Practice Makes Permanent

​You don’t get better without practicing. In fact, if you don’t practice enough you’re likely to get gradually worse as your brain cannot build and utilise its muscle memory. However, you have to practice quality. 

Whatever you do in practice is what your body learns to do, and the more you practice that process the more permanent that process becomes as it builds itself into your muscle memory. “Practice makes perfect” is a misnomer. Consistency is important and if you are doing something badly, consistently, that’s still better than doing something well occasionally. When you practice you make your technique more permanent, and that’s good, but practicing quality is better. If you practice quality shots, with technique that is conducive to consistent arrow flight, then you make your shot consistently high quality. So it’s important to practice, but it’s even more important to practice quality.
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Training can be tedious. Sometimes you have some part of your technique to work on, when you do that's all that should occupy your mind. Forget about everything else, even aiming to start with, and focus solely on getting this one new part of your technique into your muscle memory. That takes anything from 1000 to 10,000 shots so it’s important to keep focussed, and don’t overcomplicate by trying to change more than one thing at once. As that element becomes more natural you start to incorporate it into your usual process where aiming becomes more important, so that’s when to start thinking about executing a complete shot.
 
There will be times, especially in the middle of a heavy competition season, where you aren’t working on anything in particular. This is when it is hardest to keep motivated in training and showing up to training to just go through the motions isn’t using training effectively. To really make the small steps needed to get to the top you have to find ways of using this time to its fullest. The biggest issue for most archers is that their competition scores are worse than those in training. This is always likely but making that gap smaller is vital.

Emulating competition conditions is very difficult but using different techniques in training can help do this. You can try scoring your rounds and hold yourself to some account for that score by promising to share it with people, or by competing against someone else. You can be more inventive though. You can try setting yourself a target of a number of tens and trying to shoot this many tens in as few arrows as possible. An experienced compound archer might aim for 50 tens, an experiences recurve might aim for 30. Don’t let yourself finish a session until you’ve shot at least a certain number of tens, say. Or give yourself a number of points to drop, perhaps as many as you might expect to drop on a 720, and shoot as many arrows as you can before you drop more than that. You can choose a previous competition on Ianseo and compete in that tournament, shoot a ranking round and find where it would rank you, then take that persons place in the knockouts and try to win each match.

Practicing matches is the most important part of competition practice because that’s what gets you your wins. You can use a random number generator (Google has one if you just search for it). Shoot your three arrows, then generate three numbers, if the number is 1 or 2, say, then your opponent scores 9, any higher then they score 10. You can change that threshold to alter the difficulty.

Google's Random Number Generator

This will give you the sense of having to compete against another archer, not knowing what they are going to shoot and getting used to both being ahead and having to catch up.

Finally, don’t train too much. If you train so much that your shot starts to suffer, your technique isn’t as good and your muscles are fatiguing too quickly, then stop training. Whether that be just for that session, you need to take a break or stop training and pick it up again tomorrow, or whether that be a fatiguing over many sessions. You may find that you are fatiguing after 200 arrows, where before you could shoot 250. That means your muscles aren’t getting the time to recover, so give yourself a day or two off to fully rejuvenate before you train again. You won’t get quality training used to its fullest potential if you are shooting tired shots.
 
In short, make sure you use your training time as well as you can. Quality is important. Find a way to keep yourself motivated and concentrated on every shot. Concentration is a skill and being able to concentrate for 72 arrows in a row is important but barely achievable. It becomes much more achievable, though, if you are used to it in practice.