A Beginner’s Guide to Archery’s Mental Game

Why Is the Mental Game Important?

“If you ask any top archer or athlete what percentage of their sport is mental, you’ll usually get 90% or higher,” Bassham said. “If you ask them what percentage of their time and money they spend on their mental game, it’s much lower. If you ask them when they started thinking about their mental game, they say, ‘Probably too late.’”

Bassham knows firsthand how important the mental game can be to performance. When he failed to win Olympic gold his first time out, Bassham realized he needed to refine his mental process. “I was not going to win by just training my form,” Bassham said. “I started paying attention to my mental game, and the winning of World Championships and my Olympic gold medal became a reality. You can’t ignore it anymore. If you do, you’re going to get beat by the people who do pay attention.”

Bassham acknowledges that it’s not as commonplace to have a coach for your mental game as it is to have one for your physical or technical game. “Taking a lesson from a technical coach is fun,” Bassham said. “When they come in my door and we start talking about having to change the way they think, it’s not something they are used to doing.” Bassham has worked with some of the top archers for a long time, and Mental Management Systems has been associated with USA Archery for at least 20 years. He notes that competitive archers are far ahead of other athletes when it comes to accepting coaching on the mental process. USA Archery is a particularly strong advocate for this type of training. USA Archery provides online courses on mental management as an integral part of their coaching certification program, and Mental Management Systems offers additional online courses within their archery program.

Developing your mental game is vital to consistency. Bassham notes that if you don’t have mental consistency, you don’t have technical consistency. “When the mind is not consistent, the form suffers,” Bassham said. “What you physically do is called your routine, and what you’re thinking about is your mental process. A lot of archers are thinking about whatever pops into their head. If they shoot a good shot, they think one way; if they shoot a poor shot, they think another. Find a consistent way to think. That’s helped me through my career.”

I’m a Beginner. Where Do I Start?

“The things that we focus on first are safety on the range and integrating a mental process with your form,” Bassham said. “As you develop your technical skills, you should be developing your mental skills too.” He advises archers to practice their reactions to their shots right at the beginning of training and to learn to focus on the solutions, not the problems. “You need to learn how to respond to and not react to your shots,” Bassham said. The most important thing is accepting your mistakes and learning from them. “Making a mistake is not a mental error,” Bassham said. “Making a mistake and learning from it is a requirement to get better. You either get a good shot and you’re rewarded, or you get a poor shot and you get a lesson. Making a mistake and not learning from it is a mental error. Making a mistake and beating yourself up about it is a big mental error.”

Bassham notes that archers shouldn’t wait until it’s too late to address their mental game. “If you train for years focusing exclusively on your form and don’t address the mental mistakes in the very beginning, those mental errors will become embedded, and they’re much more difficult to eliminate later on,” Bassham said.