Through my younger years, I was focused on sports. I spent more time on a field, in a weight room, or in a gym than anywhere else. My summers went to sports camps and working with high-level football coaches. But these details let me improve, grow, and stand out from others.
Once I walked away from competitive athletics and went all-in on professional archery, my skills grew fast. Why? Because I carried the training disciplines from my football days straight to the archery field. As I progressed as a professional archer, I saw how directly my practice disciplines improved my hunting.
Drills like one-shot precision, speed recovery, wind compensation, gap filling, and range estimation all came into play once I put on camo and headed to the woods. I started filling tags. Here are five backyard drills that will do the same for you.
One-Shot Wonder
Focusing on perfect single-arrow shots is critical for hunters. Groups are great but making one perfect shot has great importance in real-world hunting.
Professional 3D archery taught me the value of one arrow. Target archery has you shooting groups of three to six arrows at the same face all the time. The 3D game is all about one arrow, one target, and that’s hunting.
When you shoot a single arrow and score it, you learn fast whether you seized the moment or blew it. With multiple arrows in the target, your brain focuses on the good ones and ignores the misses. If those misses came on your first shot, you’d have lost the opportunity in the field.
Get in the habit of shooting one arrow at each distance your pins are set for. I call this running the gauntlet and do it every week in practice. If you have a four-arrow quiver, shoot one at 20, one at 30, one at 40, and one at 50. Next round, reverse the order.
The other thing that factors into single-arrow training is not having other arrows to aim at. I like a fresh look at the foam and visualize where I need the arrow to land. I also learn to aim at the silhouette in low light rather than a 12-ring. This is all critical to being a good hunter.
If you have multiple targets, stand in one spot and pick a different target for each shot. Range it, pick a specific aiming point, and make one clean shot. This drill is built entirely around making that first cold shot count.
Need for Speed
Speed training is a great way to learn to control your heart rate. The real key is learning not to rush your shot but instead to lower your heart rate, collect your thoughts, and execute perfectly.
One of my favorite times to hunt is late summer into early fall, chasing mule deer, elk, and pronghorn on foot. Those hunts have taught me that speed matters, not in the shot itself, but in getting to a position and recovering fast enough to execute before the window closes.
In field competition, I learned this on steep, mountainous terrain. My heart was pounding out of my chest from climbing, and my scores dropped when I wasn’t allowing myself to recover and execute. Then I started working on exercise and breathing drills to lower my heart rate faster, and the accuracy improvement was immediate.
Pick up the pace when retrieving arrows and returning to the shooting line. Jog to and from the target, with your arrows safely stowed. The goal is a pace that gets your heart beating and recreates a hunting scenario.
Once you return to the line, load an arrow and focus on deep, slow breaths to bring your heart rate down. Focusing on breath control has a direct impact on shot control. Reload, breathe, recover, and then execute with control. Combine this with the One-Shot Wonder technique, and you’ve got a drill that trains both physical recovery and single-shot precision.
Playing the Wind
Wind affects every archer. An arrow is easily manipulated by it, and the moment of truth isn’t going to wait for calm conditions. Your success as a hunter will come down to your ability to shoot in the wind at some point.
Professional archery helped teach me how the bubble in the sight can be effective in compensating in the wind.
At a tournament years ago, I was qualifying for a US team, shooting at 70 meters. The wind gusts got so bad that a target with arrows still in it came rolling past my sight pin and off the range. I let my bow down, waited for the four archers chasing their target to run by, shook my head, and regrouped.
I won a gold medal at that event. The reason is I’d learned to shoot as well as possible in windy conditions. Some of it boiled down to knowing how to shoot in the wind from an aiming point of view, but the other part of the equation is the timing point of view, allowing the big gust to happen and waiting for the lulls to make a quick, deliberate shot.
Here’s a good way to practice. If it’s windy out, first find a spot where you’re protected from wind, like a corner of a fence or the side of a building. That’s where you should be so that you aren’t affected by the wind, but your arrow still will be. Make a clean shot, and once your arrow passes three feet from you, it’s in the wind, and you can see it drift.
Over time you learn how wind speed affects impact. Once you have started to understand how wind speed affects impact, start doing the same thing, except now use your bubble to guide the arrow back to center.
As a rule of thumb: Your arrow drifts in the same direction you lean or “cant” your top limb. Your sight bubble shows you how much you are leaning or canting the bow. What I did to learn how to offset wind drift was to learn how much to lean the bow into the wind so the arrow would still impact in the middle.
To practice this, go out on a calm day, shoot groups at each distance with your sight level positioned to a quarter, half, and full bubble out of level. See where those land at any given distance. Note how far each impact drifts off-center at each distance.
Write these numbers down so you have a reference chart for your setup.
Then practice in the wind, standing behind your barrier, applying what you learned on the calm day. In light, consistent wind, leaning a quarter to half bubble out of center will get you back to the middle. Every setup is different, so do the homework for yours.
In this case, I would have a strong right‑to‑left wind. At 40 yards, I could still aim point on as long as I buried my bubble to the left, because my top limb is tilted into the wind.
I’ve used this technique to make clean hits on spot-and-stalk hunts in high wind. It works, but it takes work to learn it. In pro archery we call it “bubbling.”
Filling Your Gaps
One of the most neglected practices for bowhunters is learning to fill sight pin gaps. Most hunters practice at even distances: 20, 30, 40, 50. How often do you practice at 36, 44, or 53?
As a baseball player, I was constantly drilled on hitting in the gaps. My batting improved when I could place the ball between fielders rather than at them.
Your success as a hunter comes from knowing your gear at distances that aren’t round numbers. Animals rarely stand at a convenient distance long enough to range perfectly and set your sight. I fill tags in those situations from knowing where to hold on the fly.
Practice at odd distances. At 36 yards, try splitting the gap between pins by holding your 30-yard pin high, your 40-yard pin low, or looking through the gap between them. See which method is most accurate for you.
This drill teaches you arrow drop at a practical level and builds confidence to compensate on the fly during a hunt.
The Range Game
Rangefinders are great for backyard practice and in the field, but learning to aim at odd numbers is mandatory for a bowhunter. Sometimes you need to learn to use your eye as much as the rangefinder.
When I was being recruited for football, I had to prove I could throw balls at random distances with accuracy. Learning to estimate distance is an absolute for a hunter. Combine that skill with your ability to fill gaps, and you become dangerous at any yardage.
The method that works best for me to learn how to estimate distance and make a good shot is a confirmation approach to training. Carry a Leupold rangefinder during every practice session. For each shot, step to a slightly different spot in your yard, take your best guess at the distance, then range it and shoot it with your sight being perfectly on the yardage. After you shoot it, range it again, but this time also range key things that help you understand how that distance adds up.
For example, the rock on the ground is 20 yards, and that rock is halfway to the target. So finding key points that add up to the distance helps you get to the total. Your brain starts to calibrate all these together, and you get better at quick estimations that are accurate.
With time, your eye starts to calibrate distance the same way your rangefinder does, but only if you practice estimation as often as you shoot. Back when I shot professional 3D, my score and paycheck were almost always determined by how well I judged distances.
Distance estimation works differently for everyone. Some people guess a total number. Some find a 20-yard reference and build from there. Use your rangefinder to get distances to several waypoints on the way to the target, and the puzzle pieces of total distance start to add up.
SIDE NOTE: I’ve always done my best guessing in 10-yard increments, probably from staring at first-and-10 markers on a football field for years. When I judged targets, I would always go 10 yards at a time. Other people like to find the halfway point and get that distance, then double it. Find what works for you, take your best guess, then confirm with the rangefinder.
