We are finally getting more than just a scant supply of resources on the mental game of archery. One such new source I encountered just before I published my book, “A Guide to the Mental Game of Archery,” is “Choose to Be a Winner” by Jens Fudge of Denmark.
I loved the tone of the book. The voice in my ear was that of a friendly coach/shooting partner who had, by all means, “been there and done that.” I am a little jealous of that tone.
And there is novelty in the contents. I read ideas and approaches I had seen nowhere else before, so something new is always welcome.
An especially strong segment of the book was the one on visualizations. Jens reminded me of uses archers can put visualizations that I hadn’t been focused upon of late. (I wish I had read this section before I published my book, but all authors have to be careful to attribute ownership to ideas and exercise and it is oh, so hard to not steal the good stuff. Oh, I am going to “steal the good stuff” when it comes to my coaching, but if I publish someone else’s work, it reduces their sales and is therefore unfair.)
What this book provides quite a good bit of are actionable exercises. And, trust me, I have been looking for years for mental exercises to help archers and this book has more than a few of those. As a tease here is one: Speed Visualizing. To do this you visualize one of your arrows, in detail. Then you visualize shooting it dead center into a target, then you repeat with a second arrow, and a third. (Mentally put yourself through the process; feel the building muscle tension, everything.) Now, speed up those three shots, reducing it to the three hitting dead center: bam, bam, bam. All three should take less than one second now. Then see if you can get this “video” burned into your mind. Practice it during breaks in your day. Then, when you reach important points in a competition, and you are in need of a boost in self-confidence, run the video several times in quick succession.
I will reinforce over and over that these techniques work for some but rarely all archers. You can only find out if any of them work for you is to try them, sincerely and vigorously try them. The hard part is coming up with things to try and Coach Fudge has supplied you with a basket full.
I am recommending this book, highly, to all archers and coaches who want to get deeper into the mental game. It is a bit pricy (see price below), but what price do you put upon winning?
Contents
1 What This Book is About
2 About the Author
3 Training Planning – Competition Planning
4 Training Journal
5 Mental Training
6 Visualization
7 The Inner Conversation
8 Mental Energy
9 Focus
10 Self-Confidence
11 Mental Competition Preparation
12 The Reviewers
13 Additional Resources
173 pages (including a number of blank pages, I assume for taking notes)
$37.79 (Amazon US), no suggested list price
Available in English and Danish (It would probably be nice to get it into French and German, too, but translations are tricky things, so we are just throwing the idea out there to potential archer-translators.)