#811: 2x Olympic Archery Medalist Jake Kaminski — Lessons Learned and Mantras Used After 1,000,000 Arrows

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 Comince.

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. I've gone to events with him because he was my coach and is my coach in archery. I had my first competition in 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 Kaminski Archery, and then the website, jakekaminski.com. and we go all over the place and 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...

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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.

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nice to see you man yeah nice to see you too so glad to be doing this we've had I was joking before I recorded that we could just treat this like conversation 678, something like that. We've had a lot of conversations. It might be double that. It might be double that. It's probably double that if we count texts and the many, many thousands and videos. It just goes on and on. So let's get people some contact.

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, 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 Ray Curve. 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.

When I grew up, we shot up to 100 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 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 who 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, not 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? And 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 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. 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. 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.

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 a 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? It's just Jake Kaminsky. Yeah. I mean, when we have 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. 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 Stephen Rinella. during the writing of The 4-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. Everything that makes it. You take off all of the performance aids and then you shoot with that particular bow. I became interested in barebow for a few reasons. I saw it online on YouTube while I was Twilling 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 that 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 arteries, Olympic recurve. They have hunting. They have longbow now. They've got all sorts of stuff. So many different classes. And barebow was 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. Bye. 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 work week. The goal is not to find the cheap shortcut.

The goal is to look for oblique maybe uncommon approaches to various problems or goals or whatever. That's it. And in this case, I looked at the number of people competing in bare bones. 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 focused training. And so we'll come back to what that looked like. Let's talk about change.

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 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.

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 between a diamond and a 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? 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 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.

Of course, he didn't get the target either. And then it just kind of started from there. We found that local club that was down the street. It's a JOAD club, a junior Olympic archery development club. There's many of those around the country in 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 contacts. 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 our tree, 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 our tree. 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'll also see all over the world because I figured out well you can make the bow a lot shorter and have the ends of the bow recurve out like kind of towards the target.

to apply more tension. It's like an advanced longbow using laminations of wood instead of just a stick. Right, exactly. So now you have this laminated 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 Horsebow, which of course 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 Ray Curve 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 barebow. And then a compound has various cams. You can think of them almost like

cams on a weightlifting machine. Actually, pulleys. Yeah, 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 pounds, draw weight, and then you're holding, what would you say? Maybe between 8 and 12 pounds. 8 and 12 pounds. Depending on if it's a hunting or a competition. Yeah, right. So 8 or 12 pounds when you're at anchor, and to define that, that's when you have your very simple term.

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 more. The main difference in a 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 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's 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 these different options in a lot of places and if you can only start with compound great maybe that's where I started maybe you stay with compound yeah And at the highest levels, they do some absurd, absurd things. Actually, I just have to give credit where credit is due.

Also have had some fantastic conversations with Joel Turner, ShotIQ, his son, Bodhi. Do you want to just explain what he's capable of doing? Sure. So, you know that ex that I shot the Inside Out on my first era? So he will shoot that axe. So that same hitting that dime for about 120 arrows in a row, essentially.

under pressure when there's a hundred thousand dollars 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. Yeah. 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. 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 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, et cetera. 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. It 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 ten times out of ten every time within a day you'll hit it probably six to eight times out of ten yep 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 rare sight, which is basically a rare sight. It's a tiny circle, a fixed 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? That's a rule for a reason. Yeah, I mean, 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. 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 the minimum. At the minimum. Yeah. It's basically their...

let's just call it basketball, football, baseball, all wrapped into one. 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.

So I would have also been discounted. 100%. 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 this? 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

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. 100%. 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 100% 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.

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 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 of 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. that's because when you're shooting it 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 sardine.

Yeah, we could get a photo of me at Lancaster for people who want to see what it looks like. It's like a Tokyo subway car. 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, the less you bleed in combat. Sure, absolutely. 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 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.

shoot a shot right so there's all sorts of weird stuff that happened all the time for 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 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 yeah like i'm not recommending people do that with their kids but We 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. just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show

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So start your journey with AG1's next gen and experience the difference firsthand. Simply go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1.com slash Tim. 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, started shooting compound. 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. for all of the regions 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 a 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 a series in a slingshot, most people know a slingshot. But let's say instead of shooting a ball bearing, you're shooting an arrow out of the 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're training yourself.

Yes and no. 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 game. So I literally took a bow off the wall. I still have the bow. That was a clubbo.

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 U.S. 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 a 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 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 80s. 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 wouldn't be thrown out because we didn't fit the mold. That's how strict they are.

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 Championship. 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. Yeah. 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. And Skol! And at archery, I didn't have that identity.

Yeah, 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. 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 bow crew, which is very different from the horse bow 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. Oh, for sure. And it doesn't matter. No. 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 would 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 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 bald and prosper or was there more to it well yeah so uh 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. My number one competitor had had 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? And that's 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... the 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 medal 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 bends, 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 fought. 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. for the very first time before going to the Empire State Games. So if I took my scores at Empire State Games, I'd probably outshot my scores at Junior Worlds.

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 league I asked him afterwards and he said I was embarrassed to bring

those archers to 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 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 context, so it took me three to four years to get back to zero, square one. Where is my buddy Dan Shuler?

Three months. Oh, wow. Maybe. Maybe less. Huh. 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 100, 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.

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 moved 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, developed tendonitis, tendinosis in 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. Bye.

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. and 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 I 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 like 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 time frame, it was... Yeah. Just a lack of anything. And so fast forward to the positive affirmations using I am period. So we check our hand placement and our grip. every single shot to make sure it's exactly the same thing yes 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... When you're shooting an arrow, there's a difference between trying to hit the ten ring and trying to not miss the ten 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 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.

Alright, so you're rebuilding and rebuilding three to four years. Good God. I mean, it's an entire college experience, basically. Talk about brutal. But... You've made all 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 U.S. 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. 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. Maybe the pressure. 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. Yeah. No one gives a shit. Meaning in the U.S. 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. In contrast, if you're a top Olympic competitor in Korea, you are LeBron. You are Kobe. Everyone cares and everyone is watching. So it's a tremendous amount of pressure. Oh, for sure. 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 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 seed yourself in the ranking round. There's 64 men competing, one through 64, one versus 64, two versus 63, and so on. 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 there was 12 teams at the time. And so you then same thing, just like the 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, I would 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. It doesn't feel right.

Tschüss. If you're practicing, let's just say, to let down, which means slowly bring the string back to the bow and start over. Essentially abort the shot. You pull back and you're like, something doesn't feel 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 clicked the clicker when I was not prepared to release the shot.

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 semifinal. 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? That's just the assumption. That is the assumption.

That's such a dick question. Yeah, so like, I don't even know who the actual media outlet was, but it's like, so how does it feel to be shooting for bronze? have you been watching at all we are at the u.s men at that time were 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 won 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 the specific time at this. specific event for this specific reason.

And that specific reason is something that I've identified as an absolute crucial thing to do every single shot in order to succeed. That's how I ended up talking to myself at that time frame, 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.

We're there training and media is 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's he started saying things in korean responding to them as their questions were in korean as well and you can just see the the shock

of this reporter's face right and even the cameraman's like and just this response and so after the media left we asked coach lee so

What did you say to them? 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 medal. in 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 just doesn't shoot as well for whatever reason. 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 bows. So I shot Brady's bow and I shot Jacob Bookie's bow. Hold on a second. How similar are your draw lengths and your appendix, right? Yeah, not at all. but the thing is you guys can look it up but it's just like your physical proportions

are not the same. And at that level, certainly everything is customized. 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 arrow. 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 use their clickers And essentially I learned that I think Brady's bow, maybe I hit low eight. So about.

eight ten inches low at 70 meters so i would just aim high eight with his bow and jacob bookies i'd have to aim like low right blue or something crazy to actually have the arrow land in the middle so we just you know played this game right and so it was you know just this a 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 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 is gusting 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 is there any other strategy that you can build around the team? Yes. I mean, so for us, the wind 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 either shoot a 10 or you don't, and you're a teammate who is also your opponent. In individuals, he 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. 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 a 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 squeak by by a point or two. 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. And once we got to the semifinal against Korea, everybody said that was the gold medal match of the games. because everybody wanted to see that. Korea was powerhouse us 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 wild. They put us on TV because we were the first medal of the u.s our first chance to get a medal and you know back then it was twitter and i had comments saying i love my sports team whatever it is the sabers 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. Usually we have a windsock. The windsock is not a calibrated windsock. 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 downrange or so. And it's always on a specific pole at a specific height. And you have, you know, every so often their place. And so you have a general consistent reference as to what the Windsock's doing and how you can guess where to aim. And that's ultimately as best as you can do is guess.

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 hallowed ground. The lawnmower is anointed by the queen to be allowed to mow her grass. But because our windsock and the stand that held that windsock 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 than 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 leadoff. Jacob Ogey shoots second. Brady Ellison shoots third. And I have to do my job when I leadoff to shoot a... supremely confidential clean shots that you can depend on so 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 Wilkie 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's going on the target the moment I let it go. Because I've shot so many arrows, I've 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 leadoff. Coach Lee's 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 in 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. Whoever had the highest score of 24 arrows after four ends, because that's the total amount shot, that team won in advance in the match. That's an incredible story. That's crazy. I've never heard a bunch of these. This is wild. I can 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 about 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 yeah Tim would like to work with you yeah and so 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, so 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 I have plenty to work with and I don't think you need my help anymore. And I was like, uh because i've 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 yeah and so at some point i'm like a bit crusty fallen 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 luck on the faces of the Korean media is you do not worry about Coach Lee speaking his mind. Oh, no. He is 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. 100% the only non-Asian there. Which is fine. It was just Korean army. And tons of Korean kids. Also some 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 a 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 coachly motivational talk, which is like, 60% inspiration, 40% you need to shape up or ship out, toughen up kids. And at one point, because 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 is here training. Seriously. And I was like, oh, I see. If I can be an inspirational slash 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 a genius he's really one of a kind okay so those are my coach stories thank you coach lee let's talk about

your coaching and what we ended up doing. Yeah. 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'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 time frame but we i think i was maybe there for three to four days

once every six weeks. 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, yeah. 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 Sir, what's in the bag? Sporting 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 U.S., 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, I need you to be serious right now. What's in the queue? I'm like, it's solid phone. And they're like, yeah, but what's inside it? I'm like, phone. 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 Cotswolds Way and at every Tiny in 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.

Just batting cages right where you have 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. It had many different physiological limiters. Right now I have a bunch of torn extensors. I mean, they're probably going to require surgery in 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 ShotIQ in terms of 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. Then I would say also recognizing that given some of the physical limitations, it's like, okay, I can't do 500 hours a day. Forget it. We started it. 60-something arrows, a limited day, I think. Oh, max. Yeah, that was the absolute max. Yep.

And a lot of that had to do with 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. there was a lot more tension in the system than was necessary.

Which is, 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? Yeah.

back and forth juggling to figure out 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. I had the whole arm ripped out doing some combat support 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, infraspinatus, supraspinatus. 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 gonna 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 rather than trying to whack out We ultimately got to the point when we were training in person, at least, that we were doing, what, 200 plus hours on some days? Yeah. 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. I found it very, very helpful. What is blank bail practice? So 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 ten 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 bail 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 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 rest. 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, I'll say the beginning of the first session. And then towards the end, I'll 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 gonna focus on that.

for my plank bill. 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 bill 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 mat.

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... pistol yeah yeah exactly yeah very similar yeah similar 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 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? 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, in tens, 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 finish.

so that would be the principle of like attention 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 work on the technical aspects of how to apply that physically throughout the months and 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 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 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.

and proper tension in the back and on the arm. 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. And this also relates to the inner

Exactly. So when you're at anchor, so you've got the strings fully pulled back. Again, for people listening who are 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 while 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 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 hand's 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. Or tap the muscle I should be feeling as a primary mover when I'm supposed to feel it. Correct, yeah. 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. So I wanted... arrows to land very close to one another 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. a bunch of arrows, then moving that on the target face

is, I'm not going to say necessarily simple, but it ended up being pretty straightforward as we got further down. But doing the blank bail, got to the point with the blank bail, or 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 sometimes releasing with my eyes closed sure

And then, how long before Lancaster did I start aiming with the crest of the AeroTub? Yeah, so about two weeks. So what Tim was doing was... was 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 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 and we also hadn't adjusted your bow either because we did make compromises within your equipment to help work with. We did a bunch of stuff 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 where you would attach the strength.

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 add 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, we'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, Yeah, like 100 checklist points for every shot. And until you have a critical mass of those steps on autopilot, you cannot add more steps.

Therefore, given the compressed timeline we were dealing with, it was also waiting for my nervous system to adapt. And for that reason, 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. 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 palm.

Kind of the right next to your lifeline in that 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 site picture. Your site picture, right. So don't worry about where the tip of the arrow is.

And maybe I said it, maybe you said it. 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 250, two plus. 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 or roughly and floating and jesus taking the wheel was working so it was working really well until We start 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 won two small events at the eastern range in salt lake city which is awesome i think you shot like utah state shoots or something 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 bail, 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 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. So I would pay attention to the left-right. And just really quick, for those that don't know, with barebow, 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. 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 warm-up tournaments, thank God, those were there. And with the black

bale, the black background. 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 bareboding and 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. But it was hard to discern with that particular...

bail and everything around it. So what ended up happening in competitions, 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. But the main thing was your first few shots were so low.

And with barebow, 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 sight. So you sight in by walking up and down the string. So I put it another way.

If you had a sight on your bow or on your gun or whatever, you take some shots, assuming your technique is decent, and then based on where, okay, I landed bottom left, and then you adjust the sight. to move that point of impact. Correct. Can't do that in Verbo. Yeah, there's no actual aiming reference. Yeah, you're not allowed to use a sight. So what do you do? Well...

The first thing is for left-right, you do have something called a plunger. You can 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 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. 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 etch line versus the bottom of the laser etch line, and it's less than a millimeter wide. Yeah, and that makes a difference. Big difference. In terms of point of impact. Okay. 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 weeks out. Yeah. And I was like, well, keep this up. I'm definitely not going to Lancaster. It'll just be a complete clown card. My wife and I 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 statements you were making in regards to never being on such an emotionally... An emotional roller coaster from day to day. Yeah. Because that time frame was really challenging for you. It was wild because I would go from one setting and we ended up shooting at a CrossFit gym from...

7.30 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. Yeah, you can eat off that floor. You can 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. Which was your goal. Yeah. Even if I'm 10% off of this, I'm good. And then went to this tournament or mock tournament in the case of the League Knights.

And it was unmitigated disaster. Like 100 points under what you wanted to be. 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 the check, okay, there are 100 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 and it was like, nope, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. All right.

So two weeks out, 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 yeah and you don't even do that consciously Same thing with archery when you're shooting instinctive, per se. For sure. 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 him. 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, and I think we're... 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 are 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. Statistically, it's a zero sum. There's 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. And when you put the arrow on your bow, let's 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 rx7 before that you were using a easton avance avance 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 something that was three pens combined almost. Oh, yeah. As far as the diameter is concerned. So big, big difference. Yeah, and much heavier. Yes, 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 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 rest what was the model on this so for those barebow 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 barebow, 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. So also barebow shooters that are listening, we were using the 2315 size RX-7, 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 weight. 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 of 20 yards if the arrow rest does not fall six inches yeah so if not more yeah game over yeah that's it you're done yeah you're ten 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 not falling. And so mentally you're struggling with the aiming. 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. So I should highlight that there's 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. If you're training by yourself,

That'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 with me? 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

person right next to you on your right side because 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 to find a left-handed guy and stand right in front of him. Yeah, totally. So I did that.

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, of course. What happens, 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, the wheels came off. Yeah, it did. The wheels came off. I was like, aren't you stupid? Fuck this game. I didn't say that. 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, 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 NFAA 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 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.

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, 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 had three to five seconds left, which is not a good feeling. You'll see the timer. 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 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 also why 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 that do that, just like the sprinters in the Olympics who, oh my god, happen 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 like, you know, 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'er, oolong, they're all holy if they're powdered so you can mix them instantly. Even in cold water. 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're pretty skeptical at first. 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. Yeah. And it's amazing. Yeah, it's wild. So... I would say when we were doing heart 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, 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. 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, most high-level competitors, how early, how far before their first shooting do they arrive at Lancaster? Most pro shooters? Yeah. 45 minutes. Half hour. When would their plane land? Oh, sorry. A few days. Well, it depends. It 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.

but ideally you 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. How early did we get there? 10 days, 12 days early, I think, something like that. 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? 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, 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 bathrooms are. This is not a small thing. 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, and 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? Where is the least crowded bathroom? Where is the secret bathroom?

figuring all this out ahead of time because i recognize like 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 like i push 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. 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's not suppositories. 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. all swollen like a puffer fish and it's like okay sure this is our first day of four days of training we need to fix this and how do we fix this from an outsider's perspective that 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 you know, 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 after I shoot this 300 arrow day am I going to be sore and unable to shoot properly? Exactly. So many different things. 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? 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. 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. That's like the weapon right there. 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. Three 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? 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 bow hand ended up being something when i got fatigued for sure 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 are 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 in 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 7-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, deal with withdrawal syndromes from not having enough sugar because you used to have Cap'n 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 this 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 8.5x11 chip. Yeah, 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 fueling glutamine and pig tea and Learning to aim. Yes. Like a big boy. Yes. Then what happens at Lancaster?

What's the goal or 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. 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. 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? 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. Part of that, though, for me was, okay, Now this is a real competition. 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, just treat this like training with distraction. That's it. This is just another training session with a lot of distraction. It's healthy. And I have had my best competition.

performances, whether it was going to the Worlds in tango or the national championships in Sancho, Chinese kickboxing, when I've done that. And having high hopes, certainly. 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. In fairness, that was pretty rough. It was rough. That was rough. Yeah, I felt bad too. Yeah, it was bad. It was really bad. And I was like, okay, so this is it. This is like a meditation practice. Yep. and Success is viewing it as training with distraction and Just keeping calm. And if I get excited, that's okay. Just 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? close to 600 shooters on the line at one time. And what Heather is saying is that

When I crossed the line to straddle the line to shoot, there was just this calm that washed over me. You were just high-eyed walking around. Yeah, my eyes were saucers beforehand. Yeah, the moment you crossed, it was just like... this is what I do. 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 and I was like 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 hours, 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, that's distracting. And then there's a guy right behind me who has a huge longbow. He's in the longbow division. He's holding it sideways. And he's holding it sideways right in front of me. So I can't even lift my bow. Meanwhile, the timer's gone. Yeah. 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...

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 get comfortable with the process and the turnaround speed from one pair to the next pair shooting on the same bale. 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 I 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 score 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, 80s in there. Yeah. So, 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, 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. I feel like automatically some of these tweaks would lead to a higher score.

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 I think, you know, one approach maybe, and this is 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 athlete's credit.

Hank Kreigenhoff or something like that. I believe it'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 yeah 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? 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 hours.

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. Three hours later. 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 This might sound a little counterintuitive, but not setting a minimum number of hours you need to shoot, but a maximum number of hours. I was like, when you hit that, you are 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 risk. Where I got into trouble was, let's just say... I wanted to shoot 100 arrows as a minimum. And I would go, if I were shooting poorly, and I got to 100, I'll be like, I'm not ending on that. It's terrible. Yeah, exactly. I whip my back. I'm not ending on that.

terrible shitty end there's no way I want to end on a good rep so I push and push and push and more often than not it would just continue to deteriorate 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 start 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

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 a successful recurve archer because 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. They were just stacking the arrows in at the center. Shooting six arrow ends in the size of the OK symbol that you can make with your fingers, basically. And that's impressive, especially at that age. And so... same kind of thing you know you're like yeah i pointed them out look at these guys you know i bet you they're shooting x amount of arrows a day first 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, hey, how long have you 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.

I'm going to get back on the witness stand and defend myself. Not to offend myself. Not that you weren't good. It's just there's a stage. No, no, no. I'm not saying that 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 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. 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. But that's true for everything. 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 a 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. I'm all for it. I love that people are proud and passionate about what they're doing. And so 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 an 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, barebow, you name it, just stickbow, horsebow, 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 could 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 because it's really fun to build a community.

And then within that, we're going to have 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. 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 thumb release. So you can check out Joel and his monster thumb and his system as well. 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. It doesn't have to be a Lancaster as it was in my case. Which also, it's not where I started out. 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.

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 you shouldn't 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 oversaw 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 the Backyard Championship allows you to shoot multiple different disciplines and submit multiple different scores. So if you have a compound, a recurve, a barebow, a longbow, a horsebow, 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 the info, the leaderboard, all that info will just be all right there. All right, perfect.

All right, everybody check it out. At the very least, go to a ranch, 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. Also, if you have kids, this is an awesome activity to do with your kids. Absolutely. And on your YouTube channel, we recorded a video that'll be coming out soon.

Will be already? Yeah, and that will show Gear 101 from Jake, and then also... technique 101 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 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. Yeah, it's 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 Kaminsky, K-A-M-I-N-S-K-I. Correct. Kaminsky.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 in so many different ways and also I will say it's given me so much energy

in a sense. It's been such a recharging activity that it's given me a lot that I can then apply to other places. I cannot tell you. I've had... some 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. 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 for that. 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 is super important. And part of that, I'll give it another plug, jacobincity.com. Watch. Jake's videos on technique. Because if you are doing the same thing over and over and over again, 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. A thousand. 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. And the problems, I think, are very easy to avoid 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 form advice that I give on my YouTube channel. 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 archer, 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 getting very close to launching. That'll also be available on jaykaminski.com as well. And as Joel Turner said, either way, it's archery. You should try it. well thanks again Jake so nice to see you and train with you Heather thank you again and

Folks listening, show notes. We're going to have links to everything. As per usual, tim.blog.com slash podcast. I can pretty much guarantee you there will not be another Kaminsky 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, shoot a terrible shot. Don't go full monkey tilt and punch yourself in the groin. It's not worth it. Be kind. And... I appreciate the other hidden chuckle from behind the pillar. 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 from 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

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