The Off-Season: Practice How You hunt
Hunting can be physically and mentally taxing, and being properly prepared and putting in the practice in the off-season can make the difference between success and failure.
Nothing can get you more prepared than practicing the situations you’ll encounter in the field. Proper planning prepares you for when the unexpected happens. Plans are worthless, but planning is everything, so here are some ideas to consider this off-season as you get ready for this next season.
Building the Habit
Building smart habits can be powerful. Do you have new habits you’re trying to start of quit? Trying to get into a consistent habit of shooting can be a powerful habit to build into your week. Maybe it’s a set amount of days a week you want to shoot, or a league you shoot at once a week, but building that routine can be powerful. I personally try and make it a habit to shoot a certain amount of days a week. I also like to change it up and shoot at a few different archery ranges if I can just to be shooting in different environments, at different targets. Below are all different types of scenarios to consider and try and practice this off-season.
Weather Conditions
Not many hunters choose to practice with their gun or bow in less than ideal conditions. Sometimes, these weather conditions allow you to capitalize on higher than average deer activity, but if you aren’t ready for the weather, you can find yourself ill equipped and failing in the field.
Situations to practice
Precipitation. Rain, snow or ice building up in your sight can really dampen your success in the field. Heading out to the range in these conditions can help you mentally prepare for how your gear will look, feel and function in the field. Precipitation can also have an affect on longer archery shots. Hunting in a downpour with a monster whitetail 30 yards away is a terrible time to figure out that you should aim a few inches higher than you would on a clear day.
Wind. Understanding how your arrow flight is affected by wind. How to read the wind and incorporate that into your shot routine.
Body Positions
If you search for tips online about how to shoot your bow more accurately, you’ll often find videos and articles about how form and stance affect your shot. While this is very true, you aren’t always going to be able to maneuver into the optimal stance when you have deer moving within range.
Sitting in your stand or crawling through brush, you might be caught in a situation where you have to sit or kneel to make a shot. This situation is also common for ground blind hunters.
Field Situations
Exercise and shoot
You know that feeling when a deer steps into range while you’re in the woods? Your heart is pounding, hands are shaking and it’s hard to catch your breath. This is the most exhilarating part of hunting, but it’s difficult to prepare for.
Try interval training to simulate the adrenaline rush you experience before a shot. This consists of light exercise like jogging or biking steadily followed by a short burst of sprinting or fast cycling. Immediately following the high intensity interval, try taking a few shots. After some practice, you can work to control your breathing and shakiness and dial in your accuracy.
As an added benefit, you’ll be getting yourself in better shape!
Obstacles
Have you ever had a shot in the woods that you thought was completely clear, only to release your arrow and watch it glance off a branch completely missing your target? Murphy’s law often applies in hunting and the woods are a very unpredictable place. Practice taking a second to survey your shooting lane and identify any obstacles that might be in your path. Next, as you settle your bow sight on the shooting lane, make sure your arrow trajectory (the arcing flight of your arrow) is free of obstacles.
Here’s a good rule of thumb to remember for bowhunters shooting a multi-pin sight. If you are shooting at 30 yards and there is an obstacle at 20 yards, make sure that your 20 yard pin clears the obstacle. That way, as your arrow follows the trajectory and reaches 20 yards from your position, it will pass the obstacle as though you were aiming at 20 yards. However, if you settle the pin on your target at 30 yards and your 20 yard pin is resting on an obstruction, your arrow will follow that trajectory and collide with the obstruction which may stop or divert its path to your target.
If you shoot a single pin sight, it’s even more important to practice obstacle shots because you have to build an intuition about where the arrow trajectory will be at any given yardage. Coupling this with the additional need to mentally range each obstacle in the way, it can quickly become very complex in the field.
Another tip, use an extra archery target as an obstacle instead of a tree. That way if you hit the obstacle by accident, which will happen, you’ll be able to easily remove your arrow from a target instead of shattering it or digging it out of a tree trunk.
Elevation
This one may be a no-brainer for hunters that use tree stands, but ground hunters can also find themselves in elevated shooting situations when hunting mountainous terrain or near valleys and ridges. There are two main concerns here:
Form
Bend at the waist, not at the back. By arching your back to take a downwards shot, you are messing with the geometry that constitutes your natural shooting posture. This can cause your anchor point to not match correctly which will affect your shot accuracy. Instead, focus on bending at the waist. This ensures that your upper body is positioned the same as when you are shooting horizontally, and you’ll be more consistent in your shot placement.
Distance ranging
Many modern rangefinders automatically calculate your shot angle to the ground and incorporate that in the distance measurement. It’s a good idea to check to make sure your rangefinder has this feature. But if you don’t own one of these nifty gadgets, the added elevation in a tree stand can make it more difficult to judge distance.
In either situation, don’t wait until you are out in the woods to figure out how to adjust your shot. You can practice by setting up a treestand in your backyard, shooting off your deck or heading to a local archery range that features an elevated platform.
Shot Placement
Practicing a broadside shot from the ground simulates a field situation where your projectile travels horizontally and exits at about the same height on the animal as it enters.
In this case, any vitals between point A and point B will be hit. However, add in some elevation and the animal quartering to or away from the shooter, and the shot path changes drastically.
When you line up a quartering-away shot, keep in mind that you should place the shot slightly farther back on the animal than you would on a broadside shot. If your shot placement is too “shallow” you risk penetrating fewer vital organs and decrease your probability of a pass-through shot which could make recovering your animal more difficult.
Conversely, on a quartering-to shot, you would need to place the shot slightly forward on the animal. For deer species, this is problematic and quartering to shots are not advisable in most situations. This is because deer have more bone protection in their shoulder and chest than they do in their rib area. While an arrow may blast through the ribs of a deer, it might be deflected by the shoulder or breast bone. Quartering-to shots also create a higher risk of hitting the digestive system of the deer which can offer a poor blood trail, taint the meat or cause a slower dispatch of the animal.
This is definitely something you should understand and practice with a 3D target before heading into the woods, so here are some great articles and videos to study regarding shot placement in the field.
Data
The Quiver app allows you to track the data you need to make informed decisions in the field. We will help you look back on an unsuccessful and analyze how you can be better prepared for a successful season next year. Here’s how it works
Quiver Hunting App
Want more tips to become a better hunter? Try out the Quiver app today to help you step up your whitetail game. We all know hunting mature whitetails isn’t easy, so let Quiver help you be in the right spot at the right time.
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