Books - not just good for target practice, you can read them too!

There have been some great books and online recourses written recently on learning archery. These can be a great tool to remind and reinforce the lessons you’ve already been taught during our beginners couse and you'll learn a whole host new skills to help you become a great archer.

The following books are recommended for someone who has just started in archery hopefully after doing a progressive beginners course (see our courses page for current availability of our great weekend, 3 week ‘Fast Track’ or regular 5 week beginers courses in London Bridge). The best books at this level help you to develop a solid, consistent form without going into deeply technical variations on the standard elements of the shot sequence. All three of the following books provide a clear guide to building a good shot sequence and will help a novice archer achieve good consistent form.

Archery (Steps to Success): Kathleen Haywood (Author), Catherine Lewis (Author) 

This is a very good book for people looking for a structured way to become a solid archer. 

• Thorough - it's a very thorough book and doesn’t miss out anything that a novice archer needs to know.
• Easy to follow - provides an easy to follow program of exercises and provides space to record how well you have done on each exercise. A fun and interesting way to learn.
• Clear illustrations - good clear photos and drawings of each step to help you to conceptualise your body position.
• Bow tuning - a great section on basic bow tuning so you can get your bow up to speed at the same time as you improve your form.

Other good beginner books to try are:

Archery Fundamentals: A Better Way to Learn the Basics by Douglas Engh (Author)

Less rigidly structured than Steps to success, so is good if you prefer to structure your own training/learning your way.

The Archery For Beginners Guidebook by Archery GB (only available through archery stores, e.g. Clickers, Aim 4 Sport, Merlin etc)

Has a very good guide on archery etiquette and protocols in competitions and in clubs. 

The Following online sources can also be helpful:

KSL International Archery 

http://www.kslinternationalarchery.com/Technique/KSLShotCycle/KSLShotCycle-USA.html

This has a very good shot sequence. It's brief in its description but is free to look at so worth a read. It does get pretty technical though. 

Archery Interchange http://www.archeryinterchange.com/forum.php

A very popular UK archery forum, this can be a useful recourse for answering specific questions. Although do bear in mind that as it’s a forum there is often lots of arguing that can be distracting and confusing. The loudest voice is also not necessarily the most accurate!

These are the ones that I particularly favour but there are many more useful resources out there. Do let us know if you have any other recommendations that you've found useful on your archery journey!

Roger - 2020 Archery Instructor

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Roger : An Archers Path by Roger Huggins

Hi, my name is Roger and I've been shooting all sorts of bows for about 6 years. I’ve been teaching modern recurve archery at 2020 Archery for the past 8 months during which time I have taught over 200 people and counting. I learnt to shoot while I was at university in Sheffield with a recurve training bow. I was fortunate enough to be able to shoot compound bows and modern recuves after which I bought myself a very nice long bow which I still shoot today. I have a love of historical archery and own - or have owned - a long bow, a horse bow and a Chinese repeating crossbow.

Last year I came back to modern recurve archery when I started using them to teach beginners. To refresh and expand my knowledge I read several books on archery and coaching (more of this later) and I also started practicing with the recurve several times a week. After a few months of practicing and improving my form with a training bow I started building my dream recurve. Components started trickling in during September 2012 with the aim of having everything together ready for me to start shooting in competitions early in 2013.

Which neatly brings me to the aim of this blog, over the next few months I am going to share my experiences of my journey along the path from being a seasoned traditional archer, through intermediate archer, to (hopefully) competitive modern recurve archer.

Hopefully this will be interesting.. and hopefully it will also help beginner and intermediate archers avoid some of the pitfalls and problems that I’m encountering myself. I’m also working with a few people at the club trying to sort various issues which I’ll be able to share with you. I’ll be offering suggestions on how to move forward with your archery if you find yourself getting stuck in a rut, whether its getting over a slump or just looking to get something more from archery than shooting a few ends in your club once a week (not that there’s anything wrong with shooting a few ends once a week!). 

Well that's more than enough about me, my next post will be on improving your knowledge to improve your shooting, what books to read and when and how to get the most out of watching the professionals.

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