There is a cycle that happens to almost everyone who tries to switch to a recurve or longbow. You get the bow in spring. You shoot all summer, every time you walk past it. You get good in the backyard. Then August comes, the season is real, and the confidence isn't there. So you hang the recurve up, take the compound out, and tell yourself *maybe next year*. And then next year you do it again. This post is about breaking that cycle. *([Part 2](/forum-thread.html?id=59fa9241-8688-4187-88a8-a6248999d6d9) covers the shot itself — holding position, aiming, and why target panic happens.)* --- ## The single biggest tip: don't start in October If your first serious trad shooting happens in hunting season, you have set yourself up to fail. The season is the worst possible place to build confidence, because every shot matters and you have no margin. Start now, whenever now is. And get shots at live targets before the season, on things where a miss costs nothing: - **Small game.** Squirrels, in particular. If you can hit a squirrel at 30 yards, a deer at 14 stops feeling impossible. - **Pigs, if you can get to them.** Two days of hog hunting will teach you more about whether your broadheads, arrows and nerve actually work than a whole summer of foam. Both do the same job: they prove to you that you can do it, before it counts. ## Expect to miss, and expect it to sting It is completely normal to miss your first several animals with a stick bow — and not by a little. High, over the back, is the classic. There are people who teach this for a living who missed ten or more before their first, over multiple seasons, and then found the floodgates opened once they got one. So if you miss the first few, you are not doing badly. You are on schedule. Backyard accuracy does not survive first contact with a live animal, and nobody's does. ## Two thoughts you have to kill **"If only I had my compound."** You don't. You could play that game forever — if only I had a rifle, if only it were closer. It goes nowhere. **"I'll just take the compound today."** If you carry it, you will use it, and you will never shoot one with the recurve. Some people sell the compound outright to remove the temptation. That's not silly, it's just honest about willpower. The useful way to frame it: would you rather take a doe with the recurve, or a giant with the compound? Either answer is fine — but you have to actually pick one, because carrying both means picking the compound every time it gets hard. ## And a reality check on distance Average shot distance on a Pope & Young animal is about **24 yards**. Within the traditional community, surveys put it nearer **15**. That is a completely ordinary trad distance. There's a knock-on effect worth understanding. Compound hunters often say they never get deer inside 20 yards — but that's because they shoot them at 40 before the animal ever works its way in. With a recurve, an animal at 40 is where your hunt *starts*. Your stand placement and your whole approach to ambushing change. --- ## The number one shooting mistake This one is worth more than anything else here. If you already shoot a compound, you have spent years building good biomechanics — standing tall, head up, repeatable anchor, running your shot properly. **Then people pick up a recurve and instantly throw all of it away.** Feet spread wide, hunched over, bow canted 45 degrees, whipping arrows off at three-quarter draw, as though a traditional bow demands a traditional-looking crouch. It doesn't. **Stand up and shoot it exactly like your compound.** A bow is a bow. You hold the string instead of a release, and you grip the riser differently. That's the difference. Everything else you already know transfers, and you throw away years of practice by abandoning it. One useful trick if you're not sure: have someone film you. Plenty of experienced hunters are drawing three-quarters of the way and are genuinely convinced they're at full draw and anchored. Video settles it in about two seconds. --- ## Aiming: the actual menu There's endless argument about this, mostly because people use the same words for different things. It sorts out cleanly: **Subconscious — instinctive.** You look at the spot and your brain sets the trajectory, the way you'd throw a rock. No conscious reference to the arrow. **Conscious — gap, fixed crawl, string walking.** All of these use the arrow tip as a reference against the target. - *Gap*: hold the tip a known distance below the spot, based on range. - *String walking*: like a single-pin slider, except the "sight tape" is marks on your finger tab. Slide down the string for closer shots. - *Fixed crawl*: pick one crawl — around 20–25 yards is popular — and leave it there. Practical for hunting, because you cannot re-crawl while a deer is walking in. **A blend — sometimes called "instinct gap."** You're aware of the arrow tip in your peripheral vision but you're not calculating anything. You draw, the sight picture either looks right — green light — or it doesn't, and you run your shot from there. A lot of hunters end up here without ever naming it. **And please kill this myth:** instinctive shooting does not mean snap shooting. You can shoot instinctively *and* have a disciplined shot execution. Plenty of people who call themselves gap or fixed-crawl shooters release the instant they touch their face, which is snap shooting with a nicer name on it. The aiming method and the shot execution are two separate things. --- ## Arrows, spine, and the mistake that wastes money **Buy a test kit.** Don't decide your spine from what worked in your last bow, or from what somebody with a different draw weight shoots. Grip geometry, mass weight and limb timing all change what a bow wants. Get 500 / 400 / 350 and let the bow tell you. **Start around 500 spine** if you're shooting 40–50 lb. People balk at that — "500 is what my kid shoots" — but your kid shoots 40 lb from a compound and you're pulling 42 off your fingers. It's fine. **Give yourself room to adjust.** The most frustrating thing you can do is start at the stiff extreme, where the arrow must be full length with 250 grains up front just to fly. Now you have nowhere to go. A spine with room to move lets you play with length and point weight until it flies. **Keep arrows as long as you can.** A longer arrow means less crawl to reach your point-on, which keeps the bow closer to a normal tune. **Stiffer beats weaker, all else equal** — a stiff shaft penetrates better. A weak one flexes on impact like pushing a wobbly noodle through a hole, and bleeds energy doing it. ## Arrow weight: heavier is not automatically better For years the standard advice was "shoot the heaviest arrow you can." That advice has been walking back, including from people who used to give it — some of whom were shooting 750-grain arrows and have since come down to the high 500s and shoot better for it. The better rule: **shoot the most accurate setup that gives you perfect arrow flight.** For a 43–58 lb bow that tends to land somewhere around **550–650 grains**. If dropping 75 grains adds five yards to your effective range, that's worth more than the extra momentum you gave up. Perfect arrow flight is what actually matters. An arrow that leaves the string wobbling bleeds energy the whole way to the target, and no amount of weight fixes it. ## One tuning warning If you take a perfectly tuned bow and start crawling down the string, **you will change your tune.** You're pre-loading the lower limb, so the limbs come out of time. Usually it's a small fix — nock height, tiller if you have it, finger pressure, or where you sit in the grip. But expect it rather than being surprised by it. And the sane test: if it's flying well and you're hitting where you look, you're tuned. It doesn't matter what a forum says your nock height should be. --- ## Bow length — the myth worth questioning Plenty of people assume you need a short bow for tree stands and ground blinds. In practice, hunters running **64–66 inch** bows very rarely hit a situation they can't shoot from — and when they do it's usually a blind built for compounds with a badly placed cross-member. The reasoning that convinced me: someone practicing seriously might shoot 15–20,000 arrows a year, and in a good season take 10 to 15 shots at animals. So **99.9% of the arrows out of that bow are practice**. Set the bow up for those, not for the rare awkward case. A longer bow is more forgiving and more pleasant to shoot. Bonus: from the ground you can rest a long bow on the lower limb tip while an animal approaches, so the movement to full draw is inches shorter. --- ## The short version 1. Don't start in October. Start now, and shoot small game first. 2. Expect to miss several animals. That's the normal path, not failure. 3. Leave the compound at home, or you'll never do it. 4. Stand up and shoot it like your compound. A bow is a bow. 5. Buy a test kit; start near 500 spine; keep arrows long and give yourself room to tune. 6. Chase perfect arrow flight, not maximum weight. **→ [Part 2: the shot, in three jobs](/forum-thread.html?id=59fa9241-8688-4187-88a8-a6248999d6d9)** — building a holding position, aiming, and the reason target panic happens to nearly everyone. --- ## Where to learn more None of this is ours to claim — traditional archery is taught well by a lot of people, and some of it needs showing rather than telling. If you want to go deeper, these are worth your time: - **The Push Archery** — YouTube channel and an online school built around getting new trad shooters up to speed quickly. Their film *The Push* is a good place to start if you're on the fence about switching. (thepusharchery.com) - **RMS Gear** — YouTube channel with a lot of shooting-form content, and a shop that has specialized in traditional for thirty years. Useful if you want the coaching side explained properly. - **Three Rivers Archery** — trad specialist retailer, and a genuinely good place to ask a question about tuning, brace height or broadheads. Worth knowing about given how few local shops stock traditional gear. - **Bear Archery** — Fred Bear's company is still making recurves and longbows, and their Hunting 101 podcast runs long interviews with trad hunters and coaches. Good listening for the season and the history both. If your local shop carries trad, use them first — that's the whole point of the [first-bow post](/forum-thread.html?id=1e06b4cb-214c-4a51-a72a-f23580c084e2). These are for when nobody nearby does, or when you want to go further than a shop visit can take you. **Got a resource that helped you?** Post it below — this list should grow. *Questions about any of it, ask below. No question is too basic here.*