How do you practice?
View from behind the string

May 12, 2002 — How do you practice? Sitting down? Bending over? Elevated? Behind trees? Around bushes? Still hunting? 

If you are standing up right, shooting at target butts — forget it. Many archers only shoot at indoor practice ranges, or computerized DART or TECHNOhunt type systems. Forget it. They are good if you are sighting-in or tuning your bow, but for complete bowhunting practice you must put yourself in the awkward positions you will encounter in the field.

Take nothing for granted
Bushes in your face, trees in your way, leaves hitting your coat or that sudden breeze blowing through your tree are real practicing. I personally like to hunt from blow downs. So I practice sitting, swinging my bow, looking for overhead branches and shooting at trees not far from my deer run. If I have my longbow or recurve I use rubber blunts. With my compound I use either rubber blunts or MUZZY small game adders. 

Pick a small spot on a sapling or small tree. Fred Bear always took one shot before he headed to his stand. Some people shoot one arrow with scent on it after they get up their stand. The point being, take nothing for granted. As I hunt I count on Murphy's Law ... if something can go wrong, it will. Therefore I plan on it going wrong and problem solve what I am going to do about it when it does. The one down side to this is the one thing I did not plan for usually happens. You can't win them all. 

Clothes
Unless we are going bare hunting, excuse me, bear hunting; we wear some type of garment. The colder it is, the more clothing you'll need. 

Now if you are like me, you have 25 sets of camo clothes. One for warm weather hunting, three for moderate hunting, six different patterns for cold weather hunting and fifteen for either deer/duck/goose field or marsh hunting and some to match your shed that they hang in, right? 

The problem being every set of camo shoots differently. The TreBark pants you own fall down when you draw. The Mossy Oak coat rides up your arm when you grab your bow, the apparition is now tight on your chest, and the all-purpose Realtree now is one purpose since you caught it on a nail in your shed. The hooded Advantage sweatshirt has one advantage ... the dog smelled the deer scent that was spilled on it and tore it apart. The nice set of Leafy Wear, starlings made their nest in it and to add insult to injury you tell the wife you have to buy another set because the other camo is ripped, torn, mildewed, missing parts or too large. Does this all sound familiar? 

Now you have to buy a new pair of camo clothes, break them in and practice with them. Buttons in the way, sleeves too loose or that great button that covered your pocket now is twenty yards away directly in the kill zone of your McKenzie deer, God knows where your arrow went. So practice with your clothes on — hat, shirt, hunting pants, coat, face mask (My wife asks me to wear that all the time I never figured out why.) But I do put on my camo gear stand in front of the mirror and after my wife, two boys, two ferrets who try to urinate on me, roll on the floor and say the big bull pine tree in the back yard looks smaller then me ... I go out to shoot. 

When you do this, I guarantee you will find out when, where and if the string hits your clothing. If not your arm or chest at least the string will catch the cord you forgot to tie on your hood (and now the hood is in front while you stare at the flannel lining of the hood covering your face). And that is just for starters. 
The point is this, practice with everything exactly as you will when hunting. It does make a difference. As the season arrives check your gear, practice from where you are going to hunt, do it safely.

That's the way I see it.