Barebow is the fastest-growing discipline in target archery and the one people understand least. This is the whole picture in one post — what the class is, how aiming works with no sight, and the handful of things that separate archers who get good in a season from archers who stay stuck for years. Fair warning that the most useful part of this is probably the part where we argue that aiming matters less than you think. --- # Part 1 — what barebow actually is **A modern bow with the aiming aids taken off.** Same riser and limbs you'd see on a recurve line. You just can't use the things that make aiming easy. **Not allowed:** sights, stabilizers, clickers, or anything else that helps you aim or times your shot. **Allowed:** a finger tab, a plunger, an arrow rest, and weights inside the riser within whatever limits your rulebook sets. Read your governing body's equipment rules before your first competition. They're short, and the weight limits and the exact definition of "stabilizer" are where people get caught out on the line. --- # Part 2 — aiming with no sight **You use the point of the arrow.** The tip goes on the target and that's your reference. There is nothing else to look through. Which creates the obvious problem: an arrow only points at the target from one distance. Change distance and the whole trajectory changes. With a sight you'd move the pin. Barebow's answer is to **move your hand down the string instead.** ## String walking (some people call it string marking) Instead of hooking the string right under the nock every time, you hold **lower down the string**, counting stitches on your tab to a spot you can hit again exactly. The rule is the opposite of what most people guess: - **Closer target → hold further DOWN the string**, away from the nock - **Further target → hold UP**, closer to the nock Holding lower tilts the back of the arrow up in your sight picture, which raises the launch angle relative to your eye. So the closer the target, the deeper you crawl. **Your tab stitches are your sight tape.** Count them, write the number down, and that's your mark for that distance. As an illustration, one international barebow archer shoots 50 m at three stitches down — but that number is hers, not yours. It depends on your draw length, your arrow, your anchor, your bow. You have to build your own list, and then trust it. Once you have marks, the remaining question is *where on the target face the tip goes* — which is a real decision with real consequences, and it gets its own post: **[where to actually put the arrow tip](/forum-thread.html?id=acb1320f-b5d7-49a9-ab7d-533ea1f51f13)**. --- # Part 3 — the part that will actually make you better Here's the reframe, and it is worth reading twice. **Most archers build the shot around the aim. You want to build the aim around the shot.** The common approach: get the point pinned dead center, hold it there by force, and then execute whatever shot you can manage inside that constraint. That's backwards. It produces a picture that looks great right up until the release, when everything you were clamping down lets go at once and the arrow leaves sideways. The better approach: **execute your best possible shot — your best movement, your best expansion, your best follow-through — and take whatever aim you get inside that.** That trade feels awful at first. Your point will wander more. You will not feel locked on. It will seem less precise, and less safe. Shoot it anyway, because the scorecard disagrees with the feeling. ## Float is fine. Float is good. The wander has a name — **float** — and trying to kill it is probably the single most common mistake in aiming, across every discipline. A relaxed point drifting around the middle, attached to a clean shot, puts arrows in the middle. A point clamped rigidly on the exact center, attached to a tense shot, throws them everywhere. If you're floating around the red at 30 m but executing well, most of those are gold and some are ten. Fix the aim perfectly and shoot tense and they're all over the face. Your body learns to shrink the float on its own. You can see the target and you can see the point, and your brain genuinely wants to put them together — it will get better at it without being forced. What it cannot do on its own is recover a shot you strangled. **Focus on the movement. Let the aim come to you.** --- # Part 4 — your eyes Three things, and the first one is backwards from what most people do. **Focus on the target, not the arrow point.** Most archers make the point sharp and let the target go soft. Do it the other way: stare at the spot you want to hit, let it be the sharp thing in your vision, and let the arrow point sit blurry underneath it. Your eye can only truly focus at one distance. Spend it on the target. **Both eyes open.** Nearly every archer at international level shoots this way. If cross-dominance genuinely fights you, squint or close one — but try both open first and give it real time. **Hold your focus until the arrow lands.** Not until the release — until it *hits*. The instant you break away to see where it went, you've moved your head, and you moved it while the arrow was still on the string more often than you'd like to believe. --- # Part 5 — string picture, the rear sight you didn't know you had This one quietly costs people entire competitions. At full draw, the string sits blurred somewhere across your vision against the riser. That blurred string is **your rear sight**, exactly like the rear notch on a rifle. Where you place it controls your **left and right**. - Some archers put it on the left edge of the riser - Some put it down the middle - Some put it on the right edge, or just off the point **Where you put it does not matter. Putting it in the same place every single shot matters enormously.** Pick a placement, make it a rule, and never let it drift. Two things to watch: **It shouldn't be set at the start of the draw.** If you try to have the string picture correct before you draw, you'll draw crooked to get it there. Let it start off to the right and settle into place as you come to anchor. **It has to hold through expansion.** If the string picture slides left or right in the last moment before release, that shift goes straight into your left-and-right group. Unexplained side-to-side spread is very often this, not your form and not the wind. --- # Part 6 — when to aim, and the path up **Don't start aiming before setup.** A lot of archers point at the target from the moment the bow comes up, drawing the bow around an aim they're already trying to protect. The aim moves during the draw anyway, so all they've done is compromise the draw to defend something that wasn't going to survive. Come up, get your shoulders aligned, reach setup — *then* be aware of aim. **Come in high and to the right** (for a right-handed archer), and settle down onto your spot as you come into anchor. Lowering into the target is smoother and more repeatable than swinging up into it or hunting around for it. **Practice the path with a light bow.** Just the movement: up, over the right edge, down to setup, settle to anchor. Do it enough that your body owns the route. Then on your real bow you're not steering — you're just shooting, and your attention is free for the parts that matter. --- # Part 7 — aim through the release The shot is not over at the release. **Keep directing the point into your spot until the arrow is in the target.** Not a shove — this isn't extra effort during expansion. It's a continuation. Your direction into the target simply doesn't stop when the string goes. The bow keeps pointing where you meant it to. Do that and the whole shot stays pointed at the target through the only moment that decides anything. Stop early — relax, break focus, drop the bow arm to look — and the arrow inherits every bit of it. --- # Part 8 — consistency beats good form. Not a little. A lot. Try this thought experiment. Take a perfectly consistent bow. Put it in a perfectly consistent machine. Perfectly consistent arrows, perfectly consistent conditions. Every arrow lands in the same hole. Every time. Forever. **That's the whole sport.** Everything you do from here is removing variables between you and that machine. Which leads somewhere people find uncomfortable: **you do not need good form to shoot well. You need repeatable form.** Consistently unorthodox beats inconsistently textbook, every time. If two shots look different and one has prettier form, the better shot is whichever one you can reproduce. That isn't an argument against coaching — every coach is teaching you to move the way human bodies move *most repeatably*, which is exactly the goal. But if something slightly odd is genuinely more repeatable for your body, that's the one to keep. Don't abandon a shot that works to chase a shot that photographs well. --- # Part 9 — take your equipment out of the equation You are one source of variance. Your gear is the other, and gear is much easier to fix. Most archers are chasing form problems that are actually equipment problems. **Check your brace height every session, before you shoot.** This is the big one. Brace height moves as a string settles, and when it moves your nocking point moves with it — which changes how your arrows tune, which changes where they land. Shoot a great string of arrows into a bad group and you'll spend the evening rebuilding form that was never broken. Measure it the same way every time (throat or back — pick one and stick to it), know your number to the sixteenth, and write it somewhere you'll actually see it: on the square, on a strip of tape on the limb, on the quiver. **Same string, every session.** A different string is a different bow. **Identical arrows. Genuinely identical.** Same spine, same length, same point weight, same fletching. A quiver holding a couple of different shafts and three different point weights will produce groups no amount of practice can tighten. If you have a mixed bag, sort it before your next session. **Draw far less weight than you can pull.** If you can max out at 70, there is nothing wrong with shooting 35 — plenty of good trad shooters go lower than that on purpose. Weight you can hold without fighting is weight you can repeat. Weight that fights you wrecks your form long before it wrecks your score, and it makes everything else on this list impossible. **Tune your arrows to your best shot, not your average one.** Then a clean release flies clean and a bad release shows you it was bad. That's a diagnostic you get for free on every arrow, and you lose it if you tune to your mistakes. Fixing just this section moves a very large share of archers more than another season of practice would. --- # Part 10 — pick one aiming method and stop shopping Instinctive, gap, string walking, point-of-aim, a blend. There are people shooting at a very high level with every one of them. **The method matters far less than committing to it.** Method-hopping is the single most reliable way to stay mediocre — every switch resets the subconscious calibration you'd been building, so you keep starting over at zero and never find out whether any of them work. Pick one. Give it months, not sessions. If you want a starting point that works quickly and scales: **string walk shallow and shoot gap.** Crawl about half a finger to pull your point-on in closer to your working distance, anchor high near your eye so you're looking more directly down the shaft and your gap is smaller to begin with, and go from there. Longer arrows, if your tuning allows, also shorten your point-on. The ideal is a point-on that lands near the distance you shoot most. Practice with lighter arrows than you hunt with — flatter trajectory, smaller gaps, faster feedback, better confidence. Save the heavy setup for when it counts. --- # Part 11 — aim small Don't aim at the target. Don't aim at the gold. Aim at a **specific tiny thing** — a mark you drew on the face, a fleck of color, a single fiber. Aim at something small and you miss small. It costs nothing and works immediately. If you're not keeping arrows in a two or three inch circle at 12 to 15 yards, the cause is usually one of three things, and they're all on this page: your gap is enormous, you never committed to a method, or your equipment is still a variable. --- # Part 12 — the two hard parts **There's no clicker.** On a sighted recurve, the clicker mechanically confirms you've reached draw length. Barebow takes that away. Your draw length is now pure consistency, shot after shot, with nothing to check it — and it is genuinely the hardest thing about the discipline. It's also why everything in Part 9 matters so much: you can't afford variables you're able to eliminate. **Target panic shows up here more than in the sighted classes.** Learn what it is before it finds you, not after. The mechanics and the only reliable way through it are in [Trad 101 Part 2](/forum-thread.html?id=59fa9241-8688-4187-88a8-a6248999d6d9) — it applies to a target line exactly as much as to a treestand. And the reward, for the record: when a barebow shot comes together — nothing between you and the target but your own execution, and the arrow goes exactly where you meant — there's nothing else in archery like it. Compound and sighted recurve will forgive a ragged shot and give you the middle anyway. Barebow won't. Which is precisely why people who find it stop shooting anything else. --- # Part 13 — "is barebow traditional?" Reasonable people disagree, and the argument comes up constantly, so here's both sides. **For:** no sight, no stabilizer, no release aid. You, a bow, and a string. About as stripped-back as archery gets. **Against:** it's a modern bow — modern riser, modern limbs — shot for score on a target face under a rulebook. Longbow is the genuinely traditional discipline. Barebow is a modern competitive class that happens to have the aids removed. That's why we keep them as **separate boards** here: Barebow for the competitive class, Traditional & Longbow for the stick-bow side. Plenty of people shoot both and the technique overlaps, but the gear conversations go in very different directions and both deserve their own room. --- ## Where to learn more - **Jake Kaminski** — Olympic silver medalist with an unusually practical run of barebow and string-walking content. He shoots what he teaches. - **Online Archery Academy** — the clearest coaching anywhere on aim, float, string picture and shot process. Aimed at sighted recurve, but the aiming principles in Parts 3 through 7 carry over to barebow almost unchanged. ([the aiming video](https://youtu.be/_ShP27UO5KE)) - **Kramer Ammons** — trad-side, no-nonsense, very good on the consistency-over-form argument in Parts 8 and 9. ([the beginner video](https://youtu.be/2eqq4XU_wsA)) - **Tom Clum / RMS Gear** — form, tuning and the shot itself, in real depth. - **World Archery** — worth watching the international barebow coverage now that it's a proper championship class. ([a short intro from a GB team barebow archer](https://youtu.be/OoszhkwXv4g)) - Your national body's **rulebook**. Genuinely. It's short. --- **Just starting barebow?** Post below — what you're shooting, what distance, and where it's going wrong. Somebody here has had the same problem. **Been at it a while?** If you disagree with Part 3, say so. That one splits rooms and the argument is worth having in public.