’s a common thing. So I wanted to shoot recurve because it’s a change, something different. Archery
was starting to become unfun for the compound side of things because of that target panic.
So I picked up the recurve and it has a device called a clicker, which is essentially a psycho
trigger that is both a draw check to make sure your draw length, the distance you pull the bow back
is the same every single time, but it also gives you a cue to tell you when to let go. So it allowed
me to aim in the middle with more comfort to disassociate from that fear of letting go.
Yeah. So let me give people a visual that might help you imagine what a clicker is. It’s a flat
piece of metal that goes on the outside of the arrow. I actually used one for the first time today and
holy God, is it challenging to figure out. But if you were to imagine, let’s say you’re using a
slingshot. Most people know a slingshot, but let’s say instead of shooting a ball bearing, you’re
shooting an arrow out of this slingshot. And there’s a piece of metal that is leaning against
the arrow as you pull it back in the slingshot. Once it flips past the very front of that arrow
point, this is not the perfect analogy, but it works and clicks onto another piece of metal.
That’s when you let go, whether you think you’re ready or not. And what that’s going to do is
standardize how much you pull it back. And it also takes away the decision to let go.
Yes, exactly.
It’s just a Pavlovian response that you train in yourself.
Yes and no.
I mean, it’s more complicated.
Yes, yes. But that is a brief look at it. So I switched to recurve specifically because of target
panic and to go to the Empire State Games. So I literally took a bow off the wall. I still have
the bow that was a club bow and took my stuff from my compound, my arrows and all sorts of other things
and threw it on the bow and started shooting it for a few months before Empire State Games made the
team. I think I won some medals there. I don’t remember exactly, but it was a lot of fun. Good
time, very good experience and ultimately fell in love with archery again because it was enjoyable
again. So there was no target panic involved and just continued to do that. Shot up through the
ranks, started winning nationals as a junior. And then at a tournament called the, well,
actually it was junior world championships at US target nationals. I was shooting against some other
people that had just moved to the training center to work with KSL, who we’ll get to in a second.
And I was the only person to beat the person who was working with KSL. And he came up to me after the
match and said, Hey, you’re pretty good. And I’d like you to come out to the training center and work
with the junior dream team. It was a squad at the time that would go out there maybe once a quarter.
And I said, actually, I just applied to become an RA, a resident athlete. I’d like to move out there
full-time in a couple months. And he said, great, I’ll keep an eye out for your application and keep
it up. And he disappeared. And so KSL is Kisik Lee, my coach, and he is the godfather of archery in Korea.
He essentially left Korea and went to Australia for a few years.
What did he do in Korea?
Oh, he was the national head coach of the Korean archery team and formulated the entire
program that is the current Korean archery training regiment to develop archers.
And to put it as a quick example as to the type of celebrity level that he is,
anytime we would fly to Korea, a limo would show up. He didn’t order it, but the limo would show up.
We flew there for a tournament and a limo showed up and he said, can’t fit the team in the limo.
No, thanks. And I’m at a tournament in Puerto Rico. We’re in a sauna, me and another archer with some
other random Korean. He looked Korean and he ended up being from Korea. And he said, oh, why are you guys
here? We’re here shooting archery. Oh, did you know archery is a national sport in Korea? Yeah,
we do actually. And our coach is actually Korean is Kisik Lee. Kisik Lee. Oh my God. Do you have any
idea like the level of celebrity and how important he is to the country? Like culturally, just random
sauna in Puerto Rico, you know, I don’t know. So that kind of level. And so he left Korea,
went to Australia, worked with them to develop a national program. I think before he was working with
them officially, he went to biomechanics school to try to apply more efficient movements to his method.
And he also, prior to that, to jump backwards, part of the development of the Korean national program
was looking at the US program back in the eighties. We were dominant worldwide and hadn’t lost a world
championship for decades and were just powerhouses on the international scale. And so he mimicked the
program that we were doing, or at least the movements, positions, that kind of thing, and
implemented that in Korea as a national system that would start from grassroots from day one,
no matter what. And then that’s why we would be thrown out because we didn’t fit the mold.
That’s how strict they are. So he went to Australia, made a better program, and then ultimately ended up
coming to the States. And so he just got hired in 2006 in like January. So just before junior world
championships, I moved out to the training center and started training under Coach Lee in 2006.
Okay. So we’re going to pick up there in a minute, but I want to just pause because you’re already doing
very, very well. So you mentioned a few things that influenced that, right? You found it appealing,
easy to use archery as maybe an escape, right? A meditation. You made training as difficult as possible.
Do any other things come to mind that were decisions you made or things you did differently
that you think contributed to those successes prior to moving out to the training center?
One of those things, honestly, was I did not really mesh well socially with other kids.
And so I didn’t really have a ton of friends. It was a very odd situation. Definitely a lot of it is
I’m an intense person as it is. And so I take things very seriously.
His wife is laughing from around the concrete pillar.
Yes. So, yeah. So I take things, yeah, very seriously. And as a kid that can make things
difficult, even though talented in sports, baseball, just any throwing sport really,
and archery and just didn’t fit in in school. So I basically built a shell around myself,
didn’t talk to anyone in school. I didn’t because I got made fun of and got a, you know,
just overall not attacked because it wasn’t physical really. It just wasn’t something I was interested.
I wasn’t wanting to participate in social life. So I just made a shell around myself and stayed inside
of that in school. And at archery, I didn’t have that identity, right? I was a kid.
Everybody’s like kind of shooting and doing their own thing.
Yeah. Everybody’s doing their own thing. Everybody’s as interesting and different and awkward and normal
and talented and just human, right? And so I didn’t have that aura of that negative experience of school
following me around. So it supercharged my desire to want to do it more because it was just,
I was normal. People treated me like a normal human, a normal kid with respect. It was great, right?
So that was ultimately my life. I think that really is what supercharged my desire to want to do it more
because it was something that I felt happy doing.
Yeah, totally. And I want to, this is as good a point as any, to say that part of what got me excited
about archery was realizing how welcoming the communities are. And there are different personalities,
right? It’s like compound crew is different from the Olympic crew, which is different from the bear
boat crew, which is very different from the horse boat crew. They’re all like different burning man camps
with super different personalities, but broadly speaking, incredibly welcoming. People are happy to give you
advice, give you pointers, help you out. And I mean this in the best way possible. It’s also kind of
like weirdo palooza. I mean, it’s like, and it doesn’t matter, right? It’s like, okay, like there’s
some dude in a kilt. Okay, whatever. And then there’s like some normal emo chick with a mohawk. Yeah. Okay.
Whatever. And everybody’s just doing their thing, shooting. And it’s, of course, that’s not every
archery range. No. But in Brooklyn, Gotham Archery, great spot. You see everything. And those people
will be right next to a dyed in the wool hunter who was born and raised in Montana who’s getting ready
for hunting season. Yeah. And everybody’s cool. Yeah. So that’s, that’s part of what I really have
enjoyed about it. All right. So Austin Powers fade back to KSL. So you get to the training center
and technically you’re perfect. And he’s just like, let her rip son. Just move forth, be bold and
prosper. Or was there more to it? Well, yeah. So perspective is I moved out there, I believe in the
end of August of 2016, world championships, junior world championships, the trials that I met him at.
It’s the first and only junior worlds I’d ever go to. And when we first moved there, we being other
people, because I also had another buddy of mine, Dan Shuler, who moved out there with me and my number
one competitor head to head since like 14 years old. And we just kind of pushed each other and kept
competing and moving up the ladder as we got older and older. So we both moved out to there at the
training center at the same time. And coach Lee said, I won’t change your form at all. Don’t worry,
train and compete through the world championships. And then we’ll work on your form. Because part of
the reason of going to the training center was to learn from coach Lee, to really learn how to be a
real archer. Because up until that point, my shot cycle, which is a thing that you do for archery,
it’s the same method over and over again. It’s like a, like a mantra, but physically,
it’s like a physical recipe, right? In a sense, just like someone who’s, let’s just say an Olympic
diver, right? They’re like, they’re going to have their routine never deviates. They’re probably
toweling off in the same way. They’re putting things in the same place, probably fold it the same and put
it in the same place on the railing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Because all that genuinely matters at a high
level, at least to the routine for sure. And so for archery, my routine prior to that was pull back the
bow, anchor, look at the middle and wait for the clicker to click. There was no activation. There
was no mental talk. There was nothing. It was genuinely pull it back, look at the middle and
wait. That’s it. And so when I was there, there was about that two month time period before junior
worlds. And I started shooting phenomenal, like to the level of I could be easily competitive top two,
top three and the senior division really starting to shoot high level scores and frankly, to be a
threat to actually metal at junior worlds. So it’s very exciting. Yeah. And then about two weeks or so
before the actual event, before we went down to Mexico, everything changed. Coach Lee just decided
it’s time to change your form and not just change my form, change my equipment, which is another part of
it. And so to not exaggerate in the least, the only thing that was the same on my entire setup and in my
entire shot process was my riser, the center part of the bow that’s made of aluminum that the limbs,
the piece that Ben snap into and the riser and my sight bar, which is the thing that moves the sight.
So my sight pin, my finger tab, my arrows, my fletchings, my string, my stabilizers, my entire shot
process, how I stood, how I thought, what I told myself, everything had changed. And my scores went from
nationally competitive as a senior, a threat on the world scale as a junior to genuinely not shooting that
terrible ever, ever. Okay. It was the worst you’ve been shooting. Literally the worst I had ever shot
even before I picked up my recurve that for the very first time before going to the Empire State
Games. So if I took my scores at Empire State Games, I probably outshot my scores at junior worlds in
Mexico. Okay. Why would coach Lee do that two weeks before the competition? He’s an interesting guy.
And his reason was, I can’t take an archer that looks like that to world championships.
In his defense, my technique was atrocious. A completely arched back and just what we would
call a hollow back. So standing very upright, you know, I’m a young kid at the time, just turned 18,
barely strength trained ever. You know, I did some planks. That was my strength training, right?
And yeah, just couldn’t control my body and just didn’t look the part. You know,
he is known for having very specific looks in his archers, a very specific biomechanically efficient
movement with very precise loading of the structure of the body itself to maintain the weight of the
bow. And I was not doing that in the least. I asked him afterwards and he said, I was embarrassed to
bring those archers to a junior world championships. And he was not afraid to say it. Ultimately, I was
there for the Olympic games, not for junior world championships. So how could I ever say no?
My ultimate goal is to make the games, not to do anything at junior worlds, but it definitely had
quite an effect on my overall mental perspective of how things were going.
How long did it take you to build back up to the same scores or superior scores?
I would say probably three to four years.
Oh my God. So what are you saying to yourself mentally over that period of time? Because I would
imagine that would, could be incredibly demoralizing.
Yes.
And you would have, I would think moments of doubt. And I’m curious what kept you going and
how you kept yourself going during that period of time. Because I mean, look, I think I’m a glutton for
punishment and have pretty good pain tolerance, physical and mental, but I don’t know if I could
do that.
To put it in a context. So it took me three to four years to get back to zero square one. Whereas my
buddy, Dan Shuler, three months.
Oh, wow.
Maybe, maybe less. Yeah. So I don’t know why, but maybe three months or so for him. So I see
somebody who went out to the training center with me at the same time. I was at the same level, if not
potentially a little bit better, at least the way I saw it than him. And then extend my timeline times
15 times. That’s how long it took me much longer to take me to get back to zero. And so, yeah, it was
definitely very difficult mentally and emotionally for sure, because it was more than challenging to
say the least. And not only that, adding in physical challenges too, because prior to moving to the
training center, I was maybe shooting maybe a hundred, 120 arrows at the most I could ever shoot in a
single day. And I would maybe shoot that once a month. I would shoot often, don’t get me wrong,
but maybe it would be 50 to 60 arrows a session at the most.
Yep. And I thought I was doing a lot and never strength training. I went to the gym at school
and did planks and I don’t even know what some very basics, maybe wall sits or something like that.
Like really just not strength training. So move out of the training center, started shooting upwards of
four to 500 arrows every single day, strength training three days a week on the track, doing
morning workouts, six days a week and shooting overall six days a week. So super crazy amounts of
load, develop tendonitis, tendinosis and shoulders and dealing with all sorts of inflammation issues.
Still deal with a little bit of that today. And I have learned a lot of things to deal with that.
But at that time, I’m going to the sports medicine for hours a day. So I do prehab rehab exercises
every single day. And I’m the only one complaining of the pain in my shoulders and all sorts of other
things. Whereas all my other teammates are shooting just as much, if not more arrows than me with
just as much, if not more draw weight, going to the gym, doing all the same things. And none of them
had to go to sports medicine. Very few of them were even sore enough to feel like they needed to ice
or do anything. And I’m there having to do all sorts of different things. It was a big, big struggle
and a challenge. And I don’t know really what pushed me through exactly. I can’t really put my finger on
the pulse of that. But I think a lot of it actually have to attribute to my sister, Liz. She was
approaching things with a different mindset than pretty much that I have ever heard of in the past,
trying to manifest things instead of just going through the motions, instead of just doing it and
hoping the outcome changes, but to try to just overall bring what you want into fruition and to
not just hope that it’s going to happen. And so a big part of that was actually using affirmations.
And I had no idea what they were at the time, but she started bringing me into that mindset of using
positive affirmations to kind of change everything. I was dealing with being on depression medication and
all sorts of other things because if I had to pick one word to describe to you how I felt during that
timeframe, it was apathy. Just a lack of anything. And so fast forward to the positive affirmations
he has I am tattooed on basically, let’s just say the back of the hand, the webbing between the index finger
and the thumb on the left hand, which you’re going to check every time. Correct. Because that’s my bow
hand. I want to make sure my bow hand placement is precise in the grip. And so it’s not just I am,
it’s I am, period. It’s a statement, right? And so what is I am? I am is whatever you want to be.
So for me, it was I am an archer. I’m an Olympian, period. So changing my overall habits and mindset
started with just self-talk. And would you do that at basically that point in your shot cycle?
Yeah, it’s like trying to when you’re shooting an arrow, there’s a difference between trying to hit
the 10 ring and trying to not miss the 10 ring. There’s also a difference between fighting for
position and owning a position. And so ultimately, how is your approach? And so if you approach from
the stance of it has happened and you are, you are that person, then your habits just change.
And so genuinely, it was like, I am an Olympian, period. Okay. I’m not yet. I’m not using the
standard thing when I ask people, so what do you want to be? I want to be an Olympian. Okay, great.
You’re going to always want to be one. Let’s change that thought to be, I am an Olympian because then
your habits change. And so my habits change to be more of a, an approach of looking at myself
from an honest perspective of, am I doing the right thing? Am I getting enough sleep? Am I strength
training enough? Am I putting in enough effort? Am I being honest with myself? All of those things,
because if a champion would do whatever it was and I wasn’t doing it, I changed that. I made a decision
to make that change. I think a lot of it that took me out of that spiral, that negative spiral was just
believing. And using the present tense affirmations, positive affirmations.
Never a future tense. Because the future tense is just, you’re just setting yourself up to continue
to want that. It’s not done. If it’s done and you shoot from that position of,
I have arrived, I am that, I am what I want to be, then everything else can click.
And for people listening, this is not the first time that affirmations have come up on this podcast
with people who are top performers. It can be a really powerful tool. And to this day, I mean,
I’m still kind of like chasing the dream here, but my best ever day of shooting was a day early on when
I started using affirmations. And for me, it was, I am a top Lancaster competitor. And it was every
single shot. And we’ll talk about practice scores versus competition scores at some point, but it is
remarkable what that can contribute to, like what it can do. All right. So you’re rebuilding,
rebuilding three to four years. Good God. I mean, it’s an entire college experience, basically.
Talk about brutal, but you’ve made all of these decisions. You’ve had all this training. You’ve
got Coach Lee’s input. You have the positive affirmations. You’ve developed, maybe fine-tuned
your shot sequence, right? You’re no longer just staring at the middle of the target and waiting
until the clicker clicks. When does it all come together? Ultimately, it really came together in
2012 at the Olympic Games in London. So put it in perspective, as we talked about Korea already,
Korea is a powerhouse now. What the US was in the 80s, Korea is today. Just dominant for decades at this
point. Yeah. So just to put that in perspective, like if we take, could be the women’s team or the
men’s team, like how dominant? If you look at their medal record over time, what does it look like?
With the exception of the Korean men, the Korean women haven’t lost a gold medal individual or team
round. And I think like 28 years or something crazy. It’s, I don’t know exactly. It’s an absurd statistic.
I mean, it is as impeccable a record as a country can possibly have.
Correct. The only reason that I say with the Korean men as an exception is because they didn’t have an
individual male Olympic gold medal for quite some time. They just recently got one, finally.
Why is that?
I don’t know.
Yeah.
Maybe the pressure.
Yeah.
I don’t know. There’s a lot riding on it. There’s also a lot of benefit for them to perform well,
but there’s a lot of pressure.
Well, I would also, for sure, I didn’t really think about this because I guess on one hand,
you could say, well, wait a second. They’ve been shooting 700 hours a day since they were a fetus.
Why can’t they handle the pressure? But at the same time, you told me, I can’t remember who it
was. You don’t need to mention them. But what did someone say to you to calm you down before one
competition? I can cue you. Do you remember what I’m talking about?
Yeah.
What is it?
Yeah. No one gives a shit.
Yeah.
Meaning in the US about.
Meaning I’m not LeBron.
Yeah.
I’m not Kobe. I’m not Michael.
Right.
Right. No one’s watching. No one cares.
Right. So relax. Take some pressure off yourself.
I believe he actually said no one cares.
So in contrast, right, if you’re a top Olympic competitor in Korea, you are LeBron. You are
Kobe. Everyone cares and everyone is watching.
Yes.
So it’s a tremendous amount of pressure.
Oh, for sure. Yeah.
Yeah.
It’s a lot of pressure no matter what. Okay.
So 2012.
So 2012, the Korean men then because of the team. So we’re leading into the team rounds
because that’s, that’s where we’re heading here.
And how does that work? Is it like the cumulative points of three people who go round robin?
So we do round robins head to head, single elimination for elimination. We do that individually.
We also do that as a team. So you, you seed yourself in the ranking round. There’s 64 men
competing one through 64, one verse 64, two verse 63, and so on. And that’s how you decide
the individual. Correct. That’s how you decide the individual champion.
Team round. It’s your three archers combined score that ranks you as a team amongst the
other teams. And then it’s, there was 12 teams at the time. And so you then same thing, just
like the, uh, March madness style bracket, it’s single elimination and head to head. And so
you shoot three archers together as a team, you shoot in rotation. So you step on and off
the line and you have a very limited amount of time to shoot your arrows. So there’s no time
to second guess, no time to let down and you have to be a well-oiled machine to execute
properly. Yeah. Let me just say, so let down for people who may not get that. If you pull
back and you make a mistake or you didn’t set up properly, doesn’t feel right. You can choose
if you’re practicing, let’s just say to let down, which means slowly bring the string back
to the bow and start over. You essentially abort the shot. Yeah. You pull back. You’re
like, eh, something doesn’t feel right. Right. The wind’s blowing harder. I had a negative
thought, which is what I had to do over and over again today because I overdrew and click the
clicker when I was not prepared to release the shot. Yep. So not having any wiggle room,
no wiggle room. There’s just really no time to second guess and you just have to go for
it. So after the ranking round, Korea was ranked first and the United States was ranked either
third or fourth. So that means that we would meet in the semifinals. And so that meant whoever won the
semifinals would go for gold. And then the loser of that match would have silver. And then the loser
of the semifinal match would have the chance to win bronze in the next match. And so we were seated
to meet Korea in the semifinals. And so the first question that we got asked as a team and the coach
included coach Lee was, so how does it feel to be shooting for bronze tomorrow? Because that’s
that’s just the assumption. That is the assumption. That’s such a dick question.
God. Yeah. So like, I don’t even know who, who the actual media outlet was, but it’s like,
so how does it feel to be shooting for bronze? It’s like, have you been watching at all? We are
at the U S men at that time, we’re ranked number one in the world as team, as a team round, because
we were winning world cup events, which are world ranking events leading up to that and doing quite
well. The Koreans were ranked second in the world and we had beat them several times on the world cup
scale. But of course, everybody’s just assuming that they’re going to be dominant because they had one
for the last decade straight or more. And so it was a interesting wake up call all of a sudden to be
like, what can you ask that question again? So it was just a shock to say the least, but
the power of positive affirmations. By that time I started changing my thought process and talking,
not just, I am an Olympian period. It became much more powerful and actionable and timely. So tying
smart goals into positive affirmations of I am an Olympian or I am 2012 Olympic champion because I run my
mental program more than any other archer period. So it’s not just, I am not just, I am an Olympian.
I am an Olympian at this specific time, at this specific event for this specific reason. And that
specific reason is something that I’ve identified as a absolute crucial thing to do every single shot
in order to succeed. That’s how I ended up talking to myself at that timeframe, to that level of detail.
So of course, whatever our response to the media was at that time, I’m not exactly sure.
What did Coach Lee say?
Well, we had a lot of opportunity to talk to a lot of media leading up to the event.
So we get to London 15 days before the start of the competition where they’re training and media’s
there asking us questions during sessions that we book. And so the Korean media was coming in asking
Coach Lee questions about basically the same kind of thing. How does it feel to win silver before we
haven’t even shot an arrow yet, essentially. And he started saying things in Korean, responding to them
as their questions were in Korean as well. And you could just see the shock of this reporter’s face,
right? And even the cameraman’s like, just this response. And so after the media left, we asked
Coach Lee, so what did you say to them? And he said, let’s just put it this way. I don’t think I’m
going to be welcome back in Korea. So I don’t know what he said. He didn’t really fill in the details
there. But the idea was essentially that the power that we had as a team of the confidence, not just
the archers individually, the archers as a team, because we were really the first and only team to
compete as a team in that tournament. So normally it’s individual. It’s an individual sport. That’s what
it is. That’s what the prestige is. And you happen to have three individuals that come together to compete
as a team, but they’re just still shooting as individuals. If somebody shoots say worse than
the others, it’s easy to kind of point fingers and be like, that’s the reason why we didn’t win because
it’s an individual sport. It’s like, we’re a team. We win as a team, we lose as a team. And so we had
that genuine change. Our main focus was team rounds. It was not individual, the three of us, because
there’s 12 other teams and there’s 64 other individuals. You only have to win three matches to be in the
medals and team rounds. Whereas you have to win five or six matches to be in an individual medal.
And so statistically much easier to medal as a team than as an individual. So we genuinely trained
every day. Once we selected the team leading up to that event as a team, encouraging each other,
learning each other’s shot, not just learning each other’s shot, but during this head-to-head match play,
there’s no time for equipment failures. So if your equipment breaks, you can’t go fix it.
So usually you have a backup bow and the backup bow is just there and it’s kind of working. You do
your best to make it as good as your primary bow, but it’s your backup bow for a reason. It’s just
doesn’t shoot as well for whatever reason. And coach Lee basically said, backup bows are pointless because
if your main bow breaks, you’re mentally just going to be shot. So what’s the point? Don’t even bother
setting up a backup bow. And so we actually shot each other’s primary bows as our backup. So I shot Brady’s
bow and I shot Jacob Wookiee’s bow.
Well, hold on a second. Hold on. So how similar are your draw lengths and like your ape index,
right? In terms of like…
Not at all. But the thing is I’m using…
Ape index is… Anyway, you guys can look it up, but it’s just like your physical proportions
are not the same.
Correct.
And at that level, certainly everything is…
Everything matters.
For sure. Not just that, the balance of the bow, the feel of the grip, the sight pin, all of
those things. And so the thing that is constant is our arrows. So we use our same arrow. And
our clickers, the device that’s a draw check, was roughly in the same place. I think the only
exception was one of us and Brady chose to not even bother with a clicker when he was shooting
one of our bows as a backup. He would just pull back, control the shot and execute good shots
and deal with that. Whereas I used their clickers. And essentially, I learned that… I think Brady’s
bow, maybe I hit low eight. So about eight, 10 inches low at 70 meters. So I would just aim high
eight with his bow. And Jacob Wookiee’s, I’d have to aim like low right blue or something crazy to
actually have the arrow land in the middle.
So we just played this game, right? And so it was just this level of intimacy per se as a team that
no one else had in the world because they all trained as individuals, not as a team.
So a quick couple of questions then, because I guess to even me listening, I’m like, well,
it’s still kind of an individual thing. I used to wrestle way back in the day. And it’s like,
okay, yeah, you’re a team and you want to be supportive. The backup bow using someone else’s
primary as your backup is super interesting. This is the first time I’m hearing of it.
Are there any other strategies where let’s just say, I’m making this up, but okay, it’s like the wind
disgusting. And the first person up is going to have to deal with the brunt of it, you think. So
you pick the person who seems to be best in high winds. I’m making that up. I have no idea. But
are, is there any other strategy that you can build around the team?
Yes. I mean, so for us, the wind is actually was part of it. We’ll get to that in a second. But
if you approach team rounds as an individual, you’re working on your own shot and that’s it.
So you, you either shoot a 10 or you don’t. And your teammate who’s also your opponent
and individuals either shoots a 10 or he doesn’t. And that’s just how it normally works. But what we
did was we worked with each other to understand a little bit more about each other’s shot cycle,
each other’s mental approach, what makes someone better than doesn’t. Like, do you want to hear
your name when you’re at full draw? Like, come on, Tim, shoot a 10. Or do you want just,
all right, strong shot, something that’s general, but not specific to you. And so there’s little
things that you learn, but then also there’s a supreme trust in each other. And so in team rounds,
you have to communicate with each other how the shot went. And then ultimately, where did the arrow go
compared to how the shot went? And then the next shooter makes adjustments based on that because the
wind is always changing. I see. Right. So each person is a feedback mechanism for everyone else.
Exactly. Yeah. And also the coaches too, because he has this third person view. He’s not shooting,
but he’s able to look at stuff, the wind blowing in different areas. And actually the very specific
thing that coach Lee did with the wind that we couldn’t as archers because of a piece of clothing
choice that he made different than us at that day. The day being when we shot for medals. If we just
fast forward to the actual medal rounds, we are in the semifinal match against Korea. We almost lose our
first match. We’re very close to actually losing and just barely squeaked by by a point or two.
And, um, but there was no doubt that we were ever going to lose, at least in my head. I had no fear
of that. I was so supremely confident because of this affirmation, the power of it, that there was
never a doubt. Even when we were behind in the match, it just was like, it’s supposed to happen
this way. Apparently, you know, and once we got to the semifinal against Korea, everybody said that
was the gold medal match of the games actually, because everybody wanted to see that Korea was
powerhouse. U S is ranked number one. It’s the Olympic games. What’s going to happen. Everybody’s
watching. We actually had, I think the highest viewership of any Olympic sport at the 2012 Olympics
during that match. That’s why they put us on TV because we were the first metal of the U S our
first chance to get a metal. And, you know, back then it was Twitter and I had comments saying, I
love my sports team, whatever it is, the Sabres or the Buffalo bills or whatever, you know, people from
my hometown. And they’re like, I have never stood on my couch and screamed at the TV, but I did when I
saw archery at the Olympics. That’s incredible. Yeah. So cool stuff. So the wind, we usually we
have a wind sock. The wind sock is not a calibrated wind sock. So meaning if it’s at a certain angle,
it’s a certain speed. We don’t do that in archery for whatever reason, but it’s always at 50 meters.
So the distance we shoot is 70. The flag is, you know, three fifths of the way down range or so. And
it’s always on a specific pole at a specific height. And you have, you know, every so often they’re
placed. And so you have a general consistent reference as to what the wind sock’s doing and
how you can guess where to aim. And that’s ultimately as best as you can do as guests.
And so we were shooting at Lord’s cricket ground and on the pitch where they bowl the ball back and
forth to each other, the people who stand on that, the lawn care people are anointed by the queen to be
allowed to stand on the hollowed ground. The lawnmower is anointed by the queen to be allowed to mow her
grass. But because our wind sock and the stand that held that wind sock was not anointed by the queen
or whatever they call it, it was not allowed to be there. So they put it in a different location
that it ever had been at any other event. We’re also shooting in a stadium within the stadium is
another stadium inside of that stadium where the archery fans are sitting and the stands go down
probably 50 meters. There’s several thousands of people in the stand and it kind of fans out
towards the target. And so we’re guessing, we’re genuinely guessing where to aim ultimately before
that match. Coach Lee was like, trust me, I know where you need to aim. Okay. You’re not shooting.
How do you know? I’m the lead off. Jacob Boogie shoots second. Brady Ellison shoots third. And I have
to do my job when I lead off to shoot a supremely confident shot.
Clean shots that you can depend on so that you can use that to calibrate for everybody else.
Correct. Or be so in tune with my shot when I make an error, I know or can essentially estimate where that
arrow should land and then compare where it actually lands to where it should land and then suggest to
Jacob Boogie where to aim. So to give you an idea as a quick sidetrack, when I let go of the string at
70 meters, I can tell you within the size of about a baseball where that arrow is going on the target
the moment I let it go. Because I’ve shot so many arrows, I verified where it went on the target looking
through a spotting scope and attributed my feeling of how the shot went to where it landed. And so I can just
tell you exactly where it’s going to go. And so that’s my job as lead off. Coach Lee is wearing shorts. We’re wearing
pants. He can feel the wind blowing on his leg hairs. And he’s like, aim left nine. Okay.
That’s wild.
Yeah. So good luck finding any other team that has ever worked that closely together. We ultimately ended up winning
and then went on to lose the gold medal match by a fraction of an inch at 70 meters away. But I mean,
ultimately, everyone came up to us afterwards and said that was the gold medal match, regardless of how the actual
medals end. So supreme confidence in that positive statements, those positive affirmations of just
supreme faith and belief in the process as it’s happening, even if it’s not going well, like our first match when
we were losing, we were behind the first several ends of the match. And the matches are only four ends.
So an end is somebody getting up and shooting a group of arrows.
Correct. So as a team, that would be each archer shoots two arrows. So that’s a total of six arrows.
That’s an end. And then a cumulative score at that time was shot. So whoever had the highest score of
24 arrows after four ends, because that’s the total amount shot that team won in advanced in the match.
It’s an incredible story. That’s crazy. I’ve never heard a bunch of these. This is wild.
Like in all the time we spent together. It’s nuts. Just for comedic relief, because you mentioned the
Korean media interviews and them looking shocked talking to Coach Lee. So I’ll just share a sidebar
on Coach Lee. So I’ve had a little bit of interaction. So flew to San Diego because we did a little bit
of training together and I wanted to meet this famous coach Lee. Why not? And so I made the introduction
and said, Hey, Coach Lee, Tim would like to work with you. Yeah. And so I landed in San Diego and a few
things that are, I think, fun to share. So the first is we meet at this outdoor range and I’m going to be
shooting mostly at 20 yards to 60 feet. Let’s just call it roughly. And we hang out for 45 minutes.
I’m taking copious notes. He’s giving me some pointers. And then we stop and he’s like, okay,
I think you have plenty to work with. And I don’t think you need my help anymore. And I was like,
uh, cause I’d flown down planning to be there for a week or something, five days, something along those
lines. Not just to be there for five days, but to be there explicitly to train with him.
And so at some point I’m like a bit crestfallen. I’m like, Oh man, letting my head hang like Eeyore.
I’m like, Oh fuck. I do feel like I need more help. And we start talking about somehow we get talking
about firearms and guns. And he is very interested in marksmanship and all things, firearms. And so he
gets more excited and we’re chatting, we’re talking about this, that, and the other thing.
And then he asks me, so what brings you to San Diego? And I was like, well,
maybe this sounds strange, but I flew here to train with you. And he’s like, Oh, okay. Tonight’s Korean
barbecue. So we go out to dinner and end up having an amazing time training with him. And he’s really
one-of-a-kind. And also the reason I was mentioning the shocked look on the faces of the Korean media is
you do not worry about Coach Lee speaking his mind.
Oh no. He’s so direct.
You do not have to worry about him sugarcoating things. And to give you an example, later I ended
up driving to his house behind which he has all these targets set up. And basically I was the only
non-Asian there. Absolutely. A hundred percent of the only non-Asian, which is fine. It was just
Korean army and tons of Korean kids. Also some like Taiwanese kids and Chinese kids, but they’re all
12 years old and shooting by my standards, especially at that point, incredibly well.
And I’m off in the corner, like getting some pointers from Coach Lee and just looking like
a total remedial case, which is fine. And then at one point he wants to give like pep talk to the
kids. And he’s like, Tim, Tim, come over here. Okay. And so we all stand in a circle and he’s giving this
very Coach Lee motivational talk, which is like 60% inspiration, 40% you need to shape up or ship out,
cuffing up kids. And at one point, cause I’m wondering why I’m in this circle. And he points
to me and he’s like, he’s like, look, this is Tim. And he is an old man, a very old man. And he’s here
training seriously. And I was like, Oh, I see if I can be a inspirational slash like warning tale for
these, these amazing young children with so much promise. I’m in, I’m in for it. I’m in for it,
but it’s just so endearing. And the guy’s genius. He’s really one of a kind. Okay. So those are my
Coach Lee stories. Thank you, Coach Lee. Let’s talk about your coaching and what we ended up doing
and all the experiments along the way, because you mentioned, for instance, you know, Coach Lee’s
feeling the leg hair and the movement and you’re providing feedback. You’re getting familiar with
one another’s shot cycles. The little things matter. It is hard for me to explain verbally,
just how many tiny, tiny, tiny details make a huge difference with archery. And just the way you hook
your fingers on the string, the exact placement, how far it is from the fold of one joint, the amount of
curl of the fingers, how much you use your, you’re using in this case, index, middle and ring finger,
the degree to which you can see or not see as a coach, my nail on my ring finger and the difference
that makes the angle of the back of the hand and the difference that makes the level of detail is
really unbelievable when you want to start training and performing with precision.
Okay. So I find you, we meet up and then ultimately about six months out from Lancaster,
decide to take it seriously. Now there are a few constraints, right? One is you live in Florida.
I do not live in Florida. So we have limited in-person training. Although I think we did a good job with
that, what would you say maybe on average, was it like a few days a month or like a week every six
weeks, something like that?
Probably somewhere in that timeframe. I think I was maybe there for three to four days once every six
weeks. Yeah.
Yeah. And we’re doing a lot of virtual training. I travel a lot. So if there are awards for most
varied training environments, I think I would win that one hands down.
For sure in the barebow division.
In the barebow.
Absolutely. The only exception would be like your professional archer who is traveling the world
competing. Yeah. But that’s the only exception. And then there’s no one doing that in barebow.
Yeah. I mean, I was not even remotely.
So I ended up bringing my roller bag, which looks like it’s carrying an assault rifle. Customs do not
love this bag. Like, sir, what’s in the bag?
Sporting a gear.
Sporting gear is the answer. That’s how you get your bow and arrow through customs. But I traveled all over
the place, all over the country in the US, certainly. And I would check my targets. And often it’s just a
big cube of foam. And they’d be like, sir, what’s in the box? And I’m like, there’s nothing in the box.
And they’d be like, sir, need you to be serious right now. What’s in the cube? I’m like, it’s solid
foam. And they’re like, yeah, but what’s inside it? I’m like, foam. And this would go on and on and on.
And, you know, going to Hawaii, going to Canada, going to the UK, where I ended up going on this
pilgrimage trail, Cotswalt’s Way. And at every tiny inn, I would have to negotiate, try to pitch
my little heart out to shoot in the backyard or anywhere. I ended up shooting from inside a hotel
to outside the hotel. I ended up shooting from outside a hotel, through the living room, through
the kitchen, into a laundry room where I hit a target.
Pickleball courts.
Pickleball courts.
Tennis courts.
Tennis courts.
Batting cages.
Batting cages, right, where you have like kids whacking balls with aluminum bats and screeching and
hooting and hollering.
Eight feet from you.
Eight feet from you.
So if you want distraction training, that’s a great way to do it.
So we had some things to work around, but the forcing function was for me, and this is always
the case, the magic of a deadline. And having a competition on the books, which I wasn’t 100%
committed to, but I was like, let me behave as if, let me train as if I’m going to compete.
It’s like, I don’t want to embarrass myself. I don’t want to embarrass you. Let’s see how it goes.
But I remember probably a few months out, like paying the registration fee and I’m like, okay,
now my name is online for everybody to see. That probably means I should go.
And then the question is, all right, what do you do if you have six months to train?
And a few things come to mind immediately. Number one is you’re always going to have things to work
around. So it could be logistics, could be in my case, my left shoulder, which was reconstructed
in 2004 and it was a real limiter, had many different physiological limiters. Right now I have a
probably going to require surgery, my right elbow, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. It’s like, okay,
well, we will have to just work around it. And lo and behold, you can work around. You might have to
make some compromises. Okay, fine. But it’s like, if, for instance, as we experienced, if shooting with
a particular stance causes my back to seize up and it’s producing a lot of incredible pain, okay,
we’ll make a few compromises on that in order to minimize that. And then that’s going to trigger a
whole chain of other adaptations that we need to make. And like you, I guess, as a kid, I very quickly
found it meditative. Archery was almost like taking a break from my monkey mind. And particularly when you
start to focus on, and this is something we focused on pretty early. I want to give Joel Turner again,
credit shot IQ in terms of like the boot up sequence and blueprinting your best shots,
really having a script for your checklist, like your pre-flight checklist as you’re going through
your entire shooting motion and having, for instance, positive affirmation. Where do you put that? You want
to put it in the same place every single time. And then I would say also recognizing that given some of
the physical limitations is like, okay, I can’t do 500 hours a day. Forget it.
We started at 60 something arrows a limited day, I think. Oh, max. Yeah. Yeah. That was the absolute
max. Yep. And a lot of that had to do with, you know, very typical Tim Ferriss fashion, as I know
now to overdo everything to 11 out of four. Yeah. I was basically doing like a Mr. Olympia pose down
every time I was trying to shoot the arrow. So there was a lot more tension in the system than was
necessary. Yeah. Which is, I just, in fairness, in my own defense, really common. Go to a range and watch,
especially guys who have a little bit of muscle shooting these things. And it’s like, whoa, okay,
this guy’s like trying to hulk his own shirt off.
But for you, the challenge was you had actual injuries, actual limitations. So how much were those
affecting the system versus the excessive tension? And it was this back and forth juggling to figure out
what was what? What was the cause? Yeah. So there’s a lot of detective work. And for instance, in the left
shoulder, you have two titanium screws, had the whole arm ripped out doing some combat sports stuff
a million years ago. And my arm ended up sticking out of my chest, basically. And I won’t get into all the
gory details, but suffice to say, when you tack down the shoulder with these screws, you create some
limitations. And as a consequence of that, I had a lot of tendinosis in rotator cuff muscles,
super spinatus. They’re a mess, really, really tangled up. So what that means is like, okay,
how do we work around this rather than do I need to stop? I mean, look, there are times when you need
to stop. Like right now with this elbow that requires surgery, I’m probably going to have to take a break
from the hard stuff for a little while, two to three months. But outside of that, it’s like, okay,
how do we work around this? And that took a bunch of different forms, including like rather than trying
whack out. I mean, we ultimately got to the point when we were training in person, at least that we
were doing what, 200 plus arrows on some days. And there were many aspects to that. And then we can
talk about some of the technical stuff, but just from the physical workaround perspective, when I
started practicing, there were a few things that I would do. And all of this we talked about, and I was
building off of your advice. So rather than doing one session, break it into two sessions
and also start and end your sessions with blank bill practice. Do you want to explain what blank bill
is? Because this avoids the target panic that you mentioned earlier. And I think is an incredible tool
that I found very, very helpful. What is blank bill practice?
The blank bail is, so the bail, the target bail is blank. There’s no target face on it, nothing to
aim at, not even a spot, a shadow, a hole or whatever. You can do small amounts of aiming per
se, but it is not for the sake of precision. It’s not trying to hit the 10 ring or anything like that.
What it does is it removes the aiming requirement or the aiming distraction from the process.
And when you were at the high level using blank bill practice, how far away from the target do
you stand?
Generally speaking for blank bail, I would be eight feet or so from the target. So you’re
never going to miss. And so you’re just simply going through repetition. It’s like a palate cleanser
almost. So you go through your motions, you go through your shot process, but you’re not aiming at
anything. So you can confidently move through the movements without being careful or over analytical
or get yourself in a bind that can happen when you’re aiming at a target. So it allows you to
ingrain your technique to a level that really trains the subconscious brain to try to take over
when you’re in pressure situations. And it also allows you to put in a lot more repetition without
so much time spent walking the distance to go down to the target. So for me, going down to 70 meters
takes a bit of time to walk that distance. So instead I can just walk eight feet, pull my arrows and
pick up my bow and immediately start shooting again. So that’s what it meant to me. And the
amount of training at blank bail really depends on what you’re working on at that time. But generally
speaking, more is better because it really allows you to focus on the process and ingrain your steps.
You know, you talked about the level of detail with just the hook alone to be able to ingrain that,
to be automated to where you grab the string and you don’t even have to think about it.
You have to put in the reps. And so if you’re putting in the reps and you’re distracted by aiming,
it can take away your focus on that grip on that hook or whatever it may be.
Exactly. So I could use it for warming up in the beginning of a session, let’s say the beginning
of the first session. And then towards the end, I’d be like, okay, look, I got as anyone competitive is
likely to do. Overly fixated on the scoring and the aiming, the performance. Let me end on a good rep.
And so ending the training practices with blank bail just allowed me to settle the snow globe a bit,
focus on the biomechanics, particularly something, I mean, at least I took this approach in the training
session if I noticed, oh, you know what? I am collapsing a little bit, meaning losing back tension
in the following way. A, B, or C is happening. Or maybe I’m not pulling my bowhand pinky back enough
and therefore I’m landing right or whatever. I’m just going to focus on that for my blank bail.
That’s going to be my most important cue, particularly in the beginning, because if you try to incorporate
too much too quickly, you’re going to get the Mac ball of death beach ball, right? You’re not going
to be able to divide your attention and maintain any type of performance in the beginning. So a lot of
what I found so valuable with your coaching was the layering. When do you choose to introduce certain
things? And I also really liked the focus on biomechanics. So the blank bail you could think of in
a way as if, let’s just say you’re, I don’t even know if they do this, but I’m making it up. Let’s just say
you’re a major league pitcher and it’s like, all right, you’re trying to focus on some aspect of your
throw without the distraction of trying to put it right into the sweet spot of a catcher’s mitt. Then let’s
just say you had a very, very large net hanging. It’s like 20 feet just hanging down and you were just throwing
the ball into this net and working on the biomechanics.
It would be similar to like dry fire training with a pistol.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Very similar. Yeah. Similar to dry firing, which you should never do
with a bow. We talk about that in our video. Unless you want your bow to explode, literally don’t do
that. And I’m trying to think in the early stages, what, because it was a detective process. And you know,
my mind is a little unusual at times and I process things a little differently. So do you recall like
what some of the early most important things were that we focused on in training?
A lot of them were conceptual things, not necessarily technical, physical, but thought process. How does the
shot go? What should you be trying to achieve kind of things? So a lot of those are really setting up
kind of the process of how to shoot a bow, not necessarily how to shoot tens with a bow.
Yeah.
So how to shoot tens with a bow comes later, I think. I’m not sure about that, but.
Yeah. And tens for just if people are getting distracted, just think about shooting both sides.
Yeah, exactly. So not how to put it in the middle, how to shoot a good shot. Right.
And so there are some really key factors that are super important to actually shooting a good shot.
One of those is follow through. It’s a very simple thing to explain. If you think of somebody,
say, throwing a ball or kicking a ball, the moment of contact of the foot hitting the ball,
when you kick the ball is when you let go of the string for shooting archery, or when you let go of
the baseball, when you’re throwing it, that’s the moment you let go of the string and shooting
archery. And so follow through is what happens after that motion. No one ever in any other sport,
including baseball and soccer, stop their motion of their foot or their arm the moment they let go of
the object or make contact with it. Just doesn’t happen. Same thing with golf, right? So stuff happens
afterwards. That’s a follow through motion. That is a maintaining of your, in archery, we call it
tension and direction. You maintain that through follow through. So tension and direction being
pull back the bow, it’s wanting to collapse you. So you have to build tension against the bow, the system
and whatever direction that is going back with the string hand and forward with the bow hand,
that tension and direction has to maintain exactly how it is when you’re at full draw through the release
until the follow through finishes. So that would be the principle of like tension and direction and just
follow through in general. It’s a very simple concept to imagine, but it’s quite difficult to kind of
implement. So we worked a lot on the technical aspects of how to apply that physically throughout
the months or years. We’ve been working together for a couple of years now, but really that last six
months leading up to Lancaster, trying to hone that in to be fluid, one motion, not fake, not two points.
So not letting go of the string, losing all that tension of the string hand, and then faking a follow
through motion. So it’s like, for those that are watching the motion would look something similar as,
so the hand touching the face at anchor, the fingers opening the arm, not moving and then moving back in
a second motion. So a good follow through would be the same fluid backward motion of the elbow, the same
exact time that the fingers are pushed out of the way of the string. And then that tension just continues
until you run out of range of motion with the shoulder.
Yeah. I mean, imagine just for a visual for folks, if you had like a theraband or a giant rubber band
and you got into an archery position and you’re holding that rubber band at max tension, the way that
it would simulate holding the string of a bow. And then you closed your eyes and somebody walked up
and just cut the rubber band.
Correct. What would happen?
And the arms kept going, obviously you didn’t expect it. And that would be what you then have
to do consciously on some level. It should take care of itself. If you’re using
the proper thought process, proper thought process and proper tension in the back and not in the arm.
But even if the tension is improper in the back or the arm, the follow through will happen if you
have that concept of maintaining whatever tension it is right or wrong when you’re at full draw,
but you continue through through release.
Well, and this also relates to the inner monologue.
Exactly.
Right. So when you’re at anchor, okay, so you’ve got your strings fully pulled back again for people
listening or not familiar with archery, your hand is glued to your face or under the jaw in the
case of Olympic archery. Okay. Now at this point, what are you saying to yourself?
Or what do you sometimes say to yourself?
For me?
Yeah.
There’s a lot of different options, but basically just continued motion.
Yeah. Continue the back shoulder moving around and behind me and the bow moving forward.
Yeah. Or like finish the shot.
Correct. Or finish the shot.
So one of the things that I talked to Coach Lee about somewhat recently when I had dinner with
him about a year and a half ago or so was, so anything new to share? And well, he chuckled first.
And then his response was, you’re not going to like this or others won’t like this actually.
And he said, release is not a step anymore. We do not release the string. And I said,
tell me more. He said, well, if you follow through and your main primary focus when you are
at full draw before you let go of the string is to follow through correctly, the release will take
care of itself. If you maintain and execute a good proper follow through your release is good. But if
you’re focused on the release, you cannot then switch your brain fast enough to the follow through
motion because the follow through is it’s frankly a reaction, not an action. So it tells you everything
about the tension that you’ve built up in the system when you’re at full draw. So it’s my job to
watch you and see the motion that the elbow moves and the hand moves and the bow hand moves and all sorts of
different spots of the body, even your head movement. The moment the string comes off your
fingers, what direction does a particular body part move? And that the motion of that body part
tells me the tension that you have at full draw because I’ve shot enough arrows and I’ve watched
enough people with enough intention and attention to look at their form, analyze it, and just overall,
just watch. I can see where the tension is built. And then a lot of the stuff that we did working
together was when you’re at full draw, I’m behind you and I’m like, I’m making motions and doing things
to feel what you’re feeling. So I can assume that if the hands coming out, there’s a change of tension
going outward of the release hand coming away from your face when you let go, instead of maintaining that
line along your neck as it comes back off your face. So if I mimic what you’re doing, I get a
bit of an insight as to what you’re feeling. And then I can communicate with you nearly at the same
language, hopefully, maybe not using the same words, but at least trying to meet you where you’re at.
Tap the muscle I should be feeling as a primary mover when I’m supposed to feel it.
Correct. Yes. And I only get that based on looking at what you’re doing and just overall trying to
really just tear down the shot and see what’s happening on the inside.
Yeah. So flashing back then thinking about
say the six months leading up to Lancaster, a couple of things. So one is
I, for a very long time, people are going to find this pretty funny.
number one, I didn’t care about hitting the bullseye. I did care about grouping.
Right. So I wanted arrows to land very close to one another. Right. But if they were bottom left,
top right, my assumption was, and I’m sure this is based off of conversations we had,
if you’re shooting consistently, if you’re getting good groups consistently, it’s not just a one-off kind
of lucky bunch of arrows. Then moving that on the target face is not going to say necessarily simple,
but it ended up being pretty straightforward as we got further down. Yeah.
But doing the blank bail, got to the point with the blank bail where, granted, it’s like for me,
10 feet away, 12 feet away, whatever, that these arrows were just getting clumped, like right on top
of one another. Even if I shot, I know this is maybe not your favorite thing, but I did this too. Like
like sometimes releasing with my eyes closed. Sure. And then how long before Lancaster did I start
aiming with the crest of the arrow to? Yeah. So about two weeks.
So, so what Tim was doing was, was, uh, having blind faith that the arrow would land in the middle
by using instinctive aiming per se. Well, I was also doing a few things that you recommended because
in fairness, we tried to have me aim earlier and I had for the first time target panic with the
understanding that the tip is always going to move. But I had, I started to develop this anxiety around
shooting because you didn’t want to let it go when the point wasn’t right on the middle.
Exactly. It wasn’t right on the bullseye, so to speak. And I also didn’t have the biomechanical control
and the conditioning, which had to compensate for all sorts of things to do it effectively. Right.
So, and we also hadn’t adjusted your bow either because we did make compromises within your equipment
to help work with the shoulder. We did a bunch of stuff with that. We won’t necessarily get into
because it gets really technical, but a lot of things that would confuse even
certain experienced folks, like the upper and lower limbs, right? Where you would attach the string,
switching those and making all sorts of tweaks to the equipment to compensate or to allow this
compromised shoulder to function, to work with you. Yeah. Not against you. Yeah, exactly. I mean,
because for instance, like the more weight, there’s a point of diminishing returns, but since you can’t
put stabilizers on a bare bow, people add weight. They just have to keep the weight very close to the
bow because this ring has to be able to pass over the whole thing for you to use it in competition.
But people had quite a bit of weight and it helps to stabilize things, but I could not tried,
but I couldn’t do it. My shoulder would develop all sorts of pain and tendon issues and just couldn’t do it.
And ultimately you could only shoot 60 arrows in a session. You couldn’t put in the amount of
arrows that was actually required to be proficient. Yeah, exactly. So I was like, okay, we’re going to
make yet another trade-off, which is I’m going to sacrifice some of the stability
in order to be able to add more volume. But the point was to allow you to work with the system.
And because when we first started aiming, you started aiming early on that distraction because
you weren’t yet there physically pulled you out of the process.
if we were to lay out step-by-step every single checkpoint that I go through or you go through,
I mean, I’d be here for three hours.
Yeah, we’d be here for three hours. It’s like 25 steps. I mean, I’m exaggerating a little bit,
but yeah.
25 steps for my hook.
Yeah. I mean, actually, you’re right. If I were to go through like every single checkpoint,
it’s like hundreds of hundreds.
Yeah, like a hundred checklist points for every shot. And until you have a critical mass of those
steps on autopilot, you cannot add more steps. And therefore, given the compressed timeline we were
dealing with, it was also like waiting for my nervous system to adapt. And for that reason,
like sometimes if you’re trying to grease the groove with a particular motor pattern, it’s like,
okay, lighter limbs are fine. Dial it down. And then, so in terms of my instinctive approach,
found a compromise was, all right, you’re not going to try to put the arrow tip or the crest of the arrow
on the bullseye. Again, for simplicity, just saying that. However, there are a few things you are going
to do. You’re going to burn a hole into the very center of the target with your eyes. And you’re going
to people think of shooting an arrow if they haven’t had a lot of experiences, like pulling back and
letting go. But you have this equal and opposite action in pushing forward with the bow hand. And
there’s a lot of technical detail that goes into how you do that. But basically pushing a portion of your
your palm, kind of the right next to your lifeline in the meaty pad of the thumb, let’s just say, roughly.
Kind of where your wrist meets your palm.
Yeah, exactly. And pushing that also, so you’re burning a hole into the target in a very dead center,
and you’re pushing that point on your palm also towards the exact center of the target.
despite whatever you’re seeing as far as your sight and your sight picture.
Right. So where you don’t worry about where the tip of the arrow is. And maybe I said it,
maybe you said, I can’t remember. I ended up calling this the Jesus takes the wheel approach,
you know, Jesus take the wheel. And it was shocking to see what happened because more often than not,
I would shoot better with that type of approach.
Yeah. And it worked surprisingly well.
It worked surprisingly well.
Until.
Yeah, it worked surprisingly well until. I guess we just decided, I mean, there were just,
it wasn’t reliable. I mean, to give you an idea, and this will mean more to people who have shot some
arrows, but when I was hitting, I had some pretty good scores. I mean, in practice, like, I don’t know.
Into the 270s, I believe.
Yeah, 270. So like 540.
270 out of 330. So decent. And the goal for where you were wanting to be was 252 plus.
Yeah.
So you were in excess of your score goal for Lancaster.
Yeah. I wanted to qualify for the top 64 shooters at Lancaster. We trained using my
Jesus take the wheel approach for up until a few weeks before Lancaster, because I was a little gun
shy after having so much trouble with trying to hold the point in one place.
And Jesus taking the wheel was working so well.
It was working really well until we started having really variable lighting conditions,
and we started dialing in the technique and the biomechanics for more precision.
And when we went to some test events, essentially. Not a test event per se, but like a local club
shoot to see how things are going.
Exactly. Yeah, that’s a great point. So, I mean, I don’t recommend this, guys. So if you can do a ton of
warm-up tournaments before the big tournament, I highly recommend doing that. Just didn’t really
work out that way. But we went to a number of league nights and it won two small events at
the Easton range in Salt Lake City, which is awesome.
I think you shot like Utah state shoots or something.
Yeah, I went in and basically just like audited the thing, right, to try to get competition
condition experience. And there are a few things that we noticed. So one is in that environment,
the bale, the canvas upon which you put the target, right, the backstop is black. And all of a sudden,
my eyes started doing funny things. And I couldn’t see the arrow tip as well. Now, the reason that’s
relevant is that I wasn’t trying to place the tip of the arrow in the center of the target, but I would
try to see it so that I could tell if I was roughly in the center of the target, right? So I would pay
attention to the left, right.
And just really quick for those that don’t know, with bare bow, you use the tip of your arrow as
your aiming reference. Part of the game is there is no sight. So you’re using the tip of the arrow
as your aiming reference. And then you’re placing that in a particular place every single time to
shoot a group in the middle. Exactly. So all of a sudden, and thank God we did these test events,
which I always have done in any other sport. Also, you just do not know what’s going to happen
and how you’re going to respond in competition conditions until you do it.
So there are a few things I think we did right. There are a lot of things we did right,
but doing those warmup tournaments, thank God, those were there. And with the black
bale, the black background that ended up…
It wasn’t just a black bale. It was also a black stand and the wall behind it was also black. It was
just all out, just dark.
It was dark. And so I could not reliably track because my arrow tip, people who have
done bare bow are going to find this funny. It was like three feet below the center of the target. I
mean, it was really, really low.
But you could still see it. I could still see it. Yeah. But it was hard to discern with that
particular black bale and everything around it. So what ended up happening in competition is I was
all over the place. Yeah. It wasn’t even just the black background that was different. It was also
the lighting condition too, because the light was very different compared to other places you shot in.
So the way you actually perceived objects in space was slightly different and you could not adjust.
It was all over the place, as you said. Yeah.
But the main thing was your first few shots were so low. Yep.
And with bare bow, we do what’s called string walking for those that don’t know.
String walking is essentially, you’re not pulling the string back right next to the arrow. You’re
actually going down the string, walking down the string, and that affects the trajectory of the
arrow. So you can essentially use the arrow point as your site. So you site in by walking up and down
the string. So to put it another way, if you had a site on your bow or on your gun or whatever,
you take some shots, assuming your technique is decent. And then based on where it, okay,
it landed bottom left. And then you adjust the site to move that point of impact. Correct.
Can’t do that in bare bow. Yeah. There’s no actual aiming reference.
Yeah. You’re not allowed to use a site. So what do you do? Well, the first thing is for left,
right, you do have something called the plunger and think of it just as kind of a screw that it’s much
more than that, but it pushes the arrow left or allows it to be more flush, right? So you can use
that to adjust your left, right. But how do you adjust your up down? Got a problem. Okay. Well,
the way you do that, and there are a lot of different approaches to this, but you’re crawling. So that means
means you’re using your thumb to basically move your fingers down from the back of the arrow
to, let’s just say, the further down you go, the further down on the target, it’s going to land and
so on. And it needs to be very precise. This is part of what makes bare bows so frustrating and so
difficult. Like if you’re, I mean, one millimeter, right? Like above or below a line.
So you have laser etched marks on your finger tab, the thing that protects your fingers from the
string, and it’s a flat piece of metal. And you were trying to be as precise enough to crawl to
the top of the laser etched line versus the bottom of the laser etched line. And it’s less than a
millimeter wide. Yeah. And that makes a difference in terms of point of impact. Yeah. Okay. So keeping all
this in mind, when I got into those lighting conditions with everything at play in competition,
it was a disaster. I mean, it was all over the place.
It was the worst score you had shot by a long shot.
Yeah. And I was like, oh, fuck me. This is three weeks, two weeks before Lancaster.
Yes. Maybe three, maybe three weeks out. Yeah. And I was like, well, keep this up. I’m definitely
not going to Lancaster because I will just, it’ll just be a complete clown car disaster.
Heather and I were looking at, my wife and I, we were looking at each other after that day
and we’re like, I really hope Tim still wants to go to Lancaster.
Yeah. That was the most frustrated. I think you guys have ever seen me. It was probably after that.
There was a lot of, uh, statements you were making in regards to never being on such an emotionally,
an emotional roller coaster from day to day. Yeah.
Because that timeframe was, was really challenging for you.
Oh, it was wild because I would go from one setting and we ended up shooting at a CrossFit gym from
seven 30 to like 10 30 at night. That was the only time and the only location that we could find.
And thank you to those guys. What a lifesaver. Chris Spieler. I think it was park city fit.
Amazing gym. The cleanest gym I’ve ever seen. It was like, yeah, you could eat off.
You could eat off the floor. It was incredible. So thank you to those guys. So we were training late
at night, very different lighting conditions, but I would have a day where I’m like, man,
I can’t miss. I can’t miss. I am so far above. I have so many more points than necessary that I need
to qualify for the top 64. Like it was your goal. Yeah. Even if I’m 10% off of this, I’m good. And then
went to this tournament or mock tournament on the, in the case of the league nights and it was unmitigated
disaster. Like a hundred points under what you wanted. Yeah. Yeah. And I was just like, what the hell is
going on? So the reason that I sometimes compare it to golf, even though I’ve only played golf a few
times, it’s like, you’re looking at this, you’re like, okay, there are a hundred different checkpoints.
Which one is it? If it’s even one of those hundred. Yeah. And that’s the detective work.
And so I’m looking at you and everything going down the list, try this, try this, try this, try this,
try this, try this. And then it’s like, maybe you should start aiming, I think. Yeah.
Because that’s really the only thing that we haven’t done up until this point.
Yeah, exactly. So we went through the list. It was like, nope, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. All right.
So two weeks out and we start aiming and it started working.
Because you had developed your technique enough that you didn’t have that aiming distracting you
from the process, from what you needed to do. And a lot of that work that we did beforehand,
when you were instinctive aiming, I don’t think we really quite covered that, but instinctive aiming
is, you know, the tension and direction of the bow arm and just staring and burning a hole with
your eyes, but your subconscious brain like takes over and just makes the arrow land in the middle.
It’s like throwing a ball. You don’t have a sight to aim with when you throw something or throw an
object at something through repeated motion. You, you make adjustments and you don’t even do that
consciously. Same thing with archery when you’re shooting instinctive per se.
And there’s some amazing instinctive shooters. They don’t tend to go to competition for reasons we can
get into. But for instance, I don’t want to name him. I don’t want to dox him, but this amazing guy from
Albania at one range I went to, and this guy all day long with his hunting bow, like a trad hunting bow made
out of wood, just drilling the center of this target for two hours straight, every time I saw,
and he would kind of pull back. And then as soon as he got his finger to the corner of his mouth,
he would release. And that was it. And the guy’s just a beast. I mean, incredibly good.
So we finally started aiming and I want to mention a couple of other things that I think were key to
ultimately being very happy with performance at Lancaster, even though, of course, I always wanted to do
better. But the first I would say is standardizing a handful of things. So obviously the shot sequence
and anchor and aiming system and all of that. The second was experimenting in mock tournament conditions,
because we also discovered, for instance, that when we went from, we upgraded from a very, very narrow
arrow. So the shaft of the arrow, and therefore the head of the arrow as well, in this particular case,
because they’re not broadheads or anything, going from a very, very thin arrow to a maximum allowable
javelin sized arrow. And what’s the reason for that?
So basically in archery, when you touch the higher scoring ring where your arrow lands, you get the
higher value. So all you have to do is touch that ring. You don’t have to break the line. You don’t
even have to be inside out. You just have to touch it. And that’s enough to get you the higher score.
And statistically speaking, somebody did a study and analysis of scores across the board at indoor
archery tournaments. And if you’re in that range of score, where you were actually targeting to be,
to be at Lancaster, there’s a very statistically significant impact on your score going up by a
tremendous amount. I think it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of eight plus points every 30 shots,
which is a massive jump at that 280, 270 range. Somewhere in there, the bigger arrows make statistically
speaking a huge difference at the highest level. The guys that win the tournaments when they’re
shooting say one or two points down from perfect, they do not make any difference at all. Like
statistically it’s, it’s a zero sum. There’s no, no additional benefit to shooting the fat arrows,
but for me, but for you statistically it made sense.
Yeah. It made a lot of sense. What that meant though, is we had to adjust a bunch of the gear.
When you put the arrow on your bow, I’ll just keep it simple. You have an arrow rest. And we had an
arrow rest that had been working great. Fantastic. It had been working so well with the little tiny darts
that I had been using once we put the much heavier arrows on. And I mean, I guess, uh,
what is the model of those arrows? So the arrows you were using was the Easton RX seven. And before
that you were using a Easton advance, I don’t know how to say it. Basically you went from an arrow that
was smaller than the diameter of your average pen or pencil to a something that was three pens combined,
almost. Oh yeah. As far as the diameter is concerned. So big, big difference there.
Yeah. And, uh, and much heavier. Yes. Right. Not just a heavier arrow,
but also a heavier point because there’s a lot of technical stuff here, but as an archer, you want
your arrow to fly perfect and you can adjust parameters of the arrow, the stiffness of the arrow,
how resistant it is to bending the point weight, the knock weight, the fletching size, the arrow length,
all sorts of things to make the arrow work with the bow. So they fly perfectly straight because
ultimately you don’t want it to have a tendency to go one direction. You want it to have like a
forgiveness. So if you make a mistake, it’s not going to deviate far from the middle.
And what we discovered when I did my, I guess it was probably the first time I did the tournament
conditions, a few things. Number one, my instinctive shooting was not going to work. Right. It was all
over the place. On top of that, with the much thicker arrows, which are much heavier,
the arrow rest, which in this case is a fall away, it was a fall away rest. What was the model on this?
So for those bare bow listeners out there, it is the sniper arrow rest, Z-N-I-P-E-R. So it is a
magnetically controlled drop away arrow rest. So for those that don’t know archery, a drop away arrow
rest is a rest that holds the arrow and supports it when you’re at full draw. But the moment you let go,
it snaps down out of the way to give the arrow, the maximum amount of clearance as it’s going by the
bow for bare bow. You use it because of the awful flight of the arrow that happens due to string
walking. When you go down the string and you don’t pull it straight back. So what was happening was,
and this is not a design flaw of that rest. It’s just, we literally hit the absolute limitations of
the system because you have to make it stiff enough, hard enough to drop, to hold the arrow up. So you
don’t accidentally bump it when you’re moving around, but you want it to be soft enough. So it drops when
you let go of the string. And because the arrow was heavy and more importantly, the point weight was
so heavy, it was not dropping. Yeah. So also bare bow shooters that are listening, we were using the 2315
size RX seven. So the stiff 420 versions, the 420 spine versions, and we had to run heavy point weights
to break the spine down. Ideally we should have run the 21 size arrows. I believe that I forget the exact
spine. I think it’s 570 or somewhere in there, much weaker. And we should have shot those light
point weights, but I don’t know if they are even available yet. They are or were on back order at
the time. So I couldn’t get you the arrow for the lighter point weight. So we literally just hit a
roadblock of the arrow rest, not working with that arrow setup. And how much can it change your impact
the 20 yards if the arrow rest does not fall? Six inches. Yeah. So if, if not more. Yeah. Game
over. Yeah. That’s it. You’re done. Yeah. You’re 10 ring again. So that’s part of the reason. Yeah.
In addition to my instinctive aiming, completely shitting the bed and not working given all the factors
we’ve already talked about, I’d say one out of every four shots maybe was, was not falling.
And so mentally you’re struggling with the aiming. Yeah. Then all of a sudden the equipment’s not
working. So it’s just adding insult to injury and it’s just making this mental struggle so much worse.
Yeah. So I should highlight that it, there are so many reasons in any sport to mimic or rehearse
competition conditions. But in the case of archery, one is you want to get used to being crowded,
right? If you’re training by yourself, it’s not the way it works at any of these larger tournaments.
Like you’re going to be on a line and literally could have somebody, I don’t know how far away
were folks for with me? Uh, less than a foot, less than a foot probably in front of me and behind me.
Correct. And I mean, you just want to hope if you’re right-handed, you don’t have a left-handed
person right next to you on your right side. Cause you’re going to basically be eye gazing them the
whole time. It’s really distracting. Although I encouraged you during your training at Gotham,
find a left-handed guy and stand right in front of them. Yeah. Yeah, totally. So I did that.
Yeah. So I had the practice. That is one reason. Another is to see what happens to your mental state
if and when, I guess it’s not really if, I mean, at my level, when you make mistakes.
At my level too. Yeah. It’s like, what happens? Yeah. Right. And those play poker. Like,
do you go tilt, monkey tilt? Like how bad does it get? And can you recover if and when that happens?
And I was just like, the wheels came off. Yeah. Yeah, it did. The wheels came off. I was like,
aren’t you stupid? Fuck this game. I didn’t say that, but I think you did inside, inside. I was
definitely, I was not happy. And then it was really, I think a combination of, I mentioned a few things.
We talked about the tournament conditions and with each mock tournament or league night that I did,
the scores went up. So everything was trending in the right direction. And I was trying to, I mean, I
used AI and all these tools to find every possible shop within an hour and a half driving distance.
And what kind of targets are they using? Can I bring my own target? Which we ended up doing,
right? Yeah. You went and shot a blue and white face league night, an NFA league night and shot a
colored face. So instead of shooting the five arrows that everyone else shot, you were shooting three
arrows. I was running a timer manually behind you, keeping tabs on, you know, your actual pacing,
because within tournaments, like a simple little added change is just a time limitation. And even though
you may never even remotely come close to running out of time, just knowing that there’s a time
limitation is enough to make you panic. Well, that’s another thing that happened to me,
right? Yeah. So given, let’s just say, you know, six months of serious practice. Now it’s like two
weeks out starting to aim. And I still have a lot that is manual. It’s not yet automatic. So I am a
pretty slow shooter. Well, because you have to think through everything. Yeah. Yeah. And so how much time
do you have for how many shots? You have two minutes to shoot three arrows. Yeah. Which sounds like a lot.
There was often times you were had three to five seconds left, which is not a good feeling to see
the timer. And it’s like, what happens when it goes from green to yellow? Yeah. And so 30 seconds
less a yellow light comes on. That’s way brighter than the green light. Green is meaning you’re just
standard time left. And what happens to a lot of people, what happened to me initially is I would
rush through that shot and let it rip. And I would still have 15 seconds left, but I rushed it and it
would not be a good shot. It was a change to your process. Yeah. All right. So other things,
mentioned standardizing as much as possible. So one was, and look, guys, I’m not proud of this,
but I’ll admit it. Figuring out expedient fuel that you can get or bring with you everywhere,
right? Especially with the amount of travel I was doing, that was actually very good practice. And it’s
like, okay, let me know how much caffeine I can tolerate. What am I going to use? Does it help at
all? Because oodles and oodles of liquid anxiety does not help you shoot better, which is why also
I beta blockers are not allowed in competition unless you get deliberately fat enough that you have a
prescription for them. That’s a whole separate story. There are actually people who do that,
just like the sprinters in the Olympics who, oh my God, happened to all be narcoleptics so they can take
modafinil. What a coincidence. All right. Putting all that aside. So what does that mean? That means that I
wanted to be able to fuel myself from things I could get at any convenience store, almost any gas
station. So it would be some form of basic protein. Don’t judge me, but maybe it’s like muscle milk or
whatever. And then having almonds. I had tolerated Maui Nui venison sticks really well. We knew that I
could digest that reasonably quickly. So always traveling with that. Then figured out a couple of other
things. So I’ll give a couple of shout outs because these products end up being really, really helpful.
So Peak Tea, P-I-Q-U-E, which are basically, if you think about matcha as whole leaf, these are
pu-erh, oolong, they’re all whole leaf. They’re powdered, so you can mix them instantly.
Even in cold water.
Even in cold water.
Yeah.
Even if you’re combining it with other things. So I figured out the timing for using that, using
glutamine, which is incredibly cheap. And I use momentous glutamine, also the next one I’ll talk
about. And for muscle recovery and soreness, it is incredibly effective. I wrote about this in The
4-Hour Body. I know you were pretty skeptical at first of the glutamine.
I mean, the amount you were taking was insane.
Yeah, it was a lot.
After doing a little bit of research on my own with the help of Heather, we saw that it was good
for people with leaky gut syndrome at very high doses. So if it’s okay for that, then it’s got to
be all right for the overall GI system, right? So it’s like, let’s give it a try. And we started trying
it as well after seeing you pretty much take an entire bottle of it in a day. Well, it actually
makes a massive difference for muscle soreness.
And it’s amazing.
Yeah, it’s wild. So I would say when we were doing hard training and look, talk to your medical
professional, I’m not giving medical advice here, but I was using a scoop, which is say five grams of
creatine three or four times over the course of a full training session, I would say. And then what
we figured out reasonably late, this was a lucky discovery, ended up playing around because I had used
this actually on very, very long hikes, which is something called fuel also by Momentus. And that is
a combination of electrolytes and let’s just call them more slowly digested carbohydrate and a handful of
other things. But it’s basically like Bugatti Kool-Aid for mental and physical performance. And it was visibly
noticeable when I was on this cocktail and when I was not. I’d start getting shaky. And then if I had,
and I timed this, I had everything on a schedule and I knew how long it took me to digest. Because
the last thing you want to do is have like three protein bars and then get up to shoot and you have
all this blood in your stomach.
Or even worse, a crash. And then you’re like, oh, emergency fuel. How long does it take to come back
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So figuring all that out was key. And I would just travel. Like I would have the
fuel, the glutamine, the peak. I would have bottles of water so I could mix all of that on my own with
a shaker bottle. And these ended up being, I think, really key to also reducing the decision fatigue and
possibility for logistics challenges. For sure.
And that’s why with Lancaster, like most high-level competitors, how early, like how far
before their first shooting do they arrive at Lancaster?
Most pro shooters?
Yeah.
45 minutes, half hour, an hour.
Right, but when would their plane land?
Oh, sorry. A few days.
Yeah.
You know, well, it depends. Depends on the season. Because if the season’s really crammed in,
you may land the night before the competition starts because one just ended somewhere across the world.
Yep.
But ideally, you’d try to get there a couple days early. So that way you shake off the jet lag,
you get used to the bed, you just get used to where everything’s laid out. And you know,
you kind of just see how things are going.
But if you’ve been to the event before.
How early did we get there?
10 days, 12 days early, I think. Something like that.
Yeah. And so again, this is just, if it’s helpful for folks, I do this whenever I’m
competing in anything new, right? So figure out where you are, figure out your food options,
figure out your bed. For instance, I slept really poorly on the hotel mattress. So ordered a pillow
topper, got that all figured out. Where are we going to practice?
How long does it take to drive from your hotel to the venue?
Right. How does that differ with different times of day?
Yep. And what does it look like, the venue?
So we did a lot of different things too. We went to the venue early and checked it out after hours
when no one was there. We’re the only ones walking around except for the Zamboni cleaning the floor.
Yeah.
Right. And so we’re checking it out. And so you get an idea of what the field looks like,
what the lighting looks like, where the bathroom’s located.
Figuring out where the bathrooms are.
This is not a small thing, right? Because when you’re shooting at this particular tournament,
on each bail, you have four targets, A, B, C, D. So you’re shooting with three other people,
you all score one another, and I’m simplifying things a little bit, but basically you’re switching back
and forth. Two people shoot, and then the next two people shoot, and then the next people shoot,
you alternate back and forth. So you may not have a whole lot of time to get to the bathroom. How
crowded is the bathroom, right? Where is the least crowded bathroom? Where’s the secret bathroom?
Yep.
I’m figuring all this out ahead of time, because I recognize, look, I don’t have a lot of time under
my belt. I’ve trained my ass off to the extent that my body would handle it. I pushed my body,
and I do need to give a huge thank you to Heather, who is a top-tier manual therapist,
magician with soft tissue, and no way that I could have made it to Lancaster without her help.
Yeah, you were on the ragged edge.
I was run pretty ragged. Yeah. I mean, I had kinesiology tape all over me. A couple of other
recovery tools that were really helpful. One, I really didn’t anticipate because I had no exposure
to it, but this is, I guess, full-spectrum cannabis oil. Was it Rick Simpson?
Yeah, R-S-O. Rick Simpson oil, I believe, is the name of the guy that came up with this.
And what was fascinating for me, you do not feel any psychoactive effects whatsoever. Topical,
to be clear. Topical, yes. It does not cross the blood-brain barrier.
Not suppositories. Yeah, no.
Don’t fall for the marketing campaigns for the archery.
No.
THC suppositories. And you don’t feel any psychoactive effect. Obviously,
do not break the law where you live, so pay attention. But in terms of reducing or eliminating
muscle spasms, incredible, incredibly effective. And also, if you’re going to get, let’s just say,
massage therapy, do not get, necessarily, Heather would be able to speak more intelligently to this,
but incredibly deep, hardcore work right before you’re going to train. I mean, there are different
types of massage for flushing.
Sure.
Yeah. You don’t want to overly lengthen the muscle, because then you can lead that
joint that it’s supporting or around to become potentially unstable, which results in a potential,
serious potential for an injury to the joint, like an actual injury.
Yeah. You can also get really sore, as I was saying.
Increase your inflammation.
Which does not help with anything, right? My main issue was, like, my shoulder or my wrist or
my forearms would just be on fire. They’d be all swollen like a puffer fish.
Sure.
And it’s like, okay, sure.
This is our first day of four days of training.
Sure.
We need to fix this.
How do we fix this?
From an outsider’s perspective, it was fascinating to see with unlimited ability to just make things
happen, what you can do to maximize your potential to perform. So what can you control? Can you get
that bed topper? Can you get there 10 days early? Can you see the venue? Can you have the Bugatti of
electrolytes? Can you get the things that actually make a difference and have you experimented enough
leading up to the event to know how you respond? And if you take enough detailed notes, you know
exactly how you’re going to respond. What is the lag time? What is the delay? How many days
days after I shoot this 300-arrow day, am I going to be sore and unable to shoot properly?
Exactly.
So many different things.
And actually, this is as good a point as any to mention the glue that holds us all together,
which is note-taking and training logs.
Yes, entirely.
Right?
This is such a pivotal thing to consistently performing under pressure. You might get hot once
and shoot great and win a tournament, but if you didn’t know what you did that led up to that,
how are you going to repeat it? And so you have to blueprint, as Joel says in his system,
the shot IQ, how do you blueprint an ideal shot or an ideal tournament? And leading up to that,
a training session, whatever it may be, what can you do to replicate that every time?
Yep. And a few things that were surprising to me, for instance, if I felt like I’d just been put
through a meat grinder, I would maybe, left to my own devices, look back one training session,
maybe two training sessions, but often it’s five days ago, five training sessions ago. You have to
look back further than I would have expected. That is going to be beyond your memory.
For sure. How many arrows did you shoot? Yeah. What did you do that day? Did you strength train
as well? How about massage therapy? What did you eat? Whatever it is, you’ve got to know. If you
don’t know, you’re guessing. Yeah, exactly. And also, we’re mentioning a lot of these different things.
Most of these are not expensive in the grand scheme of things. Correct.
I mean, the only one that might be out of range that I used quite a bit is the low intensity continuous
ultrasound. Sure. There are these devices that basically put a very light ultrasound stimulus
through these electrodes. And there’s a SAM device. There are a number of other ones that is
Lycus, L-I-C-U-S, low intensity continuous ultrasound. People can look it up. That one’s a
little pricey, but there’s a whole lot you can do that is not expensive. Almost everything I’ve mentioned
is well within reach. I mean, you’re doing it right now. You got a pen and a paper.
Yeah. That’s like the weapon right there. You know, that is so important. I’ve encouraged so
many people I work with that come to me for coaching to take detailed notes. And I can’t
tell you how few do. And you’re the only one that I’ve ever seen take a sufficient level of detail of
notes on how the training session went, what you did, and how you ultimately felt. And then just being
able to look back and see. I can’t tell you how many times you pulled it out and said, “Let me look back to
San Diego when I went and visited Coach Lee and he told me to go away after 45 minutes. Oh yeah,
this is what we worked on. Interesting. Okay. Let’s make sure I’m doing that today.”
Yeah, totally.
That’s a few months later or more than that.
Yeah. Yeah. That ended up being such an important key to everything. And I would log the workout,
give you just a couple of tips. I mean, this is going to seem really rudimentary and it’s like,
yeah, duh, but very few people do it. When did you work out? When did you do your training?
Time of day. Yeah. When was your last meal prior to that? Write this stuff down. You are not going
to remember. And then going through training, it’s like, well, if you had a period of shooting really
poorly and then you tested a number of things to fix it, what happened? So for instance, that pulling back
on the pinky of the bowhand ended up being something. When I got fatigued, I would start to lose that
tension and it would have a whole cascade of negative effects. And I was like, okay, interesting.
For whatever reason, that cue seems to fix a lot. And there were a handful of things that you’re only
going to discover if you are taking those types of notes. And I think this applies to way more than
archery. If you’re not really paying attention to what you’re doing and maximizing your chances for
success and ultimately maintaining what you’re doing and training or leading up to an event,
whatever it may be, if you change everything at the event, because I’m at the event, I should
probably clean up my diet. Why would you do that? It’s too late. It’s too late. If you’re eating Cheetos
at home, as much as you shouldn’t be eating Cheetos at home, you should probably just do it at the
tournament. If you drink seven up or you have a beer the night before or whatever it is, you should
probably continue to do that. You don’t want to all of a sudden sober up at the event and deal with
withdrawal syndromes from not having enough sugar because you used to have cap and crunch for
breakfast. I don’t know, whatever it may be, you might want to just maintain the same thing. And so
this applies to so many things, not just archery. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And also if it’s helpful to
people, when I would take notes, I mean, you can even kind of, I won’t show off all this because
some of these are top secret in this one, but I also basically draw a little square. You’ve seen
these in the bottom right of each page in this training log. And my training log is actually
like this big, it’s larger paper. It’s like bigger than an eight and a half by 11. Yeah.
It’s, it’s a large notebook. And in that bottom right corner, I, so I’m not only taking notes,
I’m also reviewing all of those notes after the session. And in the bottom right, I am putting my
next actions or key takeaways to focus on for the next workout. And so when I land at the gym,
or in this case, the range, the next day or two days later, I know exactly where I’m picking up.
I do not have to spend any time on that. All right. So we’re doing all this stuff,
chugging muscle milks and fuel and glutamine and peak tea and learning to aim.
Yes.
Like a big boy.
Yes.
Then what happens at Lancaster? What’s the goal? Were the expectations, hopes, like from your
perspective, I’d be curious to hear.
I would say my number one hope was just that you’d be happy with how it went, no matter what,
because ultimately there’s no way to know how it’s going to go. Would it be great if you made the cut?
Would it be great if you won the event? Sure. That’d be cool. But how is it going to go? No one knows.
Competition is very interesting. It really is. It’s just unknown until you do it.
Just a quick side note. So I remember, I don’t want to mention his name, but I was training somewhere
and I saw my first barebow shooter who was, in my eyes, really good. And in practice, just incredible.
And do you remember what you said to me after that?
I can tell you.
Go for it.
Practice scores don’t matter.
Oh, yeah.
Now, on some level, consistent practice scores are one indicator, but competition is just a different…
It’s a totally different animal.
Different animal.
And so you can expect to falter. You hope to do well. But ultimately, it’s looking at where you were,
you really hit rock bottom three weeks before the event, right?
So from there, there was an upward trajectory and you were heading in the right direction.
So that’s a lot of stuff that I remember I was reminding you about. You’re headed in the right
direction. You just have to maintain your focus on these things. Do not get distracted by anything
else. Each arrow is its own. You give it the care that it deserves. The arrow that you just shot does
not affect the next. And the arrow that you’re about to shoot doesn’t affect anything. It’s just its own
individual thing. Treat it with care. It’s a 60 arrow round, not a one arrow round. So it’s really
unimportant what happens on each individual arrow. Ultimately, it’s how you control the whole event,
how you maintain focus, whatever it may be. Just composure ultimately is what’s required to succeed.
It’s not about being perfect. It’s just about maintaining what you do in practice better than
the next guy. That’s who wins. And so that was just the main focus that I was trying to hammer home
to really say, this is what you need to lean into and avoid any of this other distracting
thoughts. It’s not Lancaster. It’s nothing. It’s just another venue. You’re just shooting arrows.
Nobody’s interfering with you. It’s you and the bow and no one else. So ultimately nobody’s going to
prevent you from succeeding or failing except for yourself. So you just got to get out of your own
way and let it happen. You’ve already put in the time you put in the effort. Just go have fun.
Just shoot some arrows and maintain composure.
Of course I was nervous, but I also came into it feeling like I cannot imagine with the limitations
that I have having taken this more seriously. Like I’ve done the prep I was humanly capable of doing.
So ultimately it was just, there was no expectations. I don’t like to have expectations when it comes to
competition because it’s just, it adds a level of pressure, distraction.
Yeah. Well, I can also say for myself, I hadn’t done a proper large competition in a super long time, right?
You said 20 years.
20 years, 20 plus years. And for me, I was so curious. I’m like, is that gear going to click?
Is there going to be another gear? And ultimately there was, and I was very happy to see it because
I had not seen it in the mock tournaments.
No, me neither for the record.
Yeah. And part of that though, for me was, okay, now this is a real competition, right? This is what
we’ve been training for. Adding extra pressure to myself now, much like changing your diet last minute
is not going to help. The training has been done. And so coming into it, I don’t even know if I’ve told
you guys this, maybe I did, but I basically just told myself, this is just treat this like training
with distraction. That’s it. This is just another training session with a lot of distractions.
It’s healthy.
And I have had my best competition performances, whether it was, you know, going to the worlds
in tango or the national championships in Sancho Chinese kickboxing when I’ve done that and having
high hopes certainly, but the mental prep that I did for that was my pass fail here is not the score.
It’s how well I can recover and keep my calm.
Exactly.
That was it. And I was like, okay, I have a lot of room for improvement because I remember
throwing a tantrum of epic proportions when everything went sideways at Easton.
Yeah.
In fairness, that was pretty rough.
It was rough.
That was rough.
Yeah.
Yeah. I felt bad too.
Yeah. It was bad.
Yeah.
It was really bad. And I was like, okay, so this is it. This is like a meditation practice.
And success is viewing it as training with distraction and just keeping calm. And if I
get excited, that’s okay. Just like reeling it back in.
Everyone’s going to get it.
So Heather was sitting there with a mutual friend and what Heather was saying is she was looking
at me and she’s like, wow, Tim is overstimulated. And it’s very easy to be overstimulated there.
I mean, it’s-
So loud.
It’s so loud. It is a cavernous space. There are how many shooters?
I mean, there was close to 600 shooters on the line at one time.
Yeah. And what Heather was saying is that when I crossed the line to straddle the line to
shoot, there was just this like calm that washed over me. And she was saying that-
I mean, you were just high-eyed walking around.
Yeah. My eyes were-
Beforehand.
Saucers beforehand.
And the moment, yeah, the moment you crossed, it was just like, this is what I do.
Yeah.
This is how it’s going to go.
And it was just, it was the first time, genuinely the first time where it was just like you held
your shit together.
Yeah. So that was an experience.
Yeah.
And I was like, oh, oh yeah, I’ve done this before. Because I guess, and we’ll get to
this, but it’s like historically, like I know I don’t have a technical advantage over everyone
there. Some of these guys have been shooting forever.
Yeah.
Right. And I was like, okay, well, how can I try to stack the deck? And we already talked
about a lot, right? Nutrition, sleep, taking away handicaps that I can easily remove. Then
I was like, okay, well, being consistent for 60 arrows, which means trying to contain the
fluctuations in energy and also contain the fluctuations in emotional reaction. And I remember
taking the first few shots and I’m standing on the line and there’s a person 12 inches
in front of me and sweet, sweet people, but her arrows are sticking out and literally jabbing
me in the stomach like the, you know, the knocks, the back of the arrow. And I’m like, well, that’s
distracting. And then there’s a guy right behind me who has a huge longbow. He’s in the longbow
division and he’s holding it sideways right in front of me. So I can’t even lift my bow.
Meanwhile, the timer’s going, right? And I’m like, oh man. Okay. But then I was able to,
I think in part from visiting the venue, in part from doing the Easton comp prep and having the
black bales, which they also had at Lancaster, walking in that late night when the Zamboni was
there because it’s indoor lighting to see what the lighting is like, let my eyes kind of adjust and
feel it out. Not worrying about the bathroom, not worrying about nutrition. And it took a little bit
of shooting to, to get comfortable with the process and the turnaround speed from one pair to the next
pair shooting on the same bail. But ultimately ended up with a, I think it was exactly 500 points,
right? I think so. Yeah. I think it was exactly, look, somebody could find it online. It’s easy
enough to find, but ended up with 500 points. That’s not anywhere close to my practice high
scores, but that’s fine. But it was my best tournament scoring. And you’re most importantly,
in my opinion, the best performance you’ve had. It’s not about the outcome. It’s about the performance.
Yeah. If I shoot beautifully in my opinion and someone else out shoot me, I have to be happy
with that. I did the best I can. What does that mean? I think I’d have to go back and look. I don’t
know what number. I think you were 80th something. 80 something. 80s in there. Yeah. So you’re, you know,
not quite at 64 where you wanted to be, but. It was really fun. And just the fact that I didn’t
lose it, right? Irrecoverably was a huge highlight. And also we ended up, because I’m a glutton for
punishment, you know, doing, I guess it was the next day, maybe, maybe it was a day later, but doing a
bunch of practice. Yeah. And figuring some stuff out where it’s like, oh, okay. Yep. I feel like
automatically some of these tweaks. Yep. Would lead to a higher score. Sure. And if I can basically just
get my practice scores closer to my competition scores, or maybe you frame it the other way,
then if I’m able to maintain my composure, it’s like, okay. Like I think certainly like a 540 or
something like that is, should be enough to get into the top 64 for sure. You would think so. You would
think so. Yeah. So great experience. Thanks so much for the amazing coaching. Heather, thank you for
keeping my body in one piece. And I’m just trying to think of what else we could mention just in terms of
approach or anything else that’s worth adding. I think, you know, one approach maybe, and this
particularly given some of my orthopedic issues and just like tendinosis limitations and so on,
this isn’t totally right. And I’ll explain the modification, but this actually comes from a very
famous track coach with many, many world records to his athletes credit. Hank Kreigenhoff or something
like that. I believe he’s Dutch. I’m sure I’m messing up that, but it’s in the four-hour body if people are
looking for the actual name. And he said, effectively, my goal is to do the least necessary, not the most
possible. And the way that ties into the training is I found if I really, really overdid it, then I might
need four or five days off. If my shoulder’s really inflamed and problematic. So it’s like, okay,
how can we use smaller doses with higher frequency to make this work?
Ultimately, that’s super beneficial in archery. So if I were to wave a magic wand and try to make
things better the next time, it would be doing archery more often. So it’s not about how many
arrows you do in one session. It’s how many sessions in a week can you do and how many days in between each
session are there? Anything more than one is too many, in my opinion. So if you could standardize
your schedule better, better for the sake of archery performance, that of course requires sacrifice
elsewhere. Time hanging out, time working, whatever it may be. It’s a challenge.
I mean, for the competition, I mean, that was a commitment, right? Because it was like, unless my
body failed for a period of time, which happened with alarming regularity, but I mean, certainly when
we’re looking at the training in Utah and a lot of other places, I mean, certainly in person, I mean,
it was kind of like two and a half to three hour sessions.
It was intense sessions. And in Tim’s famous last words, one more end.
One more end. Yeah. One more end. It’s like, well, one more bunch of arrows. And I’d be like,
one more end.
Okay.
Three hours later.
All right. One more end. Three hours later. Okay. One more end. Yeah. One more end. Which by
the way, that ended up for solo training being important to me because you gave me the advice
of, and this might sound a little counterintuitive, but not setting a minimum number of arrows you need
to shoot, but a maximum number of arrows. And it’s like, when you hit that, you’re done.
Yes. No matter what, no matter if it’s your best day ever and you cannot miss, and you’re just
enjoying archery more than you’ve ever enjoyed in your entire life, you have to stop.
But also if you’re struggling, you’ve got to push towards that upper end of that limit
because of you need to put in the reps.
Where I got into trouble was, let’s just say I wanted to shoot a hundred arrows as a minimum.
And I would go, if I were shooting poorly and I got to a hundred, I’d be like, I’m not ending
on that. It’s terrible. Yeah, exactly. Whip my back. I’m not ending on that terrible shitty
end. There’s no way I want to end on a good rep.
And so I’d push and push and push. And more often than not, it would just continue to deteriorate.
Yeah. And then I would end up with some type of inflamed shoulder, inflamed X, Y, or Z that now
keeps me out of training for three or four days.
Or potentially hit you real hard five days later as you started.
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So not worth it.
Yeah.
But that takes a lot. And to beat a dead horse, it comes back to also the journal, the notes,
the training logs.
But something that was interesting that you kind of discovered watching people on the practice range
the day after you competed or whenever that was, and you learned some things. You were watching a
couple of different shooters out there. There was a, I think the number one ranked barebow shooter that
won the ranking round that year and set the new Lancaster record for the ranking round. You were watching him
shoot. You first pointed him out to me and said, Hey, keep an eye on him. See if there’s anything
that he’s doing that maybe I should start to work on as, you know, just maybe there’s something I’m
missing. And, you know, I watched him for two arrows and I think I just walked right over to him. I said,
Hey, how’s it going? What’s your name? How long you been shooting? Oh, I was successful recurve
archer. Cause his form looked recurve. Like there’s a very distinct look to that. And he shot as a junior
competitively nationally, I believe for Canada, if I remember correctly. And then he shot all through
college shooting recurve competitively. And then he started shooting compound for a while and kind of
set down the bow, came back to it like four or five years later and started shooting barebow.
And so he already had a decade plus of archery experience doing essentially the same thing,
the same kind of form. And then you pointed out some 13, 14 year old Korean kids or something like
that. Korean American kids that were just pounding. Like they’re, they’re just stacking the arrows in at
the center. Yeah. I mean, and when you say stacking, it’s shooting six arrow ends in the size of the okay
symbol that you can make with your fingers basically. Like, and that’s impressive, especially at that age.
And so same kind of thing, you know, you’re like, I pointed them out. Look at these guys,
you know, I bet you they’re shooting X amount of arrows a day for, you know, 300 plus arrow. I’m just
guessing they shoot a lot. I can tell. So I went over to their coach who didn’t really want to respond
to me. So then I went to the kids directly. I was just like, how much you shoot, how long you’ve been
shooting. Which is possible because we have to go pull our arrows at the same time. Yes. Right. So you can
have a conversation. Yeah. And even if not, it’s the practice range. And again, we talked about the
community. They’re very welcoming. People are willing to discuss and communicate because it’s
just, everybody is in the same game. They’re all struggling quote unquote with the same thing that
you’re struggling with. And so they’re just in a different stage. And so you can learn from their
experience if you ask them the right questions and hopefully they’re willing to share. Yeah. The kids
are super friendly, super friendly. And so you’re, Hey, how long you’ve been shooting? Five years.
How many days a week do you shoot? Six days a week. How many arrows a day do you shoot? Two to three
hundred arrows every single day. That’s why they’re good, Tim.
Well now, okay. Now I’m going to get back on the, on the witness stand, defend myself. Not defend
myself. Not that you weren’t good. It’s just, there’s a stage, right? Yeah. I’m good. I mean,
they’re doing a lot of volume. Yeah. But that was despite having technique that was not great.
Sure. I also was like. Now to my untrained eye, I’m like, I can’t tell. Yeah. But I said this,
this, and that. They should do these things. You know, they, despite these issues, they’re still
able to do well because they’ve put in sustained reps for a very long period of time. So they’re able
to just default to what they do. Yeah. And you had six months. Yeah. They had five years. Yeah.
There’s a huge difference. It’s a different thing. Yeah. And it’s just, you get looking,
you look experienced from experience. You don’t just get it. You’ve got to make that groove,
as you said, in the brain and really make that neuromotor connection strong enough to where it
just fluidly happens. That’s why an expert is an expert. They’ve done the same thing thousands
and thousands and thousands of times. I can’t tell you how many, I’m well over a million shots the same
way, same technique, same thought process, same thought at full draw. So it’s yeah. An immense amount
of effort and work over time. Sustained effort is what really makes you good. Yeah.
Yeah. But that’s true for everything. Yeah. Well, it’s been a hell of a journey. It’s not
over. It’s not over. But we might bounce around, might ask some more questions. But do you want to
talk about the backyard championship? Yeah. So what the hell is the backyard championship?
So everybody loves to be a backyard world champion per se, because everybody, like I said, practice
scores don’t matter, right? Everybody can shoot well in their backyard. Everybody’s happy to tell you
how they’ve shot so well in their backyard and post their pictures of their targets all over social
media or potentially not just their backyard, but the range they shoot at or their club. And that’s
great. Like I’m, I’m all for it. I love that people are proud and passionate about what they’re doing.
And so we’re, we’re forming this thing that we’re calling the backyard championships, which is
essentially a digital tournament. We’re going to have two events this year, an indoor event and an
outdoor event. And essentially you will with a honor code and a buddy system, hopefully submit your scores
after you sign up for the actual event. And after you submit your scores, we’ll have a digital leaderboard
that people can essentially rank themselves amongst other people throughout the world. And it’ll be bracketed male,
female, adult kid, different disciplines, compound recurve, bare bow, you name it, just stick bow,
horse bow. I don’t, whatever it may be. As we identify important disciplines, we will make sure to have
that available so you can compete against other people shooting a similar bow. So this kind of ties
into encouraging others to pick up a bow and shoot archery. And as Joel Turner told me, it’s archery,
try it. Meaning it doesn’t matter what style of bow you shoot. You can shoot horse bow with your thumb.
You could shoot a trad bow. You can shoot a compound with a scope and a level and a release aid and huge
stabilizers. It’s archery and it’s really, really fun. And this is hopefully going to make it more
accessible to more people to show up at their local range, rent a bow, go shoot some arrows, get a score,
get it posted on the internet and just see how it goes. Cause it’s really fun to build a community.
And then within that, we’re going to have a, a discord server that is exclusive for people who
are competing at the event. So we’ll be able to have people discussing back and forth, maybe bragging
rights, things like that. And ultimately it’s nothing really being awarded other than bragging rights of
being a backyard champion.
All right. So I’m excited about this. I want to recommend everybody archery. Try it. I’ll echo
Joel, who by the way, is an amazing, we don’t have time for this, but an amazing thumb shooter. He’s got
a gnarled Franken thumb because he does it so often, but you can check that out. In fact, the oldest way
of shooting probably I would say is a thumb release. So you can check out Joel and his monster thumb and
his, and his system as well shot IQ, but coming back to this, the backyard championship, a few
things I want to say. Number one, this is an opportunity to have an end goal, right? It doesn’t
have to be a Lancaster as it was in my case, which also it’s not where I started out, right? I just
wanted the meditative practice. And quite frankly, this sort of blast from the past of using a tool
granted with some modern materials that humans have used for thousands of years upon thousands
upon thousands. And I think it is really therapeutic for a lot of people who try it and it’s just fun.
It’s really fun. So now you have the chance to have some type of goal related to giving archery a
shot. And if, if you don’t have your backyard championship set up and you don’t have your own
gear, that’s no problem whatsoever. I didn’t buy my own gear for a long time and you can go to a local
range and the folks are almost always incredibly welcoming, ready to help. Try a bunch of different
stuff. Yeah. Try a compound. Yeah. Try a recurve. Yeah. Try a horsebow. Yeah. Try them all out. And
it will give you a regular, at the very least, I mean, this is going to sound like an oversell,
but it will give you a regular meditation practice. Maybe you have trouble sitting on a cushion,
closing your eyes and doing it that way. A lot of people do try this. It for me was such an unlock
for tabling my monkey mind for an hour or two. It’s really remarkable. So I encourage people to try it
out. And this, uh, the backyard championship allows you to shoot multiple different disciplines and
submit multiple different scores. So if you have a compound or recurve, a bear bow, a long bow, a horse
bow, whatever you got, you can submit a score for each discipline for indoor and outdoor.
And once you submit your score, we have these really awesome quiver pins that we’ll send to you
as well. So you can show that you actually participated in the, the backyard championship.
So. All right. Where should people go?
Just head to my website, jakekaminski.com. Everything will be available there. As far as,
uh, the info, the leaderboard, all that info will just be all right there.
All right. Perfect. All right. Everybody check it out. The very least go to range, pick up a bow.
Yeah. Have a good time.
Take some intro classes. They do fun stuff. Some places they’ll blow up balloons or throw on the
black lights. There’s a lot of fun to be had. Yeah. Uh, also if you have kids, this is an awesome
activity to do with your kids.
Absolutely. I mean, and, uh, your YouTube channel, we recorded a video that’ll be coming out soon or
will be already. Yeah. And that, and that will show gear one-on-one from Jake and then also
technique one-on-one. Yeah. So if you’re really not sure and there’s nobody nearby or they’re not sure
how to help you, you’ll at least have a basic understanding of the equipment to be safe and to
also, uh, have a lot of fun too. So it’ll be great. So check that out. jakekaminski.com folks,
YouTube channel. I guess people can find it through the website. Is that the best way to do it?
On the, on the website, you can just search Jake Kaminski as well. It’ll pop up on YouTube direct.
It’ll pop up on any internet search as well. Very prevalent as far as the search engine results.
Easy to find. Jake Kaminski, K-A-M-I-N-S-K-I. Correct.
Kaminski.com. Once again, thanks so much to you and Heather. Yeah. It’s been a hell of a
quite a journey. Awesome adventure and trip and has reinvigorated me on in so many different ways.
And also I will say it’s, it’s given me so much energy in a sense. It’s been such a recharging
activity that it’s, it’s given me a lot that I can then apply to other places. Yeah. Yeah. I cannot
tell you, like I’ve had some, you know, challenging family issues, meaning medical issues over the last,
let’s call it six months in particular year. And having this as a way again, to just take a break
from that for a period of time to have a constant, right? I don’t need to rely on an entire team of
people to gather for a rec soccer game. It’s like, no, I can just book time off in these lanes, meaning
where you would stand and practice at a range. I mean, sometimes it’s like 10 bucks an hour. I mean,
it’s like, it’s not, it’s not going to break the bank. Yeah.
And rentals are generally very, very affordable and I can just take a break. I can go in two hours,
just quiet my mind. And it’s been such an incredible tool. So I want to thank both of you guys again.
Yeah. Anything else you’d like to add? Any closing comments before we wind to a close?
Yeah. Archery is difficult. It’s single-sided, rotational and static. So it’s not exactly good
for you. I mean, it’s great because it clears your mind. It’s activity. You got something to focus on,
but it can be a bit much for the body. So taking care of yourself, super important.
And part of that, I’ll give it another plug, jakecomincy.com. Watch Jake’s videos on technique
because if you are doing the same thing over and over and over again, you know, just imagine you
had a pebble in your shoe and you refuse to take it out and you take 10 steps. Okay. You’re fine.
Maybe you walk to Starbucks and back. You’re fine. You walk a thousand miles with that. You’re going to
have a big problem with your foot. Absolutely. And that is true with really any repetitive motion.
There are a lot of sports with repetitive motions. Yeah. Also applies to archery.
Yeah. And the problems I think are very easy to avoid. Yeah. With a few basic pointers that you
follow religiously. Yeah. And I’ve got an academy of sorts coming out. It’s like a Jake Kaminsky
academy that’ll teach you the technique. It is currently available as far as like form advice
that I give on my YouTube channel. But this academy is an ultra premium, high production quality that
once you buy into the system, you have lifetime access. So as you develop as an archery, you can
come back and check it out as often as you’d like. So that’s something that is in the works and
we’re, we’re getting very close to launching that that’ll also be available on jakekaminski.com as well.
And, uh, you know, as Joel Turner said, either way, it’s archery. You should try it.
Oh, man. Well, thanks again, Jake. So nice to see you and train with you. Heather. A lot of fun.
Thank you again. And folks listening, show notes. We’re going to have links to everything
as per usual, tim.blog slash podcast. I can pretty much guarantee you there will not be another Kaminsky
on the podcast as of yet. So you can check that out or just search Jake. I don’t think there are
many Jakes in the podcast library. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary
to others. Also to yourself. If you’re on the line and shoot a terrible shot, don’t go full monkey
tilt and punch yourself in the groin. Not worth it. Be kind. And I appreciate the other hidden chuckle
from behind the pillar. And until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one
more thing before you take off. And that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email
for me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and
two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday,
easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the
coolest things I’ve found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It’s kind of like
my diary of cool things. It often includes articles. I’m reading books. I’m reading albums, perhaps
gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot
of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I
share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before
you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you’d like to try it out, just go to
tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you’ll
get the very next one. Thanks for listening.
As many of you know, for the last few years, I’ve been sleeping on a midnight luxe mattress from today’s
sponsor, Helix Sleep. I also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs and feedback from friends has
always been fantastic. Kind of over the top, to be honest. I mean, they frequently say it’s the best night of
sleep they’ve had in ages. What kind of mattresses and what do you do? What’s the magic juju? It’s something
they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever. I also recently had a chance to test
the Helix Sunset Elite in a new guest bedroom, which I sometimes sleep in and I picked it for
its very soft but supportive feel to help with some lower back pain that I’ve had. The Sunset Elite
delivers exceptional comfort while putting the right support in the right spots. It is made with five
tailored foam layers, including a base layer with full perimeter zoned lumbar support right where I need
it and middle layers with premium foam and micro coils to create a soft contouring feel, which also means if I
feel like I want to sleep on my side, I can do that without worrying about other aches and pains I might
create. And with a luxurious pillow top for pressure relief, I look forward to nestling into that bed every
night that I use it. The best part, of course, is that it helps me wake up feeling fully rested with a back that
feels supple instead of stiff. That is the name of the game for me these days. Helix offers a 100 night sleep
trial fast free shipping and a 15 year warranty. So check it all out. And now during the month of May,
you can get 27% off anything on their website. So site wide and with any Lux or Elite mattress order,
you get a free bedding bundle that is a sheet set and mattress protector. So just go to helixsleep.com
slash Tim. One more time helixsleep.com slash Tim. With Helix, better sleep starts now.
Not to be a salty old dog, but then again, that’s what I am. But in the early 2000s, back in the day,
when I was running my own e-commerce business, the tools were atrocious. They tried hard, but man,
to cobble all sorts of stuff together. Huge pain in the ass. I could only dream of a platform like
Shopify, which is this episode’s sponsor. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses
around the world. Believe it or not, I got to know them when they had eight or nine employees. And now
10% of all e-commerce in the US is on Shopify from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to my
very own limited edition cock punch coffee. Remember that story for another time. Now back to the early
2000s, then nobody even thought of AI. Who could have predicted even in the last 24 months, the magic that
is now possible with AI. Shopify has been ahead of the curve and they are packed with helpful AI tools
that will accelerate everything, write product descriptions, page headlines, even enhance your
product photography. You can get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready to use
templates to match your brand style and create email and social media campaigns to get the word out
wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. Best of all, Shopify expertly handles everything
from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. It’s all under
one umbrella. And man, no man, could I have used that back in the day. And if I ever do something like
that again in e-commerce, I will use Shopify. If you’re ready to sell, you’re ready for Shopify. Sign up for
your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash Tim. Why not learn a little bit
more? Shopify.com slash Tim. One more time, shopify.com slash Tim.
The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, to tease
out how they do what they do, the routines, the belief structures, the training programs that you
can apply to your own life. And I say training programs because my guest today is one of the
best teachers and trainers I have found in the last several years in any discipline whatsoever.
His name is Jake Kaminsky. Jake Kaminsky is a two-time Olympic silver medalist in archery and a
longtime member of the U.S. archery team with more than a decade of international competition
experience. He is very well known for his technical precision. He is meticulous with gear and tuning,
also with biomechanics, his deep knowledge of the sport. And with all of that, Jake helped lead the
U.S. to team silver medals at both the 2012 London and 2016 Rio Olympic Games. Since retiring from
Olympic competition, Jake has become a leading voice in the archery world through content creation,
product innovation, and educational events. He runs a successful YouTube channel, which is kind of the
de facto archery technical channel. People from all over the world have seen this over and over again. He is
like the Taylor Swift meets, you name it, Brad Pitt of the archery world when I’ve gone to events with him
because he was my coach and is my coach in archery. I had my first competition end of January. We’ll talk
about that. So he, in addition to that, writes training guides and develops high-performance gear,
which he manufactures in Austria. It is as precise as you expect Jake Kaminsky to be
under the Kaminsky Archery brand. You can find him on YouTube, Jake Kaminsky at Jake Kaminsky Archery.
Kaminsky is K-A-M-I-N-S-K-I. Website, jakekaminsky.com. And on Instagram and Facebook,
Jake underscore Kaminsky on Instagram. Facebook, Kaminsky Jake. We’ll link to all that stuff,
but really the big two are the YouTube channel, Jake Kaminsky Archery, and then the website,
jakekaminsky.com. And we go all over the place in this conversation is really a close examination
of real world learning because he and I had to work around and towards all sorts of things together.
I’ll explain how I chose him, how I found him and much more in just a second after a few words from
the people who make this podcast possible. Not to be a salty old dog, but then again,
that’s what I am. But in the early 2000s, back in the day when I was running my own e-commerce business,
the tools were atrocious. They tried hard, but man, was it bad. You had to cobble all sorts of stuff
together. Huge pain in the ass. I could only dream of a platform like Shopify, which is this episode’s
sponsor. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. Believe it or
not, I got to know them when they had eight or nine employees. And now 10% of all e-commerce in the US
is on Shopify from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to my very own limited edition
cock punch coffee. Remember that story for another time. Now back to the early 2000s, then nobody even
thought of AI. Who could have predicted even in the last 24 months, the magic that is now possible
with AI. Shopify has been ahead of the curve and they are packed with helpful AI tools
that will accelerate everything. Write product descriptions, page headlines, even enhance your
product photography. You can get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready-to-use
templates to match your brand’s style and create email and social media campaigns to get the word
out wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. Best of all, Shopify expertly handles
everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. It’s all
under one umbrella and man, no man, could I have used that back in the day. And if I ever do something
like that again in e-commerce, I will use Shopify. If you’re ready to sell, you’re ready for Shopify.
Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com slash Tim. Why not
learn a little bit more? Shopify.com slash Tim. One more time, Shopify.com slash Tim.
As many of you know, for the last few years, I’ve been sleeping on a midnight luxe mattress from today’s
sponsor, Helix Sleep. I also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs and feedback from friends has always
been fantastic. Kind of over the top, to be honest. I mean, they frequently say it’s the best night
of sleep they’ve had in ages. What kind of mattresses and what do you do? What’s the magic juju? It’s
something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever. I also recently had a chance
to test the Helix Sunset Elite in a new guest bedroom, which I sometimes sleep in and I picked
it for its very soft but supportive feel to help with some lower back pain that I’ve had. The Sunset
Elite delivers exceptional comfort while putting the right support in the right spots. It is made with five
tailored foam layers, including a base layer with full perimeter zoned lumbar support, right where I
need it, and middle layers with premium foam and micro coils that create a soft contouring feel, which
also means if I feel like I want to sleep on my side, I can do that without worrying about other aches and
pains I might create. And with a luxurious pillow top for pressure relief, I look forward to nestling into
that bed every night that I use it. The best part, of course, is that it helps me wake up feeling fully
rested with a back that feels supple instead of stiff. And that is the name of the game for me these days.
Helix offers a 100-night sleep trial, fast, free shipping, and a 15-year warranty. So check it all out.
And now during the month of May, you can get 27% off anything on their website, so site-wide. And with
any Lux or Elite mattress order, you get a free bedding bundle that is a sheet set and mattress
protector. So just go to helixsleep.com slash Tim. One more time, helixsleep.com slash Tim. With Helix,
Better Sleep starts now.
Optimal, minimal.
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
Can I ask you a personal question?
Now would it seem like a perfect time?
What if I did the opposite?
I’m a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.
Me, Tim, Ferris, so.
Jake Kaminsky.
Nice to see you, man.
Yeah, nice to see you, too.
So glad to be doing this. We’ve had, I was joking before we recorded, that we could just
treat this like conversation 678, something like that. We’ve had a lot of conversations.
Might be double that.
It might be double that. It’s probably double that. If we count texts and the many, many
thousands and then videos, it just goes on and on. So let’s give people some context.
We’re going to do a deep dive into the world of archery. We’re going to do a deep dive into
the world of high performance, which transcends archery. So if you think to yourself,
archery, man, I’m not interested in flinging arrows, still listen, there’s going to be a lot
here. And we’re also going to talk about your coaching and our experience, coach and student,
and what we did with that, which I think is pretty special and fun to unpack. So we’re going to go in a
lot of different rabbit holes, but let’s start for people who are not familiar with Olympic
recurve. What does that mean? What is the sport?
Sure. So the sport of Olympic archery, as I grew up, it was just called recurve because that was the
discipline, but now it’s known as Olympic archery because there’s many different disciplines that have
spun off from that kind of bow. But essentially what it is, is a sport of hyper precision. It’s just how
good can you work with a machine, your bow to produce the exact same result every single time
at an extreme distance. So when I grew up, we shot up to a hundred yards, which is easy to see. It’s
end zone to end zone on a football field. But now the Olympic distance is 70 meters or 77 yards
or 237 feet. So that’s, you know, about three quarters of the way down the football field.
So we’re shooting an arrow that distance, the arrow reaches 12 to 13 feet in the air in an arcing
trajectory to the target. No magnification, zero magnification, no rear sight, in fact. So you don’t
even have something to align up in the back other than a string. You’re using a blurry string that is
very imprecise in your reference. And for people who are trying to get an idea of what it means to
perform at a very high level, the center of the target. How large is that? And what does that mean
for the amount of motion that is permissible at the arrow point? The 10 ring, the maximum scoring
ring is a 12.2 centimeters or about the size of a CD. You have to not only take into consideration
your alignment with that arrow and that bow, but also you have wind. So there’s a lot of factors.
Or precipitation or yeah, anything, anything but lightning. And to hit that 10 ring, that 12.2
centimeter diameter ring, it is the margin of error to hit that repeatedly is the diameter of a extra
fine ball in an extra fine ballpoint pen. So just to put this in perspective, if you’re not watching the
video, you’ll still get it. But if you’re watching the video, all right. So you’re trying to hit a CD.
For those of you remember CDs, it would be like the type of dish you might have under a cup of coffee,
maybe something like that. It’s small. And then the amount of variance at the arrow tip
that will allow you to hit that consistently is smaller than the point of this pen, not the pen,
the diameter of the pen, the actual rolling point in a ballpoint. Correct. It’s insane. Correct. And now
how often or how many arrows do you have to do that for it? It’s because it’s not just one. It’s more
than that. We shoot for a ranking round to seat us in our brackets for the Olympic games. We shoot 72
arrows. Your average, like really high score, you’re hitting that 10 ring probably 40 plus times out of 72
times. Yeah. So it’s insane. That’s the level. I’ll give one more bit of trivia that I did not know
until we were literally just walking down this hallway, which is that you have also hit the 10
ring from three quarters of a football field away while standing on an indo board. Yeah. For people
who don’t know what that is, it’s like a balance board. Imagine a skateboard deck that you could stand
on and there’s basically a huge rolling pin underneath it and you place it on the pin and
then you have to balance as you wobble. And if you see someone try this for the first time,
it’s disastrous and comical. And so to be able to stand on that and hit the 10 ring, you guys can put
the math together. It’s just, it is just an extra planetary accomplishment. It’s wild. So let’s back up
and share some context on how we first connected. So the world of archery is, I’m not going to say
it’s opaque because it’s not opaque, but it can be difficult to navigate. And when I was first trying
to find potential coaches, and I can come back to why I was doing that, I went where? I went online,
I went to YouTube. But one of the challenges, as most people recognize, is that let’s just say for
trick shooters, and there’s some amazing trick shooters, which is not to discount that as a
discipline, but people can take a thousand attempts and then show their best outcome.
And we were talking about this earlier, but when they actually go to retrieve their arrow,
look at the rest of the target face.
Not only retrieve their arrow, just look at the target in frame behind them. Oftentimes it’s like
there’s a burlap wrap over the target because people use bag targets. That’s what they’re
called. And you know how worn out they can get. Yours are nowhere near as worn out as 90 plus
percent of those trick shooters. And yeah, they show you that one impact, but look at the target
behind them.
And what I think what you’re alluding to is that if you’re hitting the center of the target
consistently, you’re basically going to carve out a sweet spot and then you have to replace
that portion of the target face if it’s replaceable. There’s a lot of, I suppose, selection and
highlights online and it can make it very, very difficult, particularly if you’re coming
in as a novice, you don’t know how to sort or separate fact from fiction. You don’t know
where to go. And so what I ended up doing was asking myself a question I ask a lot. And for
people who’ve read The 4-Hour Chef, which is actually about accelerated learning, this approach
will sound familiar, but this is a chance to see it unfold in recent history and sort of
in real time because we’re still training. How can I find an objective measure for this
sport, for this discipline? And there are almost always options. For instance, I’ve had Susan
Garrett on this podcast. She is a multiple-time agility champion. So dog agility champion. She’s
a multiple national-time champion. And that is an objective competition with set scoring, with set
penalties under time, and there’s nowhere to hide. So that is how I ended up having Susan Garrett on the
podcast versus a million celebrity dog coaches where it’s impossible to actually know what you’re
buying because you don’t have any of the outtakes. You don’t have a lot of objective measurement.
And in this case, I was like, all right, well, I think Archery’s in the Olympics. Let me look this
up. Oh, it’s in the Olympics. Great. Let me try to use that as a sorting mechanism. And that is how I
found your amazing YouTube channel. You want to give it a plug?
Yeah, it’s just Jake Kaminsky.
I mean, when we’ve gone anywhere related to archery, it’s like trying to move around with
The Rock or Lady Gaga or some combination of the two. You just get mobbed because in a world where
it can be very difficult to decipher what is legitimate, you offer the bona fides and a lot
of really good technical instructions. So that’s how I found you. Then reached out, and then lo and
behold, here we are. And it’s really worked out incredibly well. And my background, just
quickly, it’s not that extensive, but I’ve been bow hunting for at least 10 years, a bit more than
that. Did rifle prior to that. First hunt ever was with Steven Rinella during the writing of The
Four Hour Chef. So thanks to Steve Rinella. People can check him out. Everything Meat Eater. Also an
amazing writer. And I’ll give people a bit of a flash forward, and then we can talk about all sorts of
stuff, including your kind of training regimen for yourself and development and so on. But began taking
barebow archery. We can talk about what that is, but it’s effectively, for the purposes of this
conversation, it’s a competition classification. And it dictates that you basically strip off
all the stabilizers, the clicker, don’t worry about these things, the sight, et cetera, from an
Olympic bow.
Essentially, all the aids.
Yeah, all the aids.
Everything that makes it.
Yeah, you take off all of the performance aids, and then you shoot with that particular bow.
And I became interested in barebow for a few reasons. I saw it online on YouTube while I was
tooling around trying to find something, and there is something called Lancaster Classic.
Happens in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Or Lancaster.
Lancaster, yes, exactly. And Lancaster Archery Supply is a huge distributor of archery products,
and they hold this competition once a year. And it is, for the barebow discipline, I suppose it’s the
largest in the world.
I think so. Yeah.
I mean, it’s at least the most prestigious, I suppose, has the biggest reach, so it gets the
most exposure, and I think actually the most participation now, at least as of this last
year. And a couple of years leading up to this, it’s taken off, and it is, I believe it’s almost
the biggest, if not the biggest class, as far as the amount of participation.
Yeah. So you’ve got barebow. They also have compound. They also have Olympic archeries,
Olympic recurve.
They have hunting.
They have longbow now.
Yep.
They’ve got all sorts of stuff. So many different classes. And barebow is interesting to me for a few
reasons. I have not done any real physical competition. Well, now I have, but in 20 years,
probably. Last thing was Tango in Argentina in 2004, I suppose it was, a long time ago.
And I wanted to compete. I love competing. But I thought to myself, all right, I want to take a bit
of an oblique approach here, which I think is a misunderstanding about what I do sometimes, or what
I often focus on, even as early as the four-hour workweek. The goal is not to find the cheap shortcut.
The goal is to look for oblique, maybe uncommon approaches to various problems or goals.
That’s it. And in this case, I looked at the number of people competing in barebow. And I was
like, all right, it’s a smaller population at the higher levels. And it is sometimes nicknamed
the struggle stick for folks. And part of the reason it has so much viewership online compared to some of
these other disciplines is, as they would say, like in barebow, anything can happen.
Literally at any moment.
At any moment. And if somebody lets their nerves take control, if there’s any number of issues,
they could really fire on the target, but out of the bullseye, let’s just say, by a substantial margin,
which opens up the possibility for comebacks, surprise turns, reversals of fortune, and it makes
it fun to watch. And I thought, okay, well, that seems like a fun place to bookmark as a possible
competition and ended up competing end of January. We will come back to that and had, I suppose,
about six months of real training, real focus training. And so we’ll come back to what that
looked like. But let’s talk about Jake. So how did the archery thing start? And why don’t you just
take that and run with it? And then I might pepper in questions along the way.
So I grew up in a very small town in Elman, New York, kind of south of Buffalo, New York. And my dad was a
volunteer fireman at the local fire department. And they have a spring and a fall gun raffle every year.
And, you know, they raffle off guns in a canoe full of beer or whatever else. Right. And one of them was
a bow and he won the bow gun raffle. And this was, I was five years old. And of course this was a, you
know, hunting bow for an adult. So there’s no way a five-year-old is going to use that. So we found,
I think we went to Kmart and bought a bear hunting compound for a kid, just fiberglass, super cheap,
very basic. My parents bought me that for my sixth birthday. So on my sixth birthday,
after we got hay bales from a local farmer or whatever, threw up a target. And I shot my first
arrow at 20 yards and 20 yards is more than double the distance that you would really want to have any
person, not just a kid shoot their first arrow. I vividly remember my very first arrow I ever shot
because I literally shot an inside out X on my very first arrow. You should explain what that is.
So inside out X, meaning if you have your 10 ring, like the maximum scoring ring inside,
the 10 ring is a X ring. It’s about the size. It’s like a, between a diamond and nickel about that
size and inside out, meaning I put the arrow in the dead center of the target where it did not touch
the ring of the X. So it was inside of a dime, roughly my very first arrow. We won’t talk about
the next several hundred arrows. I mean, thank God for that first arrow, right?
Yeah. I mean, I was hooked. I mean, it’s kind of crazy. I’ve heard this story to think
like if your first 20 arrows had been all over the place, would it have been a different story? Like
maybe, you know, maybe it’s crazy. Yeah. Who knows? Yeah. Really no way to know. And, uh,
I was with my brother, Matt, he was out there shooting with me. Yeah. I don’t know if he shot before
me, but after I shot the X, he’s like, give me that thing. And of course, yeah. And then it just
kind of started from there. We found that local club that was down the street. It’s a Joe ad club,
a junior Olympic archery development club. There’s many of those around the country and the U S they’re
at local hunting shops. Basically, if they have a junior development program, we found that club
because that’s where the bow was bought for the gun raffle. And luckily it was about a five minute
drive from our house. And so every Saturday mornings they had a junior development program.
And so I’d go there and start shooting with them. And so every Saturday morning I’d be there
no matter what, because I enjoyed it so much. The progression, it went from shooting compound.
So I shot compound for about six years. Let’s pause for a second. Just for people who have no
archery context. And by the way, my not too secret agenda for this is I want everybody to go out and
try archery. It has been such a godsend for me to have that constant for a million reasons turns into
a form of meditation. It can also be just as frustrating, if not more frustrating than golf,
but let’s put that aside for now. It has been such a gift to my life to have archery and to be able to
train with you. It’s really been tremendous. So I have this not so secret agenda of getting as many
people as possible who are listening to try archery, which by the way, is very much within reach for
basically everybody listening. If you have a smartphone and you’re listening to this, you can
try archery. You do not need to buy anything, but let me explain a term. So longbow is about the
simplest thing you can imagine. It’s a, let’s call it a stick. It’s bent. And then you have a string
attached to it. And you’ll see this in many different indigenous hunting cultures. You’ll see it all over
the world recurve. You will also see all over the world because they figured out, well, you can make
the bow a lot shorter and have the ends of the bow recurve out. That’s kind of towards the target
to apply more tension. It’s like a advanced longbow using laminations of wood instead of just a stick.
Right, exactly. So now you have this laminated bow and you see that all over the world,
all over the world. And there are different iterations of that. You’ve got the slightly
different idea, but horse bow, which I’m, of course I’m, I’m in love with. That’s a whole separate
podcast and so on and so forth. So if you imagine like a Robin hood bow in your mind, I think it was
a recurve in maybe the cartoon, at least made out of fancier materials, whether it’s carbon or aluminum
or something else. Then you have the idea of what I’m shooting when I’m doing say a bare bow.
And then a compound has various cams. You can think of them almost like cams on a weightlifting
machine.
Or like pulleys.
Yeah, pulleys, pulleys and cams. So it’s like when you are in a gym using a machine, pushing or pulling,
there’s a strength curve. So the amount of exertion required changes over the course of that full range.
And in the case of a compound bow, very similar. And what makes it such an efficient, amazing hunting
tool, there are a few factors. One is in the beginning, it’s hard, it’s hard, it’s hard. And then
there’s a let off. So you might have, I’m making up these numbers, but 60 pound draw weight. And then
you’re holding, what would you say?
Maybe between eight and 12 pounds.
Eight and 12 pounds.
Depending on if it’s a hunting or a competition.
Yeah, right. So eight or 12 pounds when you’re at anchor. And to define that, that’s when you have your
very simple terms. Your hand that is attached to the string, whether you’re using fingers or
a mechanical release, when your hand is kind of glued to your face and you always glue it to the
same place to set up the rifle barrel, so to speak. And that’s one element of what makes compounds so
interesting. The second is when you have these additional mechanical aids, let’s just say,
the speed of the arrow is just dramatically, dramatically, dramatically more.
The main difference in the compound versus everything else is there’s one string on every
other bow called a single string bow, whether that be a trad bow, a stick bow, a traditional bow,
a recurve, a bare bow, whatever that is. Whereas compound has three strings, essentially. When you
look at it, you can see multiple strings because the string tension, as you pull it back, it builds,
but then it transfers that tension into the cables, which are the other two strings that
the arrow is not attached to. And so that then catapults the arrow at an incredible rate of speed
when you let it go.
Yeah. And when you go to your local range, which we’ll get to, and I recommend, you can try all of
these different options in a lot of places. And if you can only start with compound, great.
Absolutely. That’s where I started.
Maybe you stay with compound.
Yeah.
And at the highest levels, they do some absurd, absurd things.
Yeah.
Actually, I just have to give credit where credit is due. So also have had some fantastic conversations
with Joel Turner, shot IQ, his son, Bodie. Do you want to just explain what he’s capable of doing?
Sure. So, you know, that X that I shot the inside out on my first arrow. So he will shoot that X.
So that same hitting that dime for about 120 arrows in a row, essentially under pressure when there’s
$100,000 plus on the line. And you would not know just looking at the kid, he is just stone cold,
ice in his veins. You’d have no idea that he even had a heartbeat just watching him shoot because
he’s incredible to be able to hit that thing repeatedly with so much precision and repeatability
under pressure. Most importantly, it’s just, it’s ridiculous. We’ll get to talking about a little bit
about compound and how there’s a, I guess, a less deep learning curve. You get really good,
really fast as far as precision, but still to win with a compound in a competition,
it still requires immense amounts of effort and energy and training.
So we’re going to come back to your trajectory in a second, pun intended, but let’s mention that
briefly because I didn’t really fill in the gaps. The compound bow that I used for hunting
was fantastic. I thought it was a great transition for me because I was more familiar with rifle and
so on. It was actually a fantastic transition and I would hunt once a year. Let’s just call it something
like that. Use everything, eat everything for those people wondering. And the hop from rifle
and so on to compound was actually quite easy. I needed to brush up on a few things, obviously learn
some technical details, think about back tension a bit, etc. But for someone with a sports background,
it was pretty straightforward. And if you’re thinking about the target size, right, the kind
of kill zone on whether it’s a deer or an elk, I mean, certainly a lot larger on an elk, but you can get
to a point if you have some kinesthetic awareness very quickly, I would say within a week for a lot
of folks, maybe. Yeah. So to be like ethical as a hunter to, you know, know that when you take the
shot, you’re not going to do the animal any suffering. It will be a very, very painless and fast end.
Yeah. It takes more time to get to that point.
Well, depends. It depends on the distance that you’re shooting. So say, we’ll say 20 yards.
So what I was going to say is 20 yards, just as people can imagine.
So 20 yards, your average person, I could get them to hit that pie plate. It depends on the coach,
of course, and depends on explanations and the individual person as well. But I would say
easily within a week, you’re going to hit that thing nine to 10 times out of 10 every time within
a day, you’ll hit it probably six to eight times out of 10 because it’s just easy, relatively speaking,
to get to that level. Yeah. And there are a lot of reasons for that, right? I mean,
you have the let off, you have the peep, which is a rear sight, which is basically a rear sight.
It’s a tiny circle affixed to the string itself. You have a level on the bow.
You have a level. There are many things that allow you to do that quickly, but then to
get to the highest levels, we were talking about this at lunch. It’s kind of like, okay,
let’s get you down the hill on a snowboard. Yeah. Within a week, we can probably get you
down some easy terrain on a snowboard. Okay. Now you want to compete in the X games. Yeah.
All right. Well, good luck. That’s going to take about 10 years, right? I mean, that’s a rule for
a reason. Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s Bodhi and anyone who performs at that level.
Absolutely. So not to take it away from them, like their proficiency level is insane. And to be able
to do it all the time under pressure is even more insane. You know, it’s one thing to do it in your
backyard, right. And be that backyard world champion that so many people claim to be right. But to do it
in front of other people on a stage with crazy lighting, cheering crowds, money on the line,
potentially putting food on your table or not at the end of the day too, that’s just a whole lot
of added pressure. And so it’s different. We’ll probably end up talking about Korea later. And
maybe we can just give a sneak peek. I know we’re going all over the place, but I remember you said
to me at one point, and please correct me if I’m getting this wrong. If each country could field as
many athletes as they wanted for a given sport, that Korea would probably place one to a hundred.
At minimum, bare minimum.
Yeah. It’s basically their, let’s just call it basketball, football, baseball, all wrapped into
one.
Yeah. It is their national sport.
I mean, they are obscenely, obscenely good. And you said to me before, if you or I were scouted and
assessed early on, we wouldn’t have made the early cuts.
No, you would have immediately.
Because I’m cross-eyed.
Because of your eye dominance.
Yeah, I’m right-handed, but my left eye is my aiming eye. So I would have been gone.
And I get a little bit too excited.
Yeah.
So I would have also been-
You’d have been cut.
A hundred percent.
So what are some maybe good decisions or habits that you made early on, let’s just say before
you ended up in San Diego, that you think helped you to perform the way you performed in those
early stages? I think I can think of one example, but I’ll hold it for now, which is where you’re
placing yourself in the gym and how you’re training.
I would say for me, one of the biggest advantages as a human, not just as an archer, but as a human
was the same kind of thing that you saw was a meditative escape, right? Because when you’re
shooting archery, that’s the only thing you can focus on. Because if you’re thinking about anything
else, your scores go down, your groups open up.
Yeah. You know if you’re meditating poorly, very quickly.
A hundred percent. So I think for me, that gave me a place to kind of go to. Like I escaped to
archery. So I feel like that was definitely a big factor as to what led to that. Just it naturally
worked for me. It wasn’t difficult for me. It is hard. It’s hard to stay focused on something so
simple and repetitive over and over again, but it was very enjoyable because it’s just me,
the bow and the arrow. I love competing as well. I used to play baseball when I was a kid and that
competed with my archery time because I was trying out for the state team in baseball or about to and
winning nationals shooting archery. So it’s like kind of had an easy decision there to make because
I was already winning nationals in archery. So I went with that, but the overall just enjoyment of
shooting archery and enjoying that me and the bow and no one else is going to prevent me from beating
someone else. It’s not like they’re interfering with me or trying to prevent me from shooting my
arrow. It’s very nice. And it’s also a hundred percent objective. There is no subjectivity. There’s
no way for anyone to influence the outcome other than maybe at some weird position, a judge to make a
bad call, but it’s almost never happening. It just doesn’t happen because it’s such a small community
and everybody holds each other accountable, which is also another amazing thing about the community of
archery. So I think that was a big factor there as far as, you know, what you’re alluding to and
bringing up and saying is I choose to make things as difficult as possible when I’m practicing.
Like say if I’m out at a range, I’ll choose the lane nearest the wall. So I have the least amount of
space. And we’ll probably get into why we do that in a little bit here, but I would suggest you to do
the same thing as we were working together. And you at first were like, why, why would I do that?
It’s much better to just stand by myself out in the open and have no influence. Well, it’s because when
you’re shooting on a line in a tournament, you have 24 inches of space roughly for yourself. And you’re,
the next guy’s 24 inches, then the next guy. And so you’re stacked in there like a can of sardines.
Yeah. We get a photo of me at Lancaster for people who want to see what it looks like.
Yeah. It’s like, it’s like a Tokyo subway car. Oh, you just happen to all be holding bows with
arrows. Yes. It’s very crowded. It is. It is. It is. So anything you can do to make things more
difficult to shoot in the rain, to shoot in the wind, to shoot in the heat, I would do because I
don’t know, maybe I just enjoy torturing myself. I don’t know, but I found it to be really important.
And once I got to the training center, listening to some of the other successful athletes,
giving talks at the training center about their success and how things went and what made them
successful, a lot of them was leaning into the same kind of thing, training hard to make competition
easy. Yeah. Well, it’s very much an echo of the more you sweat in training, less you bleed in combat.
Sure. Absolutely.
Like you, you want to try to make your training harder if possible than your competition. There’s
there are limits to what you can do sometimes. Sure. We’ll talk about that.
But even still like the range I grew up on, I would go there more than just Saturdays and I’d shoot there
by myself because no one else is there and I’m just shooting. And my coach slash mentor at the time,
Harry Stabell would come downstairs because it was down in like a secondary level below and he’d have a
metal ashtray back then everybody smoked and he would just throw it randomly on the concrete ground.
When I’m at full draw and I have to regain composure and shoot a shot. Right. So there’s all sorts of
weird stuff that happened all the time. Mr. Yagi. Yeah. Action going on.
There’s a lot of stuff that happened that definitely would not fly in today’s day and age. So it’s like,
oh, you’re dropping your bow arm. That’s like a thing that when you shoot the shot, you have to
maintain the bow up. You don’t want to drop the arm. So he’d take his pocket knife out, flip it open,
turn it upside and say, don’t drop your arm. Put it under your arm. Under my arm. Or you’re grabbing
your bow. Something else you don’t want to do is hold on to it. There’s a grip on a bow, but you don’t
want to grip it. You just saddle it. Right. And you’re kind of pushing into it. Correct. And so you’re
grabbing your bow. Guess what? Thumbtacks were double-sided taped on the front of my bow. Didn’t
grab it anymore. That’s so intense. Yeah. And it worked. I mean, look, I’m not recommending people
do that with their kids, but the also supplement to our conversation, we’re going to put a number of
videos up on my YouTube page and we’ll link to Jake’s YouTube page with Archery 101, both Archery
Gear 101, just laying out the anatomy of a bow and then Technical 101. So you have a couple of
pointers, which you may not get at some ranges so that when you have your first, second and
subsequent lessons, you’ll have some really good solid fundamentals at least to use.
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All right. So you mentioned Thumbtack Billy. I forgot his name, Harry, right?
And if I’m skipping any important chapters, let me know. But I want to know when KSL entered your life
and who or what is KSL. Sure. So quickly, before we get into KSL, I started shooting compound.
Yep.
Easier sport to get into. Shot that for six years. And then some other of the friends that I developed at
the archery range that I was going to were going to the Empire State Games. It’s like a mini Olympics,
and it’s for all of the regions of within New York State. And they compete against each other,
different events. You go to a place, there’s opening ceremonies, closing ceremonies.
They have this for a bunch of sports.
It’s amazing. I wanted to do the archery thing, but compound wasn’t in it. Only recurve. And I had
really debilitating target panic, basically dealing with aiming in the middle and the irrational fear
to aim in the middle with the intention of shooting the shot.
Which is quite common.
It’s a common thing. So I wanted to shoot recurve because it’s a change, something different. Archery
was starting to become unfun for the compound side of things because of that target panic.
So I picked up the recurve and it has a device called a clicker, which is essentially a psycho
trigger that is both a draw check to make sure your draw length, the distance you pull the bow back
is the same every single time, but it also gives you a cue to tell you when to let go. So it allowed
me to aim in the middle with more comfort to disassociate from that fear of letting go.
Yeah. So let me give people a visual that might help you imagine what a clicker is. It’s a flat
piece of metal that goes on the outside of the arrow. I actually used one for the first time today and
holy God, is it challenging to figure out. But if you were to imagine, let’s say you’re using a
slingshot. Most people know a slingshot, but let’s say instead of shooting a ball bearing, you’re
shooting an arrow out of this slingshot. And there’s a piece of metal that is leaning against
the arrow as you pull it back in the slingshot. Once it flips past the very front of that arrow
point, this is not the perfect analogy, but it works and clicks onto another piece of metal.
That’s when you let go, whether you think you’re ready or not. And what that’s going to do is
standardize how much you pull it back. And it also takes away the decision to let go.
Yes, exactly.
It’s just a Pavlovian response that you train in yourself.
Yes and no.
I mean, it’s more complicated.
Yes, yes. But that is a brief look at it. So I switched to recurve specifically because of target
panic and to go to the Empire State Games. So I literally took a bow off the wall. I still have
the bow that was a club bow and took my stuff from my compound, my arrows and all sorts of other things
and threw it on the bow and started shooting it for a few months before Empire State Games made the
team. I think I won some medals there. I don’t remember exactly, but it was a lot of fun. Good
time, very good experience and ultimately fell in love with archery again because it was enjoyable
again. So there was no target panic involved and just continued to do that. Shot up through the
ranks, started winning nationals as a junior. And then at a tournament called the, well,
actually it was junior world championships at US target nationals. I was shooting against some other
people that had just moved to the training center to work with KSL, who we’ll get to in a second.
And I was the only person to beat the person who was working with KSL. And he came up to me after the
match and said, Hey, you’re pretty good. And I’d like you to come out to the training center and work
with the junior dream team. It was a squad at the time that would go out there maybe once a quarter.
And I said, actually, I just applied to become an RA, a resident athlete. I’d like to move out there
full-time in a couple months. And he said, great, I’ll keep an eye out for your application and keep
it up. And he disappeared. And so KSL is Kisik Lee, my coach, and he is the godfather of archery in Korea.
He essentially left Korea and went to Australia for a few years.
What did he do in Korea?
Oh, he was the national head coach of the Korean archery team and formulated the entire
program that is the current Korean archery training regiment to develop archers.
And to put it as a quick example as to the type of celebrity level that he is,
anytime we would fly to Korea, a limo would show up. He didn’t order it, but the limo would show up.
We flew there for a tournament and a limo showed up and he said, can’t fit the team in the limo.
No, thanks. And I’m at a tournament in Puerto Rico. We’re in a sauna, me and another archer with some
other random Korean. He looked Korean and he ended up being from Korea. And he said, oh, why are you guys
here? We’re here shooting archery. Oh, did you know archery is a national sport in Korea? Yeah,
we do actually. And our coach is actually Korean is Kisik Lee. Kisik Lee. Oh my God. Do you have any
idea like the level of celebrity and how important he is to the country? Like culturally, just random
sauna in Puerto Rico, you know, I don’t know. So that kind of level. And so he left Korea,
went to Australia, worked with them to develop a national program. I think before he was working with
them officially, he went to biomechanics school to try to apply more efficient movements to his method.
And he also, prior to that, to jump backwards, part of the development of the Korean national program
was looking at the US program back in the eighties. We were dominant worldwide and hadn’t lost a world
championship for decades and were just powerhouses on the international scale. And so he mimicked the
program that we were doing, or at least the movements, positions, that kind of thing, and
implemented that in Korea as a national system that would start from grassroots from day one,
no matter what. And then that’s why we would be thrown out because we didn’t fit the mold.
That’s how strict they are. So he went to Australia, made a better program, and then ultimately ended up
coming to the States. And so he just got hired in 2006 in like January. So just before junior world
championships, I moved out to the training center and started training under Coach Lee in 2006.
Okay. So we’re going to pick up there in a minute, but I want to just pause because you’re already doing
very, very well. So you mentioned a few things that influenced that, right? You found it appealing,
easy to use archery as maybe an escape, right? A meditation. You made training as difficult as possible.
Do any other things come to mind that were decisions you made or things you did differently
that you think contributed to those successes prior to moving out to the training center?
One of those things, honestly, was I did not really mesh well socially with other kids.
And so I didn’t really have a ton of friends. It was a very odd situation. Definitely a lot of it is
I’m an intense person as it is. And so I take things very seriously.
His wife is laughing from around the concrete pillar.
Yes. So, yeah. So I take things, yeah, very seriously. And as a kid that can make things
difficult, even though talented in sports, baseball, just any throwing sport really,
and archery and just didn’t fit in in school. So I basically built a shell around myself,
didn’t talk to anyone in school. I didn’t because I got made fun of and got a, you know,
just overall not attacked because it wasn’t physical really. It just wasn’t something I was interested.
I wasn’t wanting to participate in social life. So I just made a shell around myself and stayed inside
of that in school. And at archery, I didn’t have that identity, right? I was a kid.
Everybody’s like kind of shooting and doing their own thing.
Yeah. Everybody’s doing their own thing. Everybody’s as interesting and different and awkward and normal
and talented and just human, right? And so I didn’t have that aura of that negative experience of school
following me around. So it supercharged my desire to want to do it more because it was just,
I was normal. People treated me like a normal human, a normal kid with respect. It was great, right?
So that was ultimately my life. I think that really is what supercharged my desire to want to do it more
because it was something that I felt happy doing.
Yeah, totally. And I want to, this is as good a point as any, to say that part of what got me excited
about archery was realizing how welcoming the communities are. And there are different personalities,
right? It’s like compound crew is different from the Olympic crew, which is different from the bear
boat crew, which is very different from the horse boat crew. They’re all like different burning man camps
with super different personalities, but broadly speaking, incredibly welcoming. People are happy to give you
advice, give you pointers, help you out. And I mean this in the best way possible. It’s also kind of
like weirdo palooza. I mean, it’s like, and it doesn’t matter, right? It’s like, okay, like there’s
some dude in a kilt. Okay, whatever. And then there’s like some normal emo chick with a mohawk. Yeah. Okay.
Whatever. And everybody’s just doing their thing, shooting. And it’s, of course, that’s not every
archery range. No. But in Brooklyn, Gotham Archery, great spot. You see everything. And those people
will be right next to a dyed in the wool hunter who was born and raised in Montana who’s getting ready
for hunting season. Yeah. And everybody’s cool. Yeah. So that’s, that’s part of what I really have
enjoyed about it. All right. So Austin Powers fade back to KSL. So you get to the training center
and technically you’re perfect. And he’s just like, let her rip son. Just move forth, be bold and
prosper. Or was there more to it? Well, yeah. So perspective is I moved out there, I believe in the
end of August of 2016, world championships, junior world championships, the trials that I met him at.
It’s the first and only junior worlds I’d ever go to. And when we first moved there, we being other
people, because I also had another buddy of mine, Dan Shuler, who moved out there with me and my number
one competitor head to head since like 14 years old. And we just kind of pushed each other and kept
competing and moving up the ladder as we got older and older. So we both moved out to there at the
training center at the same time. And coach Lee said, I won’t change your form at all. Don’t worry,
train and compete through the world championships. And then we’ll work on your form. Because part of
the reason of going to the training center was to learn from coach Lee, to really learn how to be a
real archer. Because up until that point, my shot cycle, which is a thing that you do for archery,
it’s the same method over and over again. It’s like a, like a mantra, but physically,
it’s like a physical recipe, right? In a sense, just like someone who’s, let’s just say an Olympic
diver, right? They’re like, they’re going to have their routine never deviates. They’re probably
toweling off in the same way. They’re putting things in the same place, probably fold it the same and put
it in the same place on the railing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Because all that genuinely matters at a high
level, at least to the routine for sure. And so for archery, my routine prior to that was pull back the
bow, anchor, look at the middle and wait for the clicker to click. There was no activation. There
was no mental talk. There was nothing. It was genuinely pull it back, look at the middle and
wait. That’s it. And so when I was there, there was about that two month time period before junior
worlds. And I started shooting phenomenal, like to the level of I could be easily competitive top two,
top three and the senior division really starting to shoot high level scores and frankly, to be a
threat to actually metal at junior worlds. So it’s very exciting. Yeah. And then about two weeks or so
before the actual event, before we went down to Mexico, everything changed. Coach Lee just decided
it’s time to change your form and not just change my form, change my equipment, which is another part of
it. And so to not exaggerate in the least, the only thing that was the same on my entire setup and in my
entire shot process was my riser, the center part of the bow that’s made of aluminum that the limbs,
the piece that Ben snap into and the riser and my sight bar, which is the thing that moves the sight.
So my sight pin, my finger tab, my arrows, my fletchings, my string, my stabilizers, my entire shot
process, how I stood, how I thought, what I told myself, everything had changed. And my scores went from
nationally competitive as a senior, a threat on the world scale as a junior to genuinely not shooting that
terrible ever, ever. Okay. It was the worst you’ve been shooting. Literally the worst I had ever shot
even before I picked up my recurve that for the very first time before going to the Empire State
Games. So if I took my scores at Empire State Games, I probably outshot my scores at junior worlds in
Mexico. Okay. Why would coach Lee do that two weeks before the competition? He’s an interesting guy.
And his reason was, I can’t take an archer that looks like that to world championships.
In his defense, my technique was atrocious. A completely arched back and just what we would
call a hollow back. So standing very upright, you know, I’m a young kid at the time, just turned 18,
barely strength trained ever. You know, I did some planks. That was my strength training, right?
And yeah, just couldn’t control my body and just didn’t look the part. You know,
he is known for having very specific looks in his archers, a very specific biomechanically efficient
movement with very precise loading of the structure of the body itself to maintain the weight of the
bow. And I was not doing that in the least. I asked him afterwards and he said, I was embarrassed to
bring those archers to a junior world championships. And he was not afraid to say it. Ultimately, I was
there for the Olympic games, not for junior world championships. So how could I ever say no?
My ultimate goal is to make the games, not to do anything at junior worlds, but it definitely had
quite an effect on my overall mental perspective of how things were going.
How long did it take you to build back up to the same scores or superior scores?
I would say probably three to four years.
Oh my God. So what are you saying to yourself mentally over that period of time? Because I would
imagine that would, could be incredibly demoralizing.
Yes.
And you would have, I would think moments of doubt. And I’m curious what kept you going and
how you kept yourself going during that period of time. Because I mean, look, I think I’m a glutton for
punishment and have pretty good pain tolerance, physical and mental, but I don’t know if I could
do that.
To put it in a context. So it took me three to four years to get back to zero square one. Whereas my
buddy, Dan Shuler, three months.
Oh, wow.
Maybe, maybe less. Yeah. So I don’t know why, but maybe three months or so for him. So I see
somebody who went out to the training center with me at the same time. I was at the same level, if not
potentially a little bit better, at least the way I saw it than him. And then extend my timeline times
15 times. That’s how long it took me much longer to take me to get back to zero. And so, yeah, it was
definitely very difficult mentally and emotionally for sure, because it was more than challenging to
say the least. And not only that, adding in physical challenges too, because prior to moving to the
training center, I was maybe shooting maybe a hundred, 120 arrows at the most I could ever shoot in a
single day. And I would maybe shoot that once a month. I would shoot often, don’t get me wrong,
but maybe it would be 50 to 60 arrows a session at the most.
Yep. And I thought I was doing a lot and never strength training. I went to the gym at school
and did planks and I don’t even know what some very basics, maybe wall sits or something like that.
Like really just not strength training. So move out of the training center, started shooting upwards of
four to 500 arrows every single day, strength training three days a week on the track, doing
morning workouts, six days a week and shooting overall six days a week. So super crazy amounts of
load, develop tendonitis, tendinosis and shoulders and dealing with all sorts of inflammation issues.
Still deal with a little bit of that today. And I have learned a lot of things to deal with that.
But at that time, I’m going to the sports medicine for hours a day. So I do prehab rehab exercises
every single day. And I’m the only one complaining of the pain in my shoulders and all sorts of other
things. Whereas all my other teammates are shooting just as much, if not more arrows than me with
just as much, if not more draw weight, going to the gym, doing all the same things. And none of them
had to go to sports medicine. Very few of them were even sore enough to feel like they needed to ice
or do anything. And I’m there having to do all sorts of different things. It was a big, big struggle
and a challenge. And I don’t know really what pushed me through exactly. I can’t really put my finger on
the pulse of that. But I think a lot of it actually have to attribute to my sister, Liz. She was
approaching things with a different mindset than pretty much that I have ever heard of in the past,
trying to manifest things instead of just going through the motions, instead of just doing it and
hoping the outcome changes, but to try to just overall bring what you want into fruition and to
not just hope that it’s going to happen. And so a big part of that was actually using affirmations.
And I had no idea what they were at the time, but she started bringing me into that mindset of using
positive affirmations to kind of change everything. I was dealing with being on depression medication and
all sorts of other things because if I had to pick one word to describe to you how I felt during that
timeframe, it was apathy. Just a lack of anything. And so fast forward to the positive affirmations
he has I am tattooed on basically, let’s just say the back of the hand, the webbing between the index finger
and the thumb on the left hand, which you’re going to check every time. Correct. Because that’s my bow
hand. I want to make sure my bow hand placement is precise in the grip. And so it’s not just I am,
it’s I am, period. It’s a statement, right? And so what is I am? I am is whatever you want to be.
So for me, it was I am an archer. I’m an Olympian, period. So changing my overall habits and mindset
started with just self-talk. And would you do that at basically that point in your shot cycle?
Yeah, it’s like trying to when you’re shooting an arrow, there’s a difference between trying to hit
the 10 ring and trying to not miss the 10 ring. There’s also a difference between fighting for
position and owning a position. And so ultimately, how is your approach? And so if you approach from
the stance of it has happened and you are, you are that person, then your habits just change.
And so genuinely, it was like, I am an Olympian, period. Okay. I’m not yet. I’m not using the
standard thing when I ask people, so what do you want to be? I want to be an Olympian. Okay, great.
You’re going to always want to be one. Let’s change that thought to be, I am an Olympian because then
your habits change. And so my habits change to be more of a, an approach of looking at myself
from an honest perspective of, am I doing the right thing? Am I getting enough sleep? Am I strength
training enough? Am I putting in enough effort? Am I being honest with myself? All of those things,
because if a champion would do whatever it was and I wasn’t doing it, I changed that. I made a decision
to make that change. I think a lot of it that took me out of that spiral, that negative spiral was just
believing. And using the present tense affirmations, positive affirmations.
Never a future tense. Because the future tense is just, you’re just setting yourself up to continue
to want that. It’s not done. If it’s done and you shoot from that position of,
I have arrived, I am that, I am what I want to be, then everything else can click.
And for people listening, this is not the first time that affirmations have come up on this podcast
with people who are top performers. It can be a really powerful tool. And to this day, I mean,
I’m still kind of like chasing the dream here, but my best ever day of shooting was a day early on when
I started using affirmations. And for me, it was, I am a top Lancaster competitor. And it was every
single shot. And we’ll talk about practice scores versus competition scores at some point, but it is
remarkable what that can contribute to, like what it can do. All right. So you’re rebuilding,
rebuilding three to four years. Good God. I mean, it’s an entire college experience, basically.
Talk about brutal, but you’ve made all of these decisions. You’ve had all this training. You’ve
got Coach Lee’s input. You have the positive affirmations. You’ve developed, maybe fine-tuned
your shot sequence, right? You’re no longer just staring at the middle of the target and waiting
until the clicker clicks. When does it all come together? Ultimately, it really came together in
2012 at the Olympic Games in London. So put it in perspective, as we talked about Korea already,
Korea is a powerhouse now. What the US was in the 80s, Korea is today. Just dominant for decades at this
point. Yeah. So just to put that in perspective, like if we take, could be the women’s team or the
men’s team, like how dominant? If you look at their medal record over time, what does it look like?
With the exception of the Korean men, the Korean women haven’t lost a gold medal individual or team
round. And I think like 28 years or something crazy. It’s, I don’t know exactly. It’s an absurd statistic.
I mean, it is as impeccable a record as a country can possibly have.
Correct. The only reason that I say with the Korean men as an exception is because they didn’t have an
individual male Olympic gold medal for quite some time. They just recently got one, finally.
Why is that?
I don’t know.
Yeah.
Maybe the pressure.
Yeah.
I don’t know. There’s a lot riding on it. There’s also a lot of benefit for them to perform well,
but there’s a lot of pressure.
Well, I would also, for sure, I didn’t really think about this because I guess on one hand,
you could say, well, wait a second. They’ve been shooting 700 hours a day since they were a fetus.
Why can’t they handle the pressure? But at the same time, you told me, I can’t remember who it
was. You don’t need to mention them. But what did someone say to you to calm you down before one
competition? I can cue you. Do you remember what I’m talking about?
Yeah.
What is it?
Yeah. No one gives a shit.
Yeah.
Meaning in the US about.
Meaning I’m not LeBron.
Yeah.
I’m not Kobe. I’m not Michael.
Right.
Right. No one’s watching. No one cares.
Right. So relax. Take some pressure off yourself.
I believe he actually said no one cares.
So in contrast, right, if you’re a top Olympic competitor in Korea, you are LeBron. You are
Kobe. Everyone cares and everyone is watching.
Yes.
So it’s a tremendous amount of pressure.
Oh, for sure. Yeah.
Yeah.
It’s a lot of pressure no matter what. Okay.
So 2012.
So 2012, the Korean men then because of the team. So we’re leading into the team rounds
because that’s, that’s where we’re heading here.
And how does that work? Is it like the cumulative points of three people who go round robin?
So we do round robins head to head, single elimination for elimination. We do that individually.
We also do that as a team. So you, you seed yourself in the ranking round. There’s 64 men
competing one through 64, one verse 64, two verse 63, and so on. And that’s how you decide
the individual. Correct. That’s how you decide the individual champion.
Team round. It’s your three archers combined score that ranks you as a team amongst the
other teams. And then it’s, there was 12 teams at the time. And so you then same thing, just
like the, uh, March madness style bracket, it’s single elimination and head to head. And so
you shoot three archers together as a team, you shoot in rotation. So you step on and off
the line and you have a very limited amount of time to shoot your arrows. So there’s no time
to second guess, no time to let down and you have to be a well-oiled machine to execute
properly. Yeah. Let me just say, so let down for people who may not get that. If you pull
back and you make a mistake or you didn’t set up properly, doesn’t feel right. You can choose
if you’re practicing, let’s just say to let down, which means slowly bring the string back
to the bow and start over. You essentially abort the shot. Yeah. You pull back. You’re
like, eh, something doesn’t feel right. Right. The wind’s blowing harder. I had a negative
thought, which is what I had to do over and over again today because I overdrew and click the
clicker when I was not prepared to release the shot. Yep. So not having any wiggle room,
no wiggle room. There’s just really no time to second guess and you just have to go for
it. So after the ranking round, Korea was ranked first and the United States was ranked either
third or fourth. So that means that we would meet in the semifinals. And so that meant whoever won the
semifinals would go for gold. And then the loser of that match would have silver. And then the loser
of the semifinal match would have the chance to win bronze in the next match. And so we were seated
to meet Korea in the semifinals. And so the first question that we got asked as a team and the coach
included coach Lee was, so how does it feel to be shooting for bronze tomorrow? Because that’s
that’s just the assumption. That is the assumption. That’s such a dick question.
God. Yeah. So like, I don’t even know who, who the actual media outlet was, but it’s like,
so how does it feel to be shooting for bronze? It’s like, have you been watching at all? We are
at the U S men at that time, we’re ranked number one in the world as team, as a team round, because
we were winning world cup events, which are world ranking events leading up to that and doing quite
well. The Koreans were ranked second in the world and we had beat them several times on the world cup
scale. But of course, everybody’s just assuming that they’re going to be dominant because they had one
for the last decade straight or more. And so it was a interesting wake up call all of a sudden to be
like, what can you ask that question again? So it was just a shock to say the least, but
the power of positive affirmations. By that time I started changing my thought process and talking,
not just, I am an Olympian period. It became much more powerful and actionable and timely. So tying
smart goals into positive affirmations of I am an Olympian or I am 2012 Olympic champion because I run my
mental program more than any other archer period. So it’s not just, I am not just, I am an Olympian.
I am an Olympian at this specific time, at this specific event for this specific reason. And that
specific reason is something that I’ve identified as a absolute crucial thing to do every single shot
in order to succeed. That’s how I ended up talking to myself at that timeframe, to that level of detail.
So of course, whatever our response to the media was at that time, I’m not exactly sure.
What did Coach Lee say?
Well, we had a lot of opportunity to talk to a lot of media leading up to the event.
So we get to London 15 days before the start of the competition where they’re training and media’s
there asking us questions during sessions that we book. And so the Korean media was coming in asking
Coach Lee questions about basically the same kind of thing. How does it feel to win silver before we
haven’t even shot an arrow yet, essentially. And he started saying things in Korean, responding to them
as their questions were in Korean as well. And you could just see the shock of this reporter’s face,
right? And even the cameraman’s like, just this response. And so after the media left, we asked
Coach Lee, so what did you say to them? And he said, let’s just put it this way. I don’t think I’m
going to be welcome back in Korea. So I don’t know what he said. He didn’t really fill in the details
there. But the idea was essentially that the power that we had as a team of the confidence, not just
the archers individually, the archers as a team, because we were really the first and only team to
compete as a team in that tournament. So normally it’s individual. It’s an individual sport. That’s what
it is. That’s what the prestige is. And you happen to have three individuals that come together to compete
as a team, but they’re just still shooting as individuals. If somebody shoots say worse than
the others, it’s easy to kind of point fingers and be like, that’s the reason why we didn’t win because
it’s an individual sport. It’s like, we’re a team. We win as a team, we lose as a team. And so we had
that genuine change. Our main focus was team rounds. It was not individual, the three of us, because
there’s 12 other teams and there’s 64 other individuals. You only have to win three matches to be in the
medals and team rounds. Whereas you have to win five or six matches to be in an individual medal.
And so statistically much easier to medal as a team than as an individual. So we genuinely trained
every day. Once we selected the team leading up to that event as a team, encouraging each other,
learning each other’s shot, not just learning each other’s shot, but during this head-to-head match play,
there’s no time for equipment failures. So if your equipment breaks, you can’t go fix it.
So usually you have a backup bow and the backup bow is just there and it’s kind of working. You do
your best to make it as good as your primary bow, but it’s your backup bow for a reason. It’s just
doesn’t shoot as well for whatever reason. And coach Lee basically said, backup bows are pointless because
if your main bow breaks, you’re mentally just going to be shot. So what’s the point? Don’t even bother
setting up a backup bow. And so we actually shot each other’s primary bows as our backup. So I shot Brady’s
bow and I shot Jacob Wookiee’s bow.
Well, hold on a second. Hold on. So how similar are your draw lengths and like your ape index,
right? In terms of like…
Not at all. But the thing is I’m using…
Ape index is… Anyway, you guys can look it up, but it’s just like your physical proportions
are not the same.
Correct.
And at that level, certainly everything is…
Everything matters.
For sure. Not just that, the balance of the bow, the feel of the grip, the sight pin, all of
those things. And so the thing that is constant is our arrows. So we use our same arrow. And
our clickers, the device that’s a draw check, was roughly in the same place. I think the only
exception was one of us and Brady chose to not even bother with a clicker when he was shooting
one of our bows as a backup. He would just pull back, control the shot and execute good shots
and deal with that. Whereas I used their clickers. And essentially, I learned that… I think Brady’s
bow, maybe I hit low eight. So about eight, 10 inches low at 70 meters. So I would just aim high
eight with his bow. And Jacob Wookiee’s, I’d have to aim like low right blue or something crazy to
actually have the arrow land in the middle.
So we just played this game, right? And so it was just this level of intimacy per se as a team that
no one else had in the world because they all trained as individuals, not as a team.
So a quick couple of questions then, because I guess to even me listening, I’m like, well,
it’s still kind of an individual thing. I used to wrestle way back in the day. And it’s like,
okay, yeah, you’re a team and you want to be supportive. The backup bow using someone else’s
primary as your backup is super interesting. This is the first time I’m hearing of it.
Are there any other strategies where let’s just say, I’m making this up, but okay, it’s like the wind
disgusting. And the first person up is going to have to deal with the brunt of it, you think. So
you pick the person who seems to be best in high winds. I’m making that up. I have no idea. But
are, is there any other strategy that you can build around the team?
Yes. I mean, so for us, the wind is actually was part of it. We’ll get to that in a second. But
if you approach team rounds as an individual, you’re working on your own shot and that’s it.
So you, you either shoot a 10 or you don’t. And your teammate who’s also your opponent
and individuals either shoots a 10 or he doesn’t. And that’s just how it normally works. But what we
did was we worked with each other to understand a little bit more about each other’s shot cycle,
each other’s mental approach, what makes someone better than doesn’t. Like, do you want to hear
your name when you’re at full draw? Like, come on, Tim, shoot a 10. Or do you want just,
all right, strong shot, something that’s general, but not specific to you. And so there’s little
things that you learn, but then also there’s a supreme trust in each other. And so in team rounds,
you have to communicate with each other how the shot went. And then ultimately, where did the arrow go
compared to how the shot went? And then the next shooter makes adjustments based on that because the
wind is always changing. I see. Right. So each person is a feedback mechanism for everyone else.
Exactly. Yeah. And also the coaches too, because he has this third person view. He’s not shooting,
but he’s able to look at stuff, the wind blowing in different areas. And actually the very specific
thing that coach Lee did with the wind that we couldn’t as archers because of a piece of clothing
choice that he made different than us at that day. The day being when we shot for medals. If we just
fast forward to the actual medal rounds, we are in the semifinal match against Korea. We almost lose our
first match. We’re very close to actually losing and just barely squeaked by by a point or two.
And, um, but there was no doubt that we were ever going to lose, at least in my head. I had no fear
of that. I was so supremely confident because of this affirmation, the power of it, that there was
never a doubt. Even when we were behind in the match, it just was like, it’s supposed to happen
this way. Apparently, you know, and once we got to the semifinal against Korea, everybody said that
was the gold medal match of the games actually, because everybody wanted to see that Korea was
powerhouse. U S is ranked number one. It’s the Olympic games. What’s going to happen. Everybody’s
watching. We actually had, I think the highest viewership of any Olympic sport at the 2012 Olympics
during that match. That’s why they put us on TV because we were the first metal of the U S our
first chance to get a metal. And, you know, back then it was Twitter and I had comments saying, I
love my sports team, whatever it is, the Sabres or the Buffalo bills or whatever, you know, people from
my hometown. And they’re like, I have never stood on my couch and screamed at the TV, but I did when I
saw archery at the Olympics. That’s incredible. Yeah. So cool stuff. So the wind, we usually we
have a wind sock. The wind sock is not a calibrated wind sock. So meaning if it’s at a certain angle,
it’s a certain speed. We don’t do that in archery for whatever reason, but it’s always at 50 meters.
So the distance we shoot is 70. The flag is, you know, three fifths of the way down range or so. And
it’s always on a specific pole at a specific height. And you have, you know, every so often they’re
placed. And so you have a general consistent reference as to what the wind sock’s doing and
how you can guess where to aim. And that’s ultimately as best as you can do as guests.
And so we were shooting at Lord’s cricket ground and on the pitch where they bowl the ball back and
forth to each other, the people who stand on that, the lawn care people are anointed by the queen to be
allowed to stand on the hollowed ground. The lawnmower is anointed by the queen to be allowed to mow her
grass. But because our wind sock and the stand that held that wind sock was not anointed by the queen
or whatever they call it, it was not allowed to be there. So they put it in a different location
that it ever had been at any other event. We’re also shooting in a stadium within the stadium is
another stadium inside of that stadium where the archery fans are sitting and the stands go down
probably 50 meters. There’s several thousands of people in the stand and it kind of fans out
towards the target. And so we’re guessing, we’re genuinely guessing where to aim ultimately before
that match. Coach Lee was like, trust me, I know where you need to aim. Okay. You’re not shooting.
How do you know? I’m the lead off. Jacob Boogie shoots second. Brady Ellison shoots third. And I have
to do my job when I lead off to shoot a supremely confident shot.
Clean shots that you can depend on so that you can use that to calibrate for everybody else.
Correct. Or be so in tune with my shot when I make an error, I know or can essentially estimate where that
arrow should land and then compare where it actually lands to where it should land and then suggest to
Jacob Boogie where to aim. So to give you an idea as a quick sidetrack, when I let go of the string at
70 meters, I can tell you within the size of about a baseball where that arrow is going on the target
the moment I let it go. Because I’ve shot so many arrows, I verified where it went on the target looking
through a spotting scope and attributed my feeling of how the shot went to where it landed. And so I can just
tell you exactly where it’s going to go. And so that’s my job as lead off. Coach Lee is wearing shorts. We’re wearing
pants. He can feel the wind blowing on his leg hairs. And he’s like, aim left nine. Okay.
That’s wild.
Yeah. So good luck finding any other team that has ever worked that closely together. We ultimately ended up winning
and then went on to lose the gold medal match by a fraction of an inch at 70 meters away. But I mean,
ultimately, everyone came up to us afterwards and said that was the gold medal match, regardless of how the actual
medals end. So supreme confidence in that positive statements, those positive affirmations of just
supreme faith and belief in the process as it’s happening, even if it’s not going well, like our first match when
we were losing, we were behind the first several ends of the match. And the matches are only four ends.
So an end is somebody getting up and shooting a group of arrows.
Correct. So as a team, that would be each archer shoots two arrows. So that’s a total of six arrows.
That’s an end. And then a cumulative score at that time was shot. So whoever had the highest score of
24 arrows after four ends, because that’s the total amount shot that team won in advanced in the match.
It’s an incredible story. That’s crazy. I’ve never heard a bunch of these. This is wild.
Like in all the time we spent together. It’s nuts. Just for comedic relief, because you mentioned the
Korean media interviews and them looking shocked talking to Coach Lee. So I’ll just share a sidebar
on Coach Lee. So I’ve had a little bit of interaction. So flew to San Diego because we did a little bit
of training together and I wanted to meet this famous coach Lee. Why not? And so I made the introduction
and said, Hey, Coach Lee, Tim would like to work with you. Yeah. And so I landed in San Diego and a few
things that are, I think, fun to share. So the first is we meet at this outdoor range and I’m going to be
shooting mostly at 20 yards to 60 feet. Let’s just call it roughly. And we hang out for 45 minutes.
I’m taking copious notes. He’s giving me some pointers. And then we stop and he’s like, okay,
I think you have plenty to work with. And I don’t think you need my help anymore. And I was like,
uh, cause I’d flown down planning to be there for a week or something, five days, something along those
lines. Not just to be there for five days, but to be there explicitly to train with him.
And so at some point I’m like a bit crestfallen. I’m like, Oh man, letting my head hang like Eeyore.
I’m like, Oh fuck. I do feel like I need more help. And we start talking about somehow we get talking
about firearms and guns. And he is very interested in marksmanship and all things, firearms. And so he
gets more excited and we’re chatting, we’re talking about this, that, and the other thing.
And then he asks me, so what brings you to San Diego? And I was like, well,
maybe this sounds strange, but I flew here to train with you. And he’s like, Oh, okay. Tonight’s Korean
barbecue. So we go out to dinner and end up having an amazing time training with him. And he’s really
one-of-a-kind. And also the reason I was mentioning the shocked look on the faces of the Korean media is
you do not worry about Coach Lee speaking his mind.
Oh no. He’s so direct.
You do not have to worry about him sugarcoating things. And to give you an example, later I ended
up driving to his house behind which he has all these targets set up. And basically I was the only
non-Asian there. Absolutely. A hundred percent of the only non-Asian, which is fine. It was just
Korean army and tons of Korean kids. Also some like Taiwanese kids and Chinese kids, but they’re all
12 years old and shooting by my standards, especially at that point, incredibly well.
And I’m off in the corner, like getting some pointers from Coach Lee and just looking like
a total remedial case, which is fine. And then at one point he wants to give like pep talk to the
kids. And he’s like, Tim, Tim, come over here. Okay. And so we all stand in a circle and he’s giving this
very Coach Lee motivational talk, which is like 60% inspiration, 40% you need to shape up or ship out,
cuffing up kids. And at one point, cause I’m wondering why I’m in this circle. And he points
to me and he’s like, he’s like, look, this is Tim. And he is an old man, a very old man. And he’s here
training seriously. And I was like, Oh, I see if I can be a inspirational slash like warning tale for
these, these amazing young children with so much promise. I’m in, I’m in for it. I’m in for it,
but it’s just so endearing. And the guy’s genius. He’s really one of a kind. Okay. So those are my
Coach Lee stories. Thank you, Coach Lee. Let’s talk about your coaching and what we ended up doing
and all the experiments along the way, because you mentioned, for instance, you know, Coach Lee’s
feeling the leg hair and the movement and you’re providing feedback. You’re getting familiar with
one another’s shot cycles. The little things matter. It is hard for me to explain verbally,
just how many tiny, tiny, tiny details make a huge difference with archery. And just the way you hook
your fingers on the string, the exact placement, how far it is from the fold of one joint, the amount of
curl of the fingers, how much you use your, you’re using in this case, index, middle and ring finger,
the degree to which you can see or not see as a coach, my nail on my ring finger and the difference
that makes the angle of the back of the hand and the difference that makes the level of detail is
really unbelievable when you want to start training and performing with precision.
Okay. So I find you, we meet up and then ultimately about six months out from Lancaster,
decide to take it seriously. Now there are a few constraints, right? One is you live in Florida.
I do not live in Florida. So we have limited in-person training. Although I think we did a good job with
that, what would you say maybe on average, was it like a few days a month or like a week every six
weeks, something like that?
Probably somewhere in that timeframe. I think I was maybe there for three to four days once every six
weeks. Yeah.
Yeah. And we’re doing a lot of virtual training. I travel a lot. So if there are awards for most
varied training environments, I think I would win that one hands down.
For sure in the barebow division.
In the barebow.
Absolutely. The only exception would be like your professional archer who is traveling the world
competing. Yeah. But that’s the only exception. And then there’s no one doing that in barebow.
Yeah. I mean, I was not even remotely.
So I ended up bringing my roller bag, which looks like it’s carrying an assault rifle. Customs do not
love this bag. Like, sir, what’s in the bag?
Sporting a gear.
Sporting gear is the answer. That’s how you get your bow and arrow through customs. But I traveled all over
the place, all over the country in the US, certainly. And I would check my targets. And often it’s just a
big cube of foam. And they’d be like, sir, what’s in the box? And I’m like, there’s nothing in the box.
And they’d be like, sir, need you to be serious right now. What’s in the cube? I’m like, it’s solid
foam. And they’re like, yeah, but what’s inside it? I’m like, foam. And this would go on and on and on.
And, you know, going to Hawaii, going to Canada, going to the UK, where I ended up going on this
pilgrimage trail, Cotswalt’s Way. And at every tiny inn, I would have to negotiate, try to pitch
my little heart out to shoot in the backyard or anywhere. I ended up shooting from inside a hotel
to outside the hotel. I ended up shooting from outside a hotel, through the living room, through
the kitchen, into a laundry room where I hit a target.
Pickleball courts.
Pickleball courts.
Tennis courts.
Tennis courts.
Batting cages.
Batting cages, right, where you have like kids whacking balls with aluminum bats and screeching and
hooting and hollering.
Eight feet from you.
Eight feet from you.
So if you want distraction training, that’s a great way to do it.
So we had some things to work around, but the forcing function was for me, and this is always
the case, the magic of a deadline. And having a competition on the books, which I wasn’t 100%
committed to, but I was like, let me behave as if, let me train as if I’m going to compete.
It’s like, I don’t want to embarrass myself. I don’t want to embarrass you. Let’s see how it goes.
But I remember probably a few months out, like paying the registration fee and I’m like, okay,
now my name is online for everybody to see. That probably means I should go.
And then the question is, all right, what do you do if you have six months to train?
And a few things come to mind immediately. Number one is you’re always going to have things to work
around. So it could be logistics, could be in my case, my left shoulder, which was reconstructed
in 2004 and it was a real limiter, had many different physiological limiters. Right now I have a
probably going to require surgery, my right elbow, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. It’s like, okay,
well, we will have to just work around it. And lo and behold, you can work around. You might have to
make some compromises. Okay, fine. But it’s like, if, for instance, as we experienced, if shooting with
a particular stance causes my back to seize up and it’s producing a lot of incredible pain, okay,
we’ll make a few compromises on that in order to minimize that. And then that’s going to trigger a
whole chain of other adaptations that we need to make. And like you, I guess, as a kid, I very quickly
found it meditative. Archery was almost like taking a break from my monkey mind. And particularly when you
start to focus on, and this is something we focused on pretty early. I want to give Joel Turner again,
credit shot IQ in terms of like the boot up sequence and blueprinting your best shots,
really having a script for your checklist, like your pre-flight checklist as you’re going through
your entire shooting motion and having, for instance, positive affirmation. Where do you put that? You want
to put it in the same place every single time. And then I would say also recognizing that given some of
the physical limitations is like, okay, I can’t do 500 hours a day. Forget it.
We started at 60 something arrows a limited day, I think. Oh, max. Yeah. Yeah. That was the absolute
max. Yep. And a lot of that had to do with, you know, very typical Tim Ferriss fashion, as I know
now to overdo everything to 11 out of four. Yeah. I was basically doing like a Mr. Olympia pose down
every time I was trying to shoot the arrow. So there was a lot more tension in the system than was
necessary. Yeah. Which is, I just, in fairness, in my own defense, really common. Go to a range and watch,
especially guys who have a little bit of muscle shooting these things. And it’s like, whoa, okay,
this guy’s like trying to hulk his own shirt off.
But for you, the challenge was you had actual injuries, actual limitations. So how much were those
affecting the system versus the excessive tension? And it was this back and forth juggling to figure out
what was what? What was the cause? Yeah. So there’s a lot of detective work. And for instance, in the left
shoulder, you have two titanium screws, had the whole arm ripped out doing some combat sports stuff
a million years ago. And my arm ended up sticking out of my chest, basically. And I won’t get into all the
gory details, but suffice to say, when you tack down the shoulder with these screws, you create some
limitations. And as a consequence of that, I had a lot of tendinosis in rotator cuff muscles,
super spinatus. They’re a mess, really, really tangled up. So what that means is like, okay,
how do we work around this rather than do I need to stop? I mean, look, there are times when you need
to stop. Like right now with this elbow that requires surgery, I’m probably going to have to take a break
from the hard stuff for a little while, two to three months. But outside of that, it’s like, okay,
how do we work around this? And that took a bunch of different forms, including like rather than trying
whack out. I mean, we ultimately got to the point when we were training in person, at least that we
were doing what, 200 plus arrows on some days. And there were many aspects to that. And then we can
talk about some of the technical stuff, but just from the physical workaround perspective, when I
started practicing, there were a few things that I would do. And all of this we talked about, and I was
building off of your advice. So rather than doing one session, break it into two sessions
and also start and end your sessions with blank bill practice. Do you want to explain what blank bill
is? Because this avoids the target panic that you mentioned earlier. And I think is an incredible tool
that I found very, very helpful. What is blank bill practice?
The blank bail is, so the bail, the target bail is blank. There’s no target face on it, nothing to
aim at, not even a spot, a shadow, a hole or whatever. You can do small amounts of aiming per
se, but it is not for the sake of precision. It’s not trying to hit the 10 ring or anything like that.
What it does is it removes the aiming requirement or the aiming distraction from the process.
And when you were at the high level using blank bill practice, how far away from the target do
you stand?
Generally speaking for blank bail, I would be eight feet or so from the target. So you’re
never going to miss. And so you’re just simply going through repetition. It’s like a palate cleanser
almost. So you go through your motions, you go through your shot process, but you’re not aiming at
anything. So you can confidently move through the movements without being careful or over analytical
or get yourself in a bind that can happen when you’re aiming at a target. So it allows you to
ingrain your technique to a level that really trains the subconscious brain to try to take over
when you’re in pressure situations. And it also allows you to put in a lot more repetition without
so much time spent walking the distance to go down to the target. So for me, going down to 70 meters
takes a bit of time to walk that distance. So instead I can just walk eight feet, pull my arrows and
pick up my bow and immediately start shooting again. So that’s what it meant to me. And the
amount of training at blank bail really depends on what you’re working on at that time. But generally
speaking, more is better because it really allows you to focus on the process and ingrain your steps.
You know, you talked about the level of detail with just the hook alone to be able to ingrain that,
to be automated to where you grab the string and you don’t even have to think about it.
You have to put in the reps. And so if you’re putting in the reps and you’re distracted by aiming,
it can take away your focus on that grip on that hook or whatever it may be.
Exactly. So I could use it for warming up in the beginning of a session, let’s say the beginning
of the first session. And then towards the end, I’d be like, okay, look, I got as anyone competitive is
likely to do. Overly fixated on the scoring and the aiming, the performance. Let me end on a good rep.
And so ending the training practices with blank bail just allowed me to settle the snow globe a bit,
focus on the biomechanics, particularly something, I mean, at least I took this approach in the training
session if I noticed, oh, you know what? I am collapsing a little bit, meaning losing back tension
in the following way. A, B, or C is happening. Or maybe I’m not pulling my bowhand pinky back enough
and therefore I’m landing right or whatever. I’m just going to focus on that for my blank bail.
That’s going to be my most important cue, particularly in the beginning, because if you try to incorporate
too much too quickly, you’re going to get the Mac ball of death beach ball, right? You’re not going
to be able to divide your attention and maintain any type of performance in the beginning. So a lot of
what I found so valuable with your coaching was the layering. When do you choose to introduce certain
things? And I also really liked the focus on biomechanics. So the blank bail you could think of in
a way as if, let’s just say you’re, I don’t even know if they do this, but I’m making it up. Let’s just say
you’re a major league pitcher and it’s like, all right, you’re trying to focus on some aspect of your
throw without the distraction of trying to put it right into the sweet spot of a catcher’s mitt. Then let’s
just say you had a very, very large net hanging. It’s like 20 feet just hanging down and you were just throwing
the ball into this net and working on the biomechanics.
It would be similar to like dry fire training with a pistol.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Very similar. Yeah. Similar to dry firing, which you should never do
with a bow. We talk about that in our video. Unless you want your bow to explode, literally don’t do
that. And I’m trying to think in the early stages, what, because it was a detective process. And you know,
my mind is a little unusual at times and I process things a little differently. So do you recall like
what some of the early most important things were that we focused on in training?
A lot of them were conceptual things, not necessarily technical, physical, but thought process. How does the
shot go? What should you be trying to achieve kind of things? So a lot of those are really setting up
kind of the process of how to shoot a bow, not necessarily how to shoot tens with a bow.
Yeah.
So how to shoot tens with a bow comes later, I think. I’m not sure about that, but.
Yeah. And tens for just if people are getting distracted, just think about shooting both sides.
Yeah, exactly. So not how to put it in the middle, how to shoot a good shot. Right.
And so there are some really key factors that are super important to actually shooting a good shot.
One of those is follow through. It’s a very simple thing to explain. If you think of somebody,
say, throwing a ball or kicking a ball, the moment of contact of the foot hitting the ball,
when you kick the ball is when you let go of the string for shooting archery, or when you let go of
the baseball, when you’re throwing it, that’s the moment you let go of the string and shooting
archery. And so follow through is what happens after that motion. No one ever in any other sport,
including baseball and soccer, stop their motion of their foot or their arm the moment they let go of
the object or make contact with it. Just doesn’t happen. Same thing with golf, right? So stuff happens
afterwards. That’s a follow through motion. That is a maintaining of your, in archery, we call it
tension and direction. You maintain that through follow through. So tension and direction being
pull back the bow, it’s wanting to collapse you. So you have to build tension against the bow, the system
and whatever direction that is going back with the string hand and forward with the bow hand,
that tension and direction has to maintain exactly how it is when you’re at full draw through the release
until the follow through finishes. So that would be the principle of like tension and direction and just
follow through in general. It’s a very simple concept to imagine, but it’s quite difficult to kind of
implement. So we worked a lot on the technical aspects of how to apply that physically throughout
the months or years. We’ve been working together for a couple of years now, but really that last six
months leading up to Lancaster, trying to hone that in to be fluid, one motion, not fake, not two points.
So not letting go of the string, losing all that tension of the string hand, and then faking a follow
through motion. So it’s like, for those that are watching the motion would look something similar as,
so the hand touching the face at anchor, the fingers opening the arm, not moving and then moving back in
a second motion. So a good follow through would be the same fluid backward motion of the elbow, the same
exact time that the fingers are pushed out of the way of the string. And then that tension just continues
until you run out of range of motion with the shoulder.
Yeah. I mean, imagine just for a visual for folks, if you had like a theraband or a giant rubber band
and you got into an archery position and you’re holding that rubber band at max tension, the way that
it would simulate holding the string of a bow. And then you closed your eyes and somebody walked up
and just cut the rubber band.
Correct. What would happen?
And the arms kept going, obviously you didn’t expect it. And that would be what you then have
to do consciously on some level. It should take care of itself. If you’re using
the proper thought process, proper thought process and proper tension in the back and not in the arm.
But even if the tension is improper in the back or the arm, the follow through will happen if you
have that concept of maintaining whatever tension it is right or wrong when you’re at full draw,
but you continue through through release.
Well, and this also relates to the inner monologue.
Exactly.
Right. So when you’re at anchor, okay, so you’ve got your strings fully pulled back again for people
listening or not familiar with archery, your hand is glued to your face or under the jaw in the
case of Olympic archery. Okay. Now at this point, what are you saying to yourself?
Or what do you sometimes say to yourself?
For me?
Yeah.
There’s a lot of different options, but basically just continued motion.
Yeah. Continue the back shoulder moving around and behind me and the bow moving forward.
Yeah. Or like finish the shot.
Correct. Or finish the shot.
So one of the things that I talked to Coach Lee about somewhat recently when I had dinner with
him about a year and a half ago or so was, so anything new to share? And well, he chuckled first.
And then his response was, you’re not going to like this or others won’t like this actually.
And he said, release is not a step anymore. We do not release the string. And I said,
tell me more. He said, well, if you follow through and your main primary focus when you are
at full draw before you let go of the string is to follow through correctly, the release will take
care of itself. If you maintain and execute a good proper follow through your release is good. But if
you’re focused on the release, you cannot then switch your brain fast enough to the follow through
motion because the follow through is it’s frankly a reaction, not an action. So it tells you everything
about the tension that you’ve built up in the system when you’re at full draw. So it’s my job to
watch you and see the motion that the elbow moves and the hand moves and the bow hand moves and all sorts of
different spots of the body, even your head movement. The moment the string comes off your
fingers, what direction does a particular body part move? And that the motion of that body part
tells me the tension that you have at full draw because I’ve shot enough arrows and I’ve watched
enough people with enough intention and attention to look at their form, analyze it, and just overall,
just watch. I can see where the tension is built. And then a lot of the stuff that we did working
together was when you’re at full draw, I’m behind you and I’m like, I’m making motions and doing things
to feel what you’re feeling. So I can assume that if the hands coming out, there’s a change of tension
going outward of the release hand coming away from your face when you let go, instead of maintaining that
line along your neck as it comes back off your face. So if I mimic what you’re doing, I get a
bit of an insight as to what you’re feeling. And then I can communicate with you nearly at the same
language, hopefully, maybe not using the same words, but at least trying to meet you where you’re at.
Tap the muscle I should be feeling as a primary mover when I’m supposed to feel it.
Correct. Yes. And I only get that based on looking at what you’re doing and just overall trying to
really just tear down the shot and see what’s happening on the inside.
Yeah. So flashing back then thinking about
say the six months leading up to Lancaster, a couple of things. So one is
I, for a very long time, people are going to find this pretty funny.
number one, I didn’t care about hitting the bullseye. I did care about grouping.
Right. So I wanted arrows to land very close to one another. Right. But if they were bottom left,
top right, my assumption was, and I’m sure this is based off of conversations we had,
if you’re shooting consistently, if you’re getting good groups consistently, it’s not just a one-off kind
of lucky bunch of arrows. Then moving that on the target face is not going to say necessarily simple,
but it ended up being pretty straightforward as we got further down. Yeah.
But doing the blank bail, got to the point with the blank bail where, granted, it’s like for me,
10 feet away, 12 feet away, whatever, that these arrows were just getting clumped, like right on top
of one another. Even if I shot, I know this is maybe not your favorite thing, but I did this too. Like
like sometimes releasing with my eyes closed. Sure. And then how long before Lancaster did I start
aiming with the crest of the arrow to? Yeah. So about two weeks.
So, so what Tim was doing was, was, uh, having blind faith that the arrow would land in the middle
by using instinctive aiming per se. Well, I was also doing a few things that you recommended because
in fairness, we tried to have me aim earlier and I had for the first time target panic with the
understanding that the tip is always going to move. But I had, I started to develop this anxiety around
shooting because you didn’t want to let it go when the point wasn’t right on the middle.
Exactly. It wasn’t right on the bullseye, so to speak. And I also didn’t have the biomechanical control
and the conditioning, which had to compensate for all sorts of things to do it effectively. Right.
So, and we also hadn’t adjusted your bow either because we did make compromises within your equipment
to help work with the shoulder. We did a bunch of stuff with that. We won’t necessarily get into
because it gets really technical, but a lot of things that would confuse even
certain experienced folks, like the upper and lower limbs, right? Where you would attach the string,
switching those and making all sorts of tweaks to the equipment to compensate or to allow this
compromised shoulder to function, to work with you. Yeah. Not against you. Yeah, exactly. I mean,
because for instance, like the more weight, there’s a point of diminishing returns, but since you can’t
put stabilizers on a bare bow, people add weight. They just have to keep the weight very close to the
bow because this ring has to be able to pass over the whole thing for you to use it in competition.
But people had quite a bit of weight and it helps to stabilize things, but I could not tried,
but I couldn’t do it. My shoulder would develop all sorts of pain and tendon issues and just couldn’t do it.
And ultimately you could only shoot 60 arrows in a session. You couldn’t put in the amount of
arrows that was actually required to be proficient. Yeah, exactly. So I was like, okay, we’re going to
make yet another trade-off, which is I’m going to sacrifice some of the stability
in order to be able to add more volume. But the point was to allow you to work with the system.
And because when we first started aiming, you started aiming early on that distraction because
you weren’t yet there physically pulled you out of the process.
if we were to lay out step-by-step every single checkpoint that I go through or you go through,
I mean, I’d be here for three hours.
Yeah, we’d be here for three hours. It’s like 25 steps. I mean, I’m exaggerating a little bit,
but yeah.
25 steps for my hook.
Yeah. I mean, actually, you’re right. If I were to go through like every single checkpoint,
it’s like hundreds of hundreds.
Yeah, like a hundred checklist points for every shot. And until you have a critical mass of those
steps on autopilot, you cannot add more steps. And therefore, given the compressed timeline we were
dealing with, it was also like waiting for my nervous system to adapt. And for that reason,
like sometimes if you’re trying to grease the groove with a particular motor pattern, it’s like,
okay, lighter limbs are fine. Dial it down. And then, so in terms of my instinctive approach,
found a compromise was, all right, you’re not going to try to put the arrow tip or the crest of the arrow
on the bullseye. Again, for simplicity, just saying that. However, there are a few things you are going
to do. You’re going to burn a hole into the very center of the target with your eyes. And you’re going
to people think of shooting an arrow if they haven’t had a lot of experiences, like pulling back and
letting go. But you have this equal and opposite action in pushing forward with the bow hand. And
there’s a lot of technical detail that goes into how you do that. But basically pushing a portion of your
your palm, kind of the right next to your lifeline in the meaty pad of the thumb, let’s just say, roughly.
Kind of where your wrist meets your palm.
Yeah, exactly. And pushing that also, so you’re burning a hole into the target in a very dead center,
and you’re pushing that point on your palm also towards the exact center of the target.
despite whatever you’re seeing as far as your sight and your sight picture.
Right. So where you don’t worry about where the tip of the arrow is. And maybe I said it,
maybe you said, I can’t remember. I ended up calling this the Jesus takes the wheel approach,
you know, Jesus take the wheel. And it was shocking to see what happened because more often than not,
I would shoot better with that type of approach.
Yeah. And it worked surprisingly well.
It worked surprisingly well.
Until.
Yeah, it worked surprisingly well until. I guess we just decided, I mean, there were just,
it wasn’t reliable. I mean, to give you an idea, and this will mean more to people who have shot some
arrows, but when I was hitting, I had some pretty good scores. I mean, in practice, like, I don’t know.
Into the 270s, I believe.
Yeah, 270. So like 540.
270 out of 330. So decent. And the goal for where you were wanting to be was 252 plus.
Yeah.
So you were in excess of your score goal for Lancaster.
Yeah. I wanted to qualify for the top 64 shooters at Lancaster. We trained using my
Jesus take the wheel approach for up until a few weeks before Lancaster, because I was a little gun
shy after having so much trouble with trying to hold the point in one place.
And Jesus taking the wheel was working so well.
It was working really well until we started having really variable lighting conditions,
and we started dialing in the technique and the biomechanics for more precision.
And when we went to some test events, essentially. Not a test event per se, but like a local club
shoot to see how things are going.
Exactly. Yeah, that’s a great point. So, I mean, I don’t recommend this, guys. So if you can do a ton of
warm-up tournaments before the big tournament, I highly recommend doing that. Just didn’t really
work out that way. But we went to a number of league nights and it won two small events at
the Easton range in Salt Lake City, which is awesome.
I think you shot like Utah state shoots or something.
Yeah, I went in and basically just like audited the thing, right, to try to get competition
condition experience. And there are a few things that we noticed. So one is in that environment,
the bale, the canvas upon which you put the target, right, the backstop is black. And all of a sudden,
my eyes started doing funny things. And I couldn’t see the arrow tip as well. Now, the reason that’s
relevant is that I wasn’t trying to place the tip of the arrow in the center of the target, but I would
try to see it so that I could tell if I was roughly in the center of the target, right? So I would pay
attention to the left, right.
And just really quick for those that don’t know, with bare bow, you use the tip of your arrow as
your aiming reference. Part of the game is there is no sight. So you’re using the tip of the arrow
as your aiming reference. And then you’re placing that in a particular place every single time to
shoot a group in the middle. Exactly. So all of a sudden, and thank God we did these test events,
which I always have done in any other sport. Also, you just do not know what’s going to happen
and how you’re going to respond in competition conditions until you do it.
So there are a few things I think we did right. There are a lot of things we did right,
but doing those warmup tournaments, thank God, those were there. And with the black
bale, the black background that ended up…
It wasn’t just a black bale. It was also a black stand and the wall behind it was also black. It was
just all out, just dark.
It was dark. And so I could not reliably track because my arrow tip, people who have
done bare bow are going to find this funny. It was like three feet below the center of the target. I
mean, it was really, really low.
But you could still see it. I could still see it. Yeah. But it was hard to discern with that
particular black bale and everything around it. So what ended up happening in competition is I was
all over the place. Yeah. It wasn’t even just the black background that was different. It was also
the lighting condition too, because the light was very different compared to other places you shot in.
So the way you actually perceived objects in space was slightly different and you could not adjust.
It was all over the place, as you said. Yeah.
But the main thing was your first few shots were so low. Yep.
And with bare bow, we do what’s called string walking for those that don’t know.
String walking is essentially, you’re not pulling the string back right next to the arrow. You’re
actually going down the string, walking down the string, and that affects the trajectory of the
arrow. So you can essentially use the arrow point as your site. So you site in by walking up and down
the string. So to put it another way, if you had a site on your bow or on your gun or whatever,
you take some shots, assuming your technique is decent. And then based on where it, okay,
it landed bottom left. And then you adjust the site to move that point of impact. Correct.
Can’t do that in bare bow. Yeah. There’s no actual aiming reference.
Yeah. You’re not allowed to use a site. So what do you do? Well, the first thing is for left,
right, you do have something called the plunger and think of it just as kind of a screw that it’s much
more than that, but it pushes the arrow left or allows it to be more flush, right? So you can use
that to adjust your left, right. But how do you adjust your up down? Got a problem. Okay. Well,
the way you do that, and there are a lot of different approaches to this, but you’re crawling. So that means
means you’re using your thumb to basically move your fingers down from the back of the arrow
to, let’s just say, the further down you go, the further down on the target, it’s going to land and
so on. And it needs to be very precise. This is part of what makes bare bows so frustrating and so
difficult. Like if you’re, I mean, one millimeter, right? Like above or below a line.
So you have laser etched marks on your finger tab, the thing that protects your fingers from the
string, and it’s a flat piece of metal. And you were trying to be as precise enough to crawl to
the top of the laser etched line versus the bottom of the laser etched line. And it’s less than a
millimeter wide. Yeah. And that makes a difference in terms of point of impact. Yeah. Okay. So keeping all
this in mind, when I got into those lighting conditions with everything at play in competition,
it was a disaster. I mean, it was all over the place.
It was the worst score you had shot by a long shot.
Yeah. And I was like, oh, fuck me. This is three weeks, two weeks before Lancaster.
Yes. Maybe three, maybe three weeks out. Yeah. And I was like, well, keep this up. I’m definitely
not going to Lancaster because I will just, it’ll just be a complete clown car disaster.
Heather and I were looking at, my wife and I, we were looking at each other after that day
and we’re like, I really hope Tim still wants to go to Lancaster.
Yeah. That was the most frustrated. I think you guys have ever seen me. It was probably after that.
There was a lot of, uh, statements you were making in regards to never being on such an emotionally,
an emotional roller coaster from day to day. Yeah.
Because that timeframe was, was really challenging for you.
Oh, it was wild because I would go from one setting and we ended up shooting at a CrossFit gym from
seven 30 to like 10 30 at night. That was the only time and the only location that we could find.
And thank you to those guys. What a lifesaver. Chris Spieler. I think it was park city fit.
Amazing gym. The cleanest gym I’ve ever seen. It was like, yeah, you could eat off.
You could eat off the floor. It was incredible. So thank you to those guys. So we were training late
at night, very different lighting conditions, but I would have a day where I’m like, man,
I can’t miss. I can’t miss. I am so far above. I have so many more points than necessary that I need
to qualify for the top 64. Like it was your goal. Yeah. Even if I’m 10% off of this, I’m good. And then
went to this tournament or mock tournament on the, in the case of the league nights and it was unmitigated
disaster. Like a hundred points under what you wanted. Yeah. Yeah. And I was just like, what the hell is
going on? So the reason that I sometimes compare it to golf, even though I’ve only played golf a few
times, it’s like, you’re looking at this, you’re like, okay, there are a hundred different checkpoints.
Which one is it? If it’s even one of those hundred. Yeah. And that’s the detective work.
And so I’m looking at you and everything going down the list, try this, try this, try this, try this,
try this, try this. And then it’s like, maybe you should start aiming, I think. Yeah.
Because that’s really the only thing that we haven’t done up until this point.
Yeah, exactly. So we went through the list. It was like, nope, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. All right.
So two weeks out and we start aiming and it started working.
Because you had developed your technique enough that you didn’t have that aiming distracting you
from the process, from what you needed to do. And a lot of that work that we did beforehand,
when you were instinctive aiming, I don’t think we really quite covered that, but instinctive aiming
is, you know, the tension and direction of the bow arm and just staring and burning a hole with
your eyes, but your subconscious brain like takes over and just makes the arrow land in the middle.
It’s like throwing a ball. You don’t have a sight to aim with when you throw something or throw an
object at something through repeated motion. You, you make adjustments and you don’t even do that
consciously. Same thing with archery when you’re shooting instinctive per se.
And there’s some amazing instinctive shooters. They don’t tend to go to competition for reasons we can
get into. But for instance, I don’t want to name him. I don’t want to dox him, but this amazing guy from
Albania at one range I went to, and this guy all day long with his hunting bow, like a trad hunting bow made
out of wood, just drilling the center of this target for two hours straight, every time I saw,
and he would kind of pull back. And then as soon as he got his finger to the corner of his mouth,
he would release. And that was it. And the guy’s just a beast. I mean, incredibly good.
So we finally started aiming and I want to mention a couple of other things that I think were key to
ultimately being very happy with performance at Lancaster, even though, of course, I always wanted to do
better. But the first I would say is standardizing a handful of things. So obviously the shot sequence
and anchor and aiming system and all of that. The second was experimenting in mock tournament conditions,
because we also discovered, for instance, that when we went from, we upgraded from a very, very narrow
arrow. So the shaft of the arrow, and therefore the head of the arrow as well, in this particular case,
because they’re not broadheads or anything, going from a very, very thin arrow to a maximum allowable
javelin sized arrow. And what’s the reason for that?
So basically in archery, when you touch the higher scoring ring where your arrow lands, you get the
higher value. So all you have to do is touch that ring. You don’t have to break the line. You don’t
even have to be inside out. You just have to touch it. And that’s enough to get you the higher score.
And statistically speaking, somebody did a study and analysis of scores across the board at indoor
archery tournaments. And if you’re in that range of score, where you were actually targeting to be,
to be at Lancaster, there’s a very statistically significant impact on your score going up by a
tremendous amount. I think it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of eight plus points every 30 shots,
which is a massive jump at that 280, 270 range. Somewhere in there, the bigger arrows make statistically
speaking a huge difference at the highest level. The guys that win the tournaments when they’re
shooting say one or two points down from perfect, they do not make any difference at all. Like
statistically it’s, it’s a zero sum. There’s no, no additional benefit to shooting the fat arrows,
but for me, but for you statistically it made sense.
Yeah. It made a lot of sense. What that meant though, is we had to adjust a bunch of the gear.
When you put the arrow on your bow, I’ll just keep it simple. You have an arrow rest. And we had an
arrow rest that had been working great. Fantastic. It had been working so well with the little tiny darts
that I had been using once we put the much heavier arrows on. And I mean, I guess, uh,
what is the model of those arrows? So the arrows you were using was the Easton RX seven. And before
that you were using a Easton advance, I don’t know how to say it. Basically you went from an arrow that
was smaller than the diameter of your average pen or pencil to a something that was three pens combined,
almost. Oh yeah. As far as the diameter is concerned. So big, big difference there.
Yeah. And, uh, and much heavier. Yes. Right. Not just a heavier arrow,
but also a heavier point because there’s a lot of technical stuff here, but as an archer, you want
your arrow to fly perfect and you can adjust parameters of the arrow, the stiffness of the arrow,
how resistant it is to bending the point weight, the knock weight, the fletching size, the arrow length,
all sorts of things to make the arrow work with the bow. So they fly perfectly straight because
ultimately you don’t want it to have a tendency to go one direction. You want it to have like a
forgiveness. So if you make a mistake, it’s not going to deviate far from the middle.
And what we discovered when I did my, I guess it was probably the first time I did the tournament
conditions, a few things. Number one, my instinctive shooting was not going to work. Right. It was all
over the place. On top of that, with the much thicker arrows, which are much heavier,
the arrow rest, which in this case is a fall away, it was a fall away rest. What was the model on this?
So for those bare bow listeners out there, it is the sniper arrow rest, Z-N-I-P-E-R. So it is a
magnetically controlled drop away arrow rest. So for those that don’t know archery, a drop away arrow
rest is a rest that holds the arrow and supports it when you’re at full draw. But the moment you let go,
it snaps down out of the way to give the arrow, the maximum amount of clearance as it’s going by the
bow for bare bow. You use it because of the awful flight of the arrow that happens due to string
walking. When you go down the string and you don’t pull it straight back. So what was happening was,
and this is not a design flaw of that rest. It’s just, we literally hit the absolute limitations of
the system because you have to make it stiff enough, hard enough to drop, to hold the arrow up. So you
don’t accidentally bump it when you’re moving around, but you want it to be soft enough. So it drops when
you let go of the string. And because the arrow was heavy and more importantly, the point weight was
so heavy, it was not dropping. Yeah. So also bare bow shooters that are listening, we were using the 2315
size RX seven. So the stiff 420 versions, the 420 spine versions, and we had to run heavy point weights
to break the spine down. Ideally we should have run the 21 size arrows. I believe that I forget the exact
spine. I think it’s 570 or somewhere in there, much weaker. And we should have shot those light
point weights, but I don’t know if they are even available yet. They are or were on back order at
the time. So I couldn’t get you the arrow for the lighter point weight. So we literally just hit a
roadblock of the arrow rest, not working with that arrow setup. And how much can it change your impact
the 20 yards if the arrow rest does not fall? Six inches. Yeah. So if, if not more. Yeah. Game
over. Yeah. That’s it. You’re done. Yeah. You’re 10 ring again. So that’s part of the reason. Yeah.
In addition to my instinctive aiming, completely shitting the bed and not working given all the factors
we’ve already talked about, I’d say one out of every four shots maybe was, was not falling.
And so mentally you’re struggling with the aiming. Yeah. Then all of a sudden the equipment’s not
working. So it’s just adding insult to injury and it’s just making this mental struggle so much worse.
Yeah. So I should highlight that it, there are so many reasons in any sport to mimic or rehearse
competition conditions. But in the case of archery, one is you want to get used to being crowded,
right? If you’re training by yourself, it’s not the way it works at any of these larger tournaments.
Like you’re going to be on a line and literally could have somebody, I don’t know how far away
were folks for with me? Uh, less than a foot, less than a foot probably in front of me and behind me.
Correct. And I mean, you just want to hope if you’re right-handed, you don’t have a left-handed
person right next to you on your right side. Cause you’re going to basically be eye gazing them the
whole time. It’s really distracting. Although I encouraged you during your training at Gotham,
find a left-handed guy and stand right in front of them. Yeah. Yeah, totally. So I did that.
Yeah. So I had the practice. That is one reason. Another is to see what happens to your mental state
if and when, I guess it’s not really if, I mean, at my level, when you make mistakes.
At my level too. Yeah. It’s like, what happens? Yeah. Right. And those play poker. Like,
do you go tilt, monkey tilt? Like how bad does it get? And can you recover if and when that happens?
And I was just like, the wheels came off. Yeah. Yeah, it did. The wheels came off. I was like,
aren’t you stupid? Fuck this game. I didn’t say that, but I think you did inside, inside. I was
definitely, I was not happy. And then it was really, I think a combination of, I mentioned a few things.
We talked about the tournament conditions and with each mock tournament or league night that I did,
the scores went up. So everything was trending in the right direction. And I was trying to, I mean, I
used AI and all these tools to find every possible shop within an hour and a half driving distance.
And what kind of targets are they using? Can I bring my own target? Which we ended up doing,
right? Yeah. You went and shot a blue and white face league night, an NFA league night and shot a
colored face. So instead of shooting the five arrows that everyone else shot, you were shooting three
arrows. I was running a timer manually behind you, keeping tabs on, you know, your actual pacing,
because within tournaments, like a simple little added change is just a time limitation. And even though
you may never even remotely come close to running out of time, just knowing that there’s a time
limitation is enough to make you panic. Well, that’s another thing that happened to me,
right? Yeah. So given, let’s just say, you know, six months of serious practice. Now it’s like two
weeks out starting to aim. And I still have a lot that is manual. It’s not yet automatic. So I am a
pretty slow shooter. Well, because you have to think through everything. Yeah. Yeah. And so how much time
do you have for how many shots? You have two minutes to shoot three arrows. Yeah. Which sounds like a lot.
There was often times you were had three to five seconds left, which is not a good feeling to see
the timer. And it’s like, what happens when it goes from green to yellow? Yeah. And so 30 seconds
less a yellow light comes on. That’s way brighter than the green light. Green is meaning you’re just
standard time left. And what happens to a lot of people, what happened to me initially is I would
rush through that shot and let it rip. And I would still have 15 seconds left, but I rushed it and it
would not be a good shot. It was a change to your process. Yeah. All right. So other things,
mentioned standardizing as much as possible. So one was, and look, guys, I’m not proud of this,
but I’ll admit it. Figuring out expedient fuel that you can get or bring with you everywhere,
right? Especially with the amount of travel I was doing, that was actually very good practice. And it’s
like, okay, let me know how much caffeine I can tolerate. What am I going to use? Does it help at
all? Because oodles and oodles of liquid anxiety does not help you shoot better, which is why also
I beta blockers are not allowed in competition unless you get deliberately fat enough that you have a
prescription for them. That’s a whole separate story. There are actually people who do that,
just like the sprinters in the Olympics who, oh my God, happened to all be narcoleptics so they can take
modafinil. What a coincidence. All right. Putting all that aside. So what does that mean? That means that I
wanted to be able to fuel myself from things I could get at any convenience store, almost any gas
station. So it would be some form of basic protein. Don’t judge me, but maybe it’s like muscle milk or
whatever. And then having almonds. I had tolerated Maui Nui venison sticks really well. We knew that I
could digest that reasonably quickly. So always traveling with that. Then figured out a couple of other
things. So I’ll give a couple of shout outs because these products end up being really, really helpful.
So Peak Tea, P-I-Q-U-E, which are basically, if you think about matcha as whole leaf, these are
pu-erh, oolong, they’re all whole leaf. They’re powdered, so you can mix them instantly.
Even in cold water.
Even in cold water.
Yeah.
Even if you’re combining it with other things. So I figured out the timing for using that, using
glutamine, which is incredibly cheap. And I use momentous glutamine, also the next one I’ll talk
about. And for muscle recovery and soreness, it is incredibly effective. I wrote about this in The
4-Hour Body. I know you were pretty skeptical at first of the glutamine.
I mean, the amount you were taking was insane.
Yeah, it was a lot.
After doing a little bit of research on my own with the help of Heather, we saw that it was good
for people with leaky gut syndrome at very high doses. So if it’s okay for that, then it’s got to
be all right for the overall GI system, right? So it’s like, let’s give it a try. And we started trying
it as well after seeing you pretty much take an entire bottle of it in a day. Well, it actually
makes a massive difference for muscle soreness.
And it’s amazing.
Yeah, it’s wild. So I would say when we were doing hard training and look, talk to your medical
professional, I’m not giving medical advice here, but I was using a scoop, which is say five grams of
creatine three or four times over the course of a full training session, I would say. And then what
we figured out reasonably late, this was a lucky discovery, ended up playing around because I had used
this actually on very, very long hikes, which is something called fuel also by Momentus. And that is
a combination of electrolytes and let’s just call them more slowly digested carbohydrate and a handful of
other things. But it’s basically like Bugatti Kool-Aid for mental and physical performance. And it was visibly
noticeable when I was on this cocktail and when I was not. I’d start getting shaky. And then if I had,
and I timed this, I had everything on a schedule and I knew how long it took me to digest. Because
the last thing you want to do is have like three protein bars and then get up to shoot and you have
all this blood in your stomach.
Or even worse, a crash. And then you’re like, oh, emergency fuel. How long does it take to come back
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So figuring all that out was key. And I would just travel. Like I would have the
fuel, the glutamine, the peak. I would have bottles of water so I could mix all of that on my own with
a shaker bottle. And these ended up being, I think, really key to also reducing the decision fatigue and
possibility for logistics challenges. For sure.
And that’s why with Lancaster, like most high-level competitors, how early, like how far
before their first shooting do they arrive at Lancaster?
Most pro shooters?
Yeah.
45 minutes, half hour, an hour.
Right, but when would their plane land?
Oh, sorry. A few days.
Yeah.
You know, well, it depends. Depends on the season. Because if the season’s really crammed in,
you may land the night before the competition starts because one just ended somewhere across the world.
Yep.
But ideally, you’d try to get there a couple days early. So that way you shake off the jet lag,
you get used to the bed, you just get used to where everything’s laid out. And you know,
you kind of just see how things are going.
But if you’ve been to the event before.
How early did we get there?
10 days, 12 days early, I think. Something like that.
Yeah. And so again, this is just, if it’s helpful for folks, I do this whenever I’m
competing in anything new, right? So figure out where you are, figure out your food options,
figure out your bed. For instance, I slept really poorly on the hotel mattress. So ordered a pillow
topper, got that all figured out. Where are we going to practice?
How long does it take to drive from your hotel to the venue?
Right. How does that differ with different times of day?
Yep. And what does it look like, the venue?
So we did a lot of different things too. We went to the venue early and checked it out after hours
when no one was there. We’re the only ones walking around except for the Zamboni cleaning the floor.
Yeah.
Right. And so we’re checking it out. And so you get an idea of what the field looks like,
what the lighting looks like, where the bathroom’s located.
Figuring out where the bathrooms are.
This is not a small thing, right? Because when you’re shooting at this particular tournament,
on each bail, you have four targets, A, B, C, D. So you’re shooting with three other people,
you all score one another, and I’m simplifying things a little bit, but basically you’re switching back
and forth. Two people shoot, and then the next two people shoot, and then the next people shoot,
you alternate back and forth. So you may not have a whole lot of time to get to the bathroom. How
crowded is the bathroom, right? Where is the least crowded bathroom? Where’s the secret bathroom?
Yep.
I’m figuring all this out ahead of time, because I recognize, look, I don’t have a lot of time under
my belt. I’ve trained my ass off to the extent that my body would handle it. I pushed my body,
and I do need to give a huge thank you to Heather, who is a top-tier manual therapist,
magician with soft tissue, and no way that I could have made it to Lancaster without her help.
Yeah, you were on the ragged edge.
I was run pretty ragged. Yeah. I mean, I had kinesiology tape all over me. A couple of other
recovery tools that were really helpful. One, I really didn’t anticipate because I had no exposure
to it, but this is, I guess, full-spectrum cannabis oil. Was it Rick Simpson?
Yeah, R-S-O. Rick Simpson oil, I believe, is the name of the guy that came up with this.
And what was fascinating for me, you do not feel any psychoactive effects whatsoever. Topical,
to be clear. Topical, yes. It does not cross the blood-brain barrier.
Not suppositories. Yeah, no.
Don’t fall for the marketing campaigns for the archery.
No.
THC suppositories. And you don’t feel any psychoactive effect. Obviously,
do not break the law where you live, so pay attention. But in terms of reducing or eliminating
muscle spasms, incredible, incredibly effective. And also, if you’re going to get, let’s just say,
massage therapy, do not get, necessarily, Heather would be able to speak more intelligently to this,
but incredibly deep, hardcore work right before you’re going to train. I mean, there are different
types of massage for flushing.
Sure.
Yeah. You don’t want to overly lengthen the muscle, because then you can lead that
joint that it’s supporting or around to become potentially unstable, which results in a potential,
serious potential for an injury to the joint, like an actual injury.
Yeah. You can also get really sore, as I was saying.
Increase your inflammation.
Which does not help with anything, right? My main issue was, like, my shoulder or my wrist or
my forearms would just be on fire. They’d be all swollen like a puffer fish.
Sure.
And it’s like, okay, sure.
This is our first day of four days of training.
Sure.
We need to fix this.
How do we fix this?
From an outsider’s perspective, it was fascinating to see with unlimited ability to just make things
happen, what you can do to maximize your potential to perform. So what can you control? Can you get
that bed topper? Can you get there 10 days early? Can you see the venue? Can you have the Bugatti of
electrolytes? Can you get the things that actually make a difference and have you experimented enough
leading up to the event to know how you respond? And if you take enough detailed notes, you know
exactly how you’re going to respond. What is the lag time? What is the delay? How many days
days after I shoot this 300-arrow day, am I going to be sore and unable to shoot properly?
Exactly.
So many different things.
And actually, this is as good a point as any to mention the glue that holds us all together,
which is note-taking and training logs.
Yes, entirely.
Right?
This is such a pivotal thing to consistently performing under pressure. You might get hot once
and shoot great and win a tournament, but if you didn’t know what you did that led up to that,
how are you going to repeat it? And so you have to blueprint, as Joel says in his system,
the shot IQ, how do you blueprint an ideal shot or an ideal tournament? And leading up to that,
a training session, whatever it may be, what can you do to replicate that every time?
Yep. And a few things that were surprising to me, for instance, if I felt like I’d just been put
through a meat grinder, I would maybe, left to my own devices, look back one training session,
maybe two training sessions, but often it’s five days ago, five training sessions ago. You have to
look back further than I would have expected. That is going to be beyond your memory.
For sure. How many arrows did you shoot? Yeah. What did you do that day? Did you strength train
as well? How about massage therapy? What did you eat? Whatever it is, you’ve got to know. If you
don’t know, you’re guessing. Yeah, exactly. And also, we’re mentioning a lot of these different things.
Most of these are not expensive in the grand scheme of things. Correct.
I mean, the only one that might be out of range that I used quite a bit is the low intensity continuous
ultrasound. Sure. There are these devices that basically put a very light ultrasound stimulus
through these electrodes. And there’s a SAM device. There are a number of other ones that is
Lycus, L-I-C-U-S, low intensity continuous ultrasound. People can look it up. That one’s a
little pricey, but there’s a whole lot you can do that is not expensive. Almost everything I’ve mentioned
is well within reach. I mean, you’re doing it right now. You got a pen and a paper.
Yeah. That’s like the weapon right there. You know, that is so important. I’ve encouraged so
many people I work with that come to me for coaching to take detailed notes. And I can’t
tell you how few do. And you’re the only one that I’ve ever seen take a sufficient level of detail of
notes on how the training session went, what you did, and how you ultimately felt. And then just being
able to look back and see. I can’t tell you how many times you pulled it out and said, “Let me look back to
San Diego when I went and visited Coach Lee and he told me to go away after 45 minutes. Oh yeah,
this is what we worked on. Interesting. Okay. Let’s make sure I’m doing that today.”
Yeah, totally.
That’s a few months later or more than that.
Yeah. Yeah. That ended up being such an important key to everything. And I would log the workout,
give you just a couple of tips. I mean, this is going to seem really rudimentary and it’s like,
yeah, duh, but very few people do it. When did you work out? When did you do your training?
Time of day. Yeah. When was your last meal prior to that? Write this stuff down. You are not going
to remember. And then going through training, it’s like, well, if you had a period of shooting really
poorly and then you tested a number of things to fix it, what happened? So for instance, that pulling back
on the pinky of the bowhand ended up being something. When I got fatigued, I would start to lose that
tension and it would have a whole cascade of negative effects. And I was like, okay, interesting.
For whatever reason, that cue seems to fix a lot. And there were a handful of things that you’re only
going to discover if you are taking those types of notes. And I think this applies to way more than
archery. If you’re not really paying attention to what you’re doing and maximizing your chances for
success and ultimately maintaining what you’re doing and training or leading up to an event,
whatever it may be, if you change everything at the event, because I’m at the event, I should
probably clean up my diet. Why would you do that? It’s too late. It’s too late. If you’re eating Cheetos
at home, as much as you shouldn’t be eating Cheetos at home, you should probably just do it at the
tournament. If you drink seven up or you have a beer the night before or whatever it is, you should
probably continue to do that. You don’t want to all of a sudden sober up at the event and deal with
withdrawal syndromes from not having enough sugar because you used to have cap and crunch for
breakfast. I don’t know, whatever it may be, you might want to just maintain the same thing. And so
this applies to so many things, not just archery. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And also if it’s helpful to
people, when I would take notes, I mean, you can even kind of, I won’t show off all this because
some of these are top secret in this one, but I also basically draw a little square. You’ve seen
these in the bottom right of each page in this training log. And my training log is actually
like this big, it’s larger paper. It’s like bigger than an eight and a half by 11. Yeah.
It’s, it’s a large notebook. And in that bottom right corner, I, so I’m not only taking notes,
I’m also reviewing all of those notes after the session. And in the bottom right, I am putting my
next actions or key takeaways to focus on for the next workout. And so when I land at the gym,
or in this case, the range, the next day or two days later, I know exactly where I’m picking up.
I do not have to spend any time on that. All right. So we’re doing all this stuff,
chugging muscle milks and fuel and glutamine and peak tea and learning to aim.
Yes.
Like a big boy.
Yes.
Then what happens at Lancaster? What’s the goal? Were the expectations, hopes, like from your
perspective, I’d be curious to hear.
I would say my number one hope was just that you’d be happy with how it went, no matter what,
because ultimately there’s no way to know how it’s going to go. Would it be great if you made the cut?
Would it be great if you won the event? Sure. That’d be cool. But how is it going to go? No one knows.
Competition is very interesting. It really is. It’s just unknown until you do it.
Just a quick side note. So I remember, I don’t want to mention his name, but I was training somewhere
and I saw my first barebow shooter who was, in my eyes, really good. And in practice, just incredible.
And do you remember what you said to me after that?
I can tell you.
Go for it.
Practice scores don’t matter.
Oh, yeah.
Now, on some level, consistent practice scores are one indicator, but competition is just a different…
It’s a totally different animal.
Different animal.
And so you can expect to falter. You hope to do well. But ultimately, it’s looking at where you were,
you really hit rock bottom three weeks before the event, right?
So from there, there was an upward trajectory and you were heading in the right direction.
So that’s a lot of stuff that I remember I was reminding you about. You’re headed in the right
direction. You just have to maintain your focus on these things. Do not get distracted by anything
else. Each arrow is its own. You give it the care that it deserves. The arrow that you just shot does
not affect the next. And the arrow that you’re about to shoot doesn’t affect anything. It’s just its own
individual thing. Treat it with care. It’s a 60 arrow round, not a one arrow round. So it’s really
unimportant what happens on each individual arrow. Ultimately, it’s how you control the whole event,
how you maintain focus, whatever it may be. Just composure ultimately is what’s required to succeed.
It’s not about being perfect. It’s just about maintaining what you do in practice better than
the next guy. That’s who wins. And so that was just the main focus that I was trying to hammer home
to really say, this is what you need to lean into and avoid any of this other distracting
thoughts. It’s not Lancaster. It’s nothing. It’s just another venue. You’re just shooting arrows.
Nobody’s interfering with you. It’s you and the bow and no one else. So ultimately nobody’s going to
prevent you from succeeding or failing except for yourself. So you just got to get out of your own
way and let it happen. You’ve already put in the time you put in the effort. Just go have fun.
Just shoot some arrows and maintain composure.
Of course I was nervous, but I also came into it feeling like I cannot imagine with the limitations
that I have having taken this more seriously. Like I’ve done the prep I was humanly capable of doing.
So ultimately it was just, there was no expectations. I don’t like to have expectations when it comes to
competition because it’s just, it adds a level of pressure, distraction.
Yeah. Well, I can also say for myself, I hadn’t done a proper large competition in a super long time, right?
You said 20 years.
20 years, 20 plus years. And for me, I was so curious. I’m like, is that gear going to click?
Is there going to be another gear? And ultimately there was, and I was very happy to see it because
I had not seen it in the mock tournaments.
No, me neither for the record.
Yeah. And part of that though, for me was, okay, now this is a real competition, right? This is what
we’ve been training for. Adding extra pressure to myself now, much like changing your diet last minute
is not going to help. The training has been done. And so coming into it, I don’t even know if I’ve told
you guys this, maybe I did, but I basically just told myself, this is just treat this like training
with distraction. That’s it. This is just another training session with a lot of distractions.
It’s healthy.
And I have had my best competition performances, whether it was, you know, going to the worlds
in tango or the national championships in Sancho Chinese kickboxing when I’ve done that and having
high hopes certainly, but the mental prep that I did for that was my pass fail here is not the score.
It’s how well I can recover and keep my calm.
Exactly.
That was it. And I was like, okay, I have a lot of room for improvement because I remember
throwing a tantrum of epic proportions when everything went sideways at Easton.
Yeah.
In fairness, that was pretty rough.
It was rough.
That was rough.
Yeah.
Yeah. I felt bad too.
Yeah. It was bad.
Yeah.
It was really bad. And I was like, okay, so this is it. This is like a meditation practice.
And success is viewing it as training with distraction and just keeping calm. And if I
get excited, that’s okay. Just like reeling it back in.
Everyone’s going to get it.
So Heather was sitting there with a mutual friend and what Heather was saying is she was looking
at me and she’s like, wow, Tim is overstimulated. And it’s very easy to be overstimulated there.
I mean, it’s-
So loud.
It’s so loud. It is a cavernous space. There are how many shooters?
I mean, there was close to 600 shooters on the line at one time.
Yeah. And what Heather was saying is that when I crossed the line to straddle the line to
shoot, there was just this like calm that washed over me. And she was saying that-
I mean, you were just high-eyed walking around.
Yeah. My eyes were-
Beforehand.
Saucers beforehand.
And the moment, yeah, the moment you crossed, it was just like, this is what I do.
Yeah.
This is how it’s going to go.
And it was just, it was the first time, genuinely the first time where it was just like you held
your shit together.
Yeah. So that was an experience.
Yeah.
And I was like, oh, oh yeah, I’ve done this before. Because I guess, and we’ll get to
this, but it’s like historically, like I know I don’t have a technical advantage over everyone
there. Some of these guys have been shooting forever.
Yeah.
Right. And I was like, okay, well, how can I try to stack the deck? And we already talked
about a lot, right? Nutrition, sleep, taking away handicaps that I can easily remove. Then
I was like, okay, well, being consistent for 60 arrows, which means trying to contain the
fluctuations in energy and also contain the fluctuations in emotional reaction. And I remember
taking the first few shots and I’m standing on the line and there’s a person 12 inches
in front of me and sweet, sweet people, but her arrows are sticking out and literally jabbing
me in the stomach like the, you know, the knocks, the back of the arrow. And I’m like, well, that’s
distracting. And then there’s a guy right behind me who has a huge longbow. He’s in the longbow
division and he’s holding it sideways right in front of me. So I can’t even lift my bow.
Meanwhile, the timer’s going, right? And I’m like, oh man. Okay. But then I was able to,
I think in part from visiting the venue, in part from doing the Easton comp prep and having the
black bales, which they also had at Lancaster, walking in that late night when the Zamboni was
there because it’s indoor lighting to see what the lighting is like, let my eyes kind of adjust and
feel it out. Not worrying about the bathroom, not worrying about nutrition. And it took a little bit
of shooting to, to get comfortable with the process and the turnaround speed from one pair to the next
pair shooting on the same bail. But ultimately ended up with a, I think it was exactly 500 points,
right? I think so. Yeah. I think it was exactly, look, somebody could find it online. It’s easy
enough to find, but ended up with 500 points. That’s not anywhere close to my practice high
scores, but that’s fine. But it was my best tournament scoring. And you’re most importantly,
in my opinion, the best performance you’ve had. It’s not about the outcome. It’s about the performance.
Yeah. If I shoot beautifully in my opinion and someone else out shoot me, I have to be happy
with that. I did the best I can. What does that mean? I think I’d have to go back and look. I don’t
know what number. I think you were 80th something. 80 something. 80s in there. Yeah. So you’re, you know,
not quite at 64 where you wanted to be, but. It was really fun. And just the fact that I didn’t
lose it, right? Irrecoverably was a huge highlight. And also we ended up, because I’m a glutton for
punishment, you know, doing, I guess it was the next day, maybe, maybe it was a day later, but doing a
bunch of practice. Yeah. And figuring some stuff out where it’s like, oh, okay. Yep. I feel like
automatically some of these tweaks. Yep. Would lead to a higher score. Sure. And if I can basically just
get my practice scores closer to my competition scores, or maybe you frame it the other way,
then if I’m able to maintain my composure, it’s like, okay. Like I think certainly like a 540 or
something like that is, should be enough to get into the top 64 for sure. You would think so. You would
think so. Yeah. So great experience. Thanks so much for the amazing coaching. Heather, thank you for
keeping my body in one piece. And I’m just trying to think of what else we could mention just in terms of
approach or anything else that’s worth adding. I think, you know, one approach maybe, and this
particularly given some of my orthopedic issues and just like tendinosis limitations and so on,
this isn’t totally right. And I’ll explain the modification, but this actually comes from a very
famous track coach with many, many world records to his athletes credit. Hank Kreigenhoff or something
like that. I believe he’s Dutch. I’m sure I’m messing up that, but it’s in the four-hour body if people are
looking for the actual name. And he said, effectively, my goal is to do the least necessary, not the most
possible. And the way that ties into the training is I found if I really, really overdid it, then I might
need four or five days off. If my shoulder’s really inflamed and problematic. So it’s like, okay,
how can we use smaller doses with higher frequency to make this work?
Ultimately, that’s super beneficial in archery. So if I were to wave a magic wand and try to make
things better the next time, it would be doing archery more often. So it’s not about how many
arrows you do in one session. It’s how many sessions in a week can you do and how many days in between each
session are there? Anything more than one is too many, in my opinion. So if you could standardize
your schedule better, better for the sake of archery performance, that of course requires sacrifice
elsewhere. Time hanging out, time working, whatever it may be. It’s a challenge.
I mean, for the competition, I mean, that was a commitment, right? Because it was like, unless my
body failed for a period of time, which happened with alarming regularity, but I mean, certainly when
we’re looking at the training in Utah and a lot of other places, I mean, certainly in person, I mean,
it was kind of like two and a half to three hour sessions.
It was intense sessions. And in Tim’s famous last words, one more end.
One more end. Yeah. One more end. It’s like, well, one more bunch of arrows. And I’d be like,
one more end.
Okay.
Three hours later.
All right. One more end. Three hours later. Okay. One more end. Yeah. One more end. Which by
the way, that ended up for solo training being important to me because you gave me the advice
of, and this might sound a little counterintuitive, but not setting a minimum number of arrows you need
to shoot, but a maximum number of arrows. And it’s like, when you hit that, you’re done.
Yes. No matter what, no matter if it’s your best day ever and you cannot miss, and you’re just
enjoying archery more than you’ve ever enjoyed in your entire life, you have to stop.
But also if you’re struggling, you’ve got to push towards that upper end of that limit
because of you need to put in the reps.
Where I got into trouble was, let’s just say I wanted to shoot a hundred arrows as a minimum.
And I would go, if I were shooting poorly and I got to a hundred, I’d be like, I’m not ending
on that. It’s terrible. Yeah, exactly. Whip my back. I’m not ending on that terrible shitty
end. There’s no way I want to end on a good rep.
And so I’d push and push and push. And more often than not, it would just continue to deteriorate.
Yeah. And then I would end up with some type of inflamed shoulder, inflamed X, Y, or Z that now
keeps me out of training for three or four days.
Or potentially hit you real hard five days later as you started.
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So not worth it.
Yeah.
But that takes a lot. And to beat a dead horse, it comes back to also the journal, the notes,
the training logs.
But something that was interesting that you kind of discovered watching people on the practice range
the day after you competed or whenever that was, and you learned some things. You were watching a
couple of different shooters out there. There was a, I think the number one ranked barebow shooter that
won the ranking round that year and set the new Lancaster record for the ranking round. You were watching him
shoot. You first pointed him out to me and said, Hey, keep an eye on him. See if there’s anything
that he’s doing that maybe I should start to work on as, you know, just maybe there’s something I’m
missing. And, you know, I watched him for two arrows and I think I just walked right over to him. I said,
Hey, how’s it going? What’s your name? How long you been shooting? Oh, I was successful recurve
archer. Cause his form looked recurve. Like there’s a very distinct look to that. And he shot as a junior
competitively nationally, I believe for Canada, if I remember correctly. And then he shot all through
college shooting recurve competitively. And then he started shooting compound for a while and kind of
set down the bow, came back to it like four or five years later and started shooting barebow.
And so he already had a decade plus of archery experience doing essentially the same thing,
the same kind of form. And then you pointed out some 13, 14 year old Korean kids or something like
that. Korean American kids that were just pounding. Like they’re, they’re just stacking the arrows in at
the center. Yeah. I mean, and when you say stacking, it’s shooting six arrow ends in the size of the okay
symbol that you can make with your fingers basically. Like, and that’s impressive, especially at that age.
And so same kind of thing, you know, you’re like, I pointed them out. Look at these guys,
you know, I bet you they’re shooting X amount of arrows a day for, you know, 300 plus arrow. I’m just
guessing they shoot a lot. I can tell. So I went over to their coach who didn’t really want to respond
to me. So then I went to the kids directly. I was just like, how much you shoot, how long you’ve been
shooting. Which is possible because we have to go pull our arrows at the same time. Yes. Right. So you can
have a conversation. Yeah. And even if not, it’s the practice range. And again, we talked about the
community. They’re very welcoming. People are willing to discuss and communicate because it’s
just, everybody is in the same game. They’re all struggling quote unquote with the same thing that
you’re struggling with. And so they’re just in a different stage. And so you can learn from their
experience if you ask them the right questions and hopefully they’re willing to share. Yeah. The kids
are super friendly, super friendly. And so you’re, Hey, how long you’ve been shooting? Five years.
How many days a week do you shoot? Six days a week. How many arrows a day do you shoot? Two to three
hundred arrows every single day. That’s why they’re good, Tim.
Well now, okay. Now I’m going to get back on the, on the witness stand, defend myself. Not defend
myself. Not that you weren’t good. It’s just, there’s a stage, right? Yeah. I’m good. I mean,
they’re doing a lot of volume. Yeah. But that was despite having technique that was not great.
Sure. I also was like. Now to my untrained eye, I’m like, I can’t tell. Yeah. But I said this,
this, and that. They should do these things. You know, they, despite these issues, they’re still
able to do well because they’ve put in sustained reps for a very long period of time. So they’re able
to just default to what they do. Yeah. And you had six months. Yeah. They had five years. Yeah.
There’s a huge difference. It’s a different thing. Yeah. And it’s just, you get looking,
you look experienced from experience. You don’t just get it. You’ve got to make that groove,
as you said, in the brain and really make that neuromotor connection strong enough to where it
just fluidly happens. That’s why an expert is an expert. They’ve done the same thing thousands
and thousands and thousands of times. I can’t tell you how many, I’m well over a million shots the same
way, same technique, same thought process, same thought at full draw. So it’s yeah. An immense amount
of effort and work over time. Sustained effort is what really makes you good. Yeah.
Yeah. But that’s true for everything. Yeah. Well, it’s been a hell of a journey. It’s not
over. It’s not over. But we might bounce around, might ask some more questions. But do you want to
talk about the backyard championship? Yeah. So what the hell is the backyard championship?
So everybody loves to be a backyard world champion per se, because everybody, like I said, practice
scores don’t matter, right? Everybody can shoot well in their backyard. Everybody’s happy to tell you
how they’ve shot so well in their backyard and post their pictures of their targets all over social
media or potentially not just their backyard, but the range they shoot at or their club. And that’s
great. Like I’m, I’m all for it. I love that people are proud and passionate about what they’re doing.
And so we’re, we’re forming this thing that we’re calling the backyard championships, which is
essentially a digital tournament. We’re going to have two events this year, an indoor event and an
outdoor event. And essentially you will with a honor code and a buddy system, hopefully submit your scores
after you sign up for the actual event. And after you submit your scores, we’ll have a digital leaderboard
that people can essentially rank themselves amongst other people throughout the world. And it’ll be bracketed male,
female, adult kid, different disciplines, compound recurve, bare bow, you name it, just stick bow,
horse bow. I don’t, whatever it may be. As we identify important disciplines, we will make sure to have
that available so you can compete against other people shooting a similar bow. So this kind of ties
into encouraging others to pick up a bow and shoot archery. And as Joel Turner told me, it’s archery,
try it. Meaning it doesn’t matter what style of bow you shoot. You can shoot horse bow with your thumb.
You could shoot a trad bow. You can shoot a compound with a scope and a level and a release aid and huge
stabilizers. It’s archery and it’s really, really fun. And this is hopefully going to make it more
accessible to more people to show up at their local range, rent a bow, go shoot some arrows, get a score,
get it posted on the internet and just see how it goes. Cause it’s really fun to build a community.
And then within that, we’re going to have a, a discord server that is exclusive for people who
are competing at the event. So we’ll be able to have people discussing back and forth, maybe bragging
rights, things like that. And ultimately it’s nothing really being awarded other than bragging rights of
being a backyard champion.
All right. So I’m excited about this. I want to recommend everybody archery. Try it. I’ll echo
Joel, who by the way, is an amazing, we don’t have time for this, but an amazing thumb shooter. He’s got
a gnarled Franken thumb because he does it so often, but you can check that out. In fact, the oldest way
of shooting probably I would say is a thumb release. So you can check out Joel and his monster thumb and
his, and his system as well shot IQ, but coming back to this, the backyard championship, a few
things I want to say. Number one, this is an opportunity to have an end goal, right? It doesn’t
have to be a Lancaster as it was in my case, which also it’s not where I started out, right? I just
wanted the meditative practice. And quite frankly, this sort of blast from the past of using a tool
granted with some modern materials that humans have used for thousands of years upon thousands
upon thousands. And I think it is really therapeutic for a lot of people who try it and it’s just fun.
It’s really fun. So now you have the chance to have some type of goal related to giving archery a
shot. And if, if you don’t have your backyard championship set up and you don’t have your own
gear, that’s no problem whatsoever. I didn’t buy my own gear for a long time and you can go to a local
range and the folks are almost always incredibly welcoming, ready to help. Try a bunch of different
stuff. Yeah. Try a compound. Yeah. Try a recurve. Yeah. Try a horsebow. Yeah. Try them all out. And
it will give you a regular, at the very least, I mean, this is going to sound like an oversell,
but it will give you a regular meditation practice. Maybe you have trouble sitting on a cushion,
closing your eyes and doing it that way. A lot of people do try this. It for me was such an unlock
for tabling my monkey mind for an hour or two. It’s really remarkable. So I encourage people to try it
out. And this, uh, the backyard championship allows you to shoot multiple different disciplines and
submit multiple different scores. So if you have a compound or recurve, a bear bow, a long bow, a horse
bow, whatever you got, you can submit a score for each discipline for indoor and outdoor.
And once you submit your score, we have these really awesome quiver pins that we’ll send to you
as well. So you can show that you actually participated in the, the backyard championship.
So. All right. Where should people go?
Just head to my website, jakekaminski.com. Everything will be available there. As far as,
uh, the info, the leaderboard, all that info will just be all right there.
All right. Perfect. All right. Everybody check it out. The very least go to range, pick up a bow.
Yeah. Have a good time.
Take some intro classes. They do fun stuff. Some places they’ll blow up balloons or throw on the
black lights. There’s a lot of fun to be had. Yeah. Uh, also if you have kids, this is an awesome
activity to do with your kids.
Absolutely. I mean, and, uh, your YouTube channel, we recorded a video that’ll be coming out soon or
will be already. Yeah. And that, and that will show gear one-on-one from Jake and then also
technique one-on-one. Yeah. So if you’re really not sure and there’s nobody nearby or they’re not sure
how to help you, you’ll at least have a basic understanding of the equipment to be safe and to
also, uh, have a lot of fun too. So it’ll be great. So check that out. jakekaminski.com folks,
YouTube channel. I guess people can find it through the website. Is that the best way to do it?
On the, on the website, you can just search Jake Kaminski as well. It’ll pop up on YouTube direct.
It’ll pop up on any internet search as well. Very prevalent as far as the search engine results.
Easy to find. Jake Kaminski, K-A-M-I-N-S-K-I. Correct.
Kaminski.com. Once again, thanks so much to you and Heather. Yeah. It’s been a hell of a
quite a journey. Awesome adventure and trip and has reinvigorated me on in so many different ways.
And also I will say it’s, it’s given me so much energy in a sense. It’s been such a recharging
activity that it’s, it’s given me a lot that I can then apply to other places. Yeah. Yeah. I cannot
tell you, like I’ve had some, you know, challenging family issues, meaning medical issues over the last,
let’s call it six months in particular year. And having this as a way again, to just take a break
from that for a period of time to have a constant, right? I don’t need to rely on an entire team of
people to gather for a rec soccer game. It’s like, no, I can just book time off in these lanes, meaning
where you would stand and practice at a range. I mean, sometimes it’s like 10 bucks an hour. I mean,
it’s like, it’s not, it’s not going to break the bank. Yeah.
And rentals are generally very, very affordable and I can just take a break. I can go in two hours,
just quiet my mind. And it’s been such an incredible tool. So I want to thank both of you guys again.
Yeah. Anything else you’d like to add? Any closing comments before we wind to a close?
Yeah. Archery is difficult. It’s single-sided, rotational and static. So it’s not exactly good
for you. I mean, it’s great because it clears your mind. It’s activity. You got something to focus on,
but it can be a bit much for the body. So taking care of yourself, super important.
And part of that, I’ll give it another plug, jakecomincy.com. Watch Jake’s videos on technique
because if you are doing the same thing over and over and over again, you know, just imagine you
had a pebble in your shoe and you refuse to take it out and you take 10 steps. Okay. You’re fine.
Maybe you walk to Starbucks and back. You’re fine. You walk a thousand miles with that. You’re going to
have a big problem with your foot. Absolutely. And that is true with really any repetitive motion.
There are a lot of sports with repetitive motions. Yeah. Also applies to archery.
Yeah. And the problems I think are very easy to avoid. Yeah. With a few basic pointers that you
follow religiously. Yeah. And I’ve got an academy of sorts coming out. It’s like a Jake Kaminsky
academy that’ll teach you the technique. It is currently available as far as like form advice
that I give on my YouTube channel. But this academy is an ultra premium, high production quality that
once you buy into the system, you have lifetime access. So as you develop as an archery, you can
come back and check it out as often as you’d like. So that’s something that is in the works and
we’re, we’re getting very close to launching that that’ll also be available on jakekaminski.com as well.
And, uh, you know, as Joel Turner said, either way, it’s archery. You should try it.
Oh, man. Well, thanks again, Jake. So nice to see you and train with you. Heather. A lot of fun.
Thank you again. And folks listening, show notes. We’re going to have links to everything
as per usual, tim.blog slash podcast. I can pretty much guarantee you there will not be another Kaminsky
on the podcast as of yet. So you can check that out or just search Jake. I don’t think there are
many Jakes in the podcast library. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary
to others. Also to yourself. If you’re on the line and shoot a terrible shot, don’t go full monkey
tilt and punch yourself in the groin. Not worth it. Be kind. And I appreciate the other hidden chuckle
from behind the pillar. And until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one
more thing before you take off. And that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email
for me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and
two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday,
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gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot
of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I
share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before
you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you’d like to try it out, just go to
tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you’ll
get the very next one. Thanks for listening.
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around the world. Believe it or not, I got to know them when they had eight or nine employees. And now
10% of all e-commerce in the US is on Shopify from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to my
very own limited edition cock punch coffee. Remember that story for another time. Now back to the early
2000s, then nobody even thought of AI. Who could have predicted even in the last 24 months, the magic that
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one umbrella. And man, no man, could I have used that back in the day. And if I ever do something like
that again in e-commerce, I will use Shopify. If you’re ready to sell, you’re ready for Shopify. Sign up for
your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash Tim. Why not learn a little bit
more? Shopify.com slash Tim. One more time, shopify.com slash Tim.
Jake Kaminski is a two-time Olympic silver medalist in archery and a longtime member of the US Archery Team. He runs a successful YouTube channel, writes training guides, and develops high-performance gear under the Kaminski Archery brand. Sign up for the Kaminski Archery Backyard Championship here.
Sponsors:
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AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://DrinkAG1.com/Tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)
Shopify global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business: https://shopify.com/tim (one-dollar-per-month trial period)
*
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