Can you say more about what that pro ment by judgin back from the target? What is the process? For instance one of the things I do, and it is classic, is find my 20. Which means locate twenty yards, almost by feel, and work from there. That is a basic technique. I couldn' t do that working back form the target, since it' s 20 would look different from every distance. Can you walk me through how this works?

You have to do a lot of work with the targets you are actualy shooting. So you need to shoot a local club, or get your own targets. I can' t do either and suck beyond 35 yards.

Has anyone tried the Yardage pro software? It is supposed to help you train for 3D on a computer simulation.

Another thing is head yardage. Keep track of what you thought and where you hit. This was in the Burley Hall tape of yore. He found he was off X over 40 yards, so he set his sight to compensate for that, and put together a big string of wins. If 42 yards looks like 40 to him every time, why fight it? recalibrate the sight. On the other hand I wonder if this technique maters as much now that we have lasers, since we can train from the begining to exact yardages.

You should also watch out for your initial gut feel. There are targets you walk up to and just say " that' s 36" . Now what do you do? you either will find you should go with this really strong read, or not. But even if you feel your gut isn' t accurate, how do you work the target without being influenced by the feeling? You need to be aware of this phenomenon, so you can use it effectively.

Next subject is cheating. You can set up parts of your bow so that they operate like rangefinders, the same goes with cameras, and binocs. Many of these techniques are illegal, but some of them are not. In FITA, with which we are now aligned, this kind of thing is formalized and but not frowned on. In IBO using your focus as a rangefinder is (?) illegal, but noticing something through a fixed focus that looks different than by naked eye is fine. There are all kinds of things you might notice about a target relative to elements of your sight. I think using these is generaly OK, as long as you don' t let-down, make a change, and redraw. As I said, i can' t use this kind of thing because I don' t begin to have enough time or targets to practice on. But anyone who has the time on targets, even if they are a purist is just going to get all kinds of gut feels about what looks right. That tingling gut instinct even the amateur gets looking at targets, I can only imagine hits pros a lot, relative to all the memories they have about the look of a shot situations they have been in before. This stuff used to be discussed a lot. Is " cheating" still an issue?