Training Component Concept
One comment was pretty much what most archery coaches face everyday when trying to work with their athletes for advancement in achievement. “The reality is that I only have 1.5 hours with the kids each week and they want to shoot. I have a hard enough time getting them to stretch.”
Unfortunately this is the reality, however if a shooter or a parent comes to you and asks, “What more could we do to improve our athlete's chances at becoming a good archer?” Now what?
As coaches it is important to start thinking outside of the one and a half or two hour blocks that you have with your athletes doing sport specific work. As an athlete you need to be thinking about that one little extra thing you can do each day to improve your skill. I realize that a large majority of discussion I put out there is more mental training, coping skills and some physical conditioning.
These are some of the hardest areas to address when you have limited access to your shooters.
Physical fitness refers to the capacity of an athlete to meet the varied physical demands of their sport without reducing the athlete to a fatigued state. The components of physical fitness are: Strength, Endurance, Speed, Flexibility and Body Composition.
In general, Archery needs at least three of these components - Flexibility, Endurance and Strength. Speed and Body Composition are not issues that we see needing to be addressed very often in our sport.
Motor Fitness refers to the ability of an athlete to perform successfully at their sport. The components of motor fitness are: Agility, Balance, Co-ordination, Power and Reaction Time. This is where we fall into the sport specific issues - Balance, Co-ordination and Reaction Time.
Maybe we should try looking at this from a different perspective. What you see above the water is the sport specific activity, shooting. But below the water there are so many other aspects of what it takes to get to the tip above the water. If you only contribute with one component the iceberg cannot sustain its visibility above the water for very long.
Another coach didn’t feel that the medicine ball workouts were very useful. For one thing, he had stated that he had no access to medicine balls to do such a workout. That is a fair enough statement, and in reply to this I would like to clarify that these workouts do not have to be done with medicine balls. Depending on the age and physical maturity of you athlete you might want to use a soccer or basketball. Something, that is about the same size that can be used to encourage controlled movement. Medicine ball training is appropriate to all levels of ability, age, development and sport. To be most effective the program should contain exercises that match the pattern of movements of the sport, however in archery it has more to do with the development of the muscles that give us our balance ability and hold our bodies upright.
One other comment that came my way that I found very important was a need to communicate. As a coach we don’t often hear what the athlete is really saying, and vice versa. As an athlete we need to say what we are thinking and how we feel so that we can be supported by the people around us. In general people don’t always say what they are thinking, that maybe a good thing, but if you think you want to go somewhere, want to do something, achieve a goal, how are you ever going to get there if you don’t say it out loud. Say it to yourself, say it to you parents, your family, your coach, write it down. Evaluate what it is you want to do, be confident that you want to do it and then seek support to get it done. You may find that the only thing keeping you from even trying is you.
