Anagail Hamby, March – Waiting for your flight is stressful. It gets you amped up, nervous, and sometimes even shaky. When you’re stressed you overthink and your shot degrades. While waiting for your turn to shoot, the most important thing to do is to calm down. There are many ways to do this, but we’ll go over my favorites: relaxing, distracting, and reviewing.
Relaxing seems the obvious way to relieve stress but many of us archers just don’t before our flights. I don’t mean chilling in front of the TV relaxing, but physically relaxing. Loosening the hunched shoulders, stretching out tapping toes, and even yawning. Yawning relieves stress according to many studies and I tried it after my coach advised me to. After forcing five or six yawns I was on a relaxing roll. I felt about seventy percent of my stress float away.
Another of my favorite ways to calm down is distraction. For me, reading is a way to forget my worries and regroup before a trial. If you have a non-disruptive diverting activity, like humming or maybe a bit of stretching, do it while waiting for your turn to shoot. This can help your shot exponentially by getting you in the right headspace.
Perhaps you would like to feel in control of your surroundings, but are feeling unprepared instead. Going over what you will do can help. Closing your eyes and vividly seeing yourself grabbing your bow, walking to the shooting line and hearing the whistle can prepare you. To fortify your composure, imagine the feel of the bow string on your fingers, the fluid motion of your release, and envision the zip of the arrow to the ten-ring. Perhaps even reviewing your aim spots will help. This mental review can refresh your mind and instill a peace inside you. If, however, overthinking stresses you, I recommend clearing your head instead, and trusting in the hard earned skills you’ve gained in practice.
Peace and calm is key in finding the right headspace for archers and the best way to achieve that will be different for everyone. If you love to plan, then a mental review might be calming, but if you like going with the flow more, planning that much could really stress you out. Maybe ignorance is bliss for you and your preferred method might be to distract yourself on your phone until you don’t have time to be worried. The best course to take before your flight depends entirely on you and what type of person you know yourself to be. Whether you choose to relax, distract, plan, or something else entirely, remember that you don’t need to stress: you’ve put in the time and dedication, tournaments are just the place to perform what you know.
