Everything we teach archers is based upon the exclusion of distractions. Shot routines are designed to guide the archers attention from one important thing to the next with no distractions. We teach archers that if they become distracted, they re to break off their current shot by letting down and then starting over.
Distractions cannot help us. (At least I haven’t been able to find one that can.)
Recently students in school have been observed to being less able to focus than they had in the past. I had trouble focusing in school, being somewhat scatterbrained, but inherited intelligence bailed me out in the lower grades, but when I got to college I had to take concrete steps to remove distractions when I studied. No music, no TV, and I darkened the room I was studying in and just used a desk lamp to shrink my world down to a tiny cone of light. Then I had to overcome decades of bad habits.
So, what has been causing the current decline in the ability to focus. Most definitive studies are implicating smartphones. The are designed to attract attention with sounds, flashing lights, vibrations, etc. And there is no control over what that attention was stealing time from.
When I was still a classroom teacher, I asked students to turn off their phones while in class, because they were just a source of distraction from what they were trying to achieve, an education. Many ignored my advice and most paid a penalty thereby. Remembering my own experience, I assume their native smarts got them through grade school and high school classes but the stakes had been upped, as I had found out decades earlier.
Shooting arrows is a focus training sport. If archers get distracted, or worse distracts themselves, their results suffer (garbage in, garbage out). I think parents recognize this intuitively as many, many parents have told us that their children have benefited from their archery lessons in that way.
So, do you notice smartphone distractions occurring in the serious archers you coach? Is this a topic we might want to add to our teachings?
