Two Weeks Out: Stop Shooting Groups

Openers are landing across the Midwest right now and my phone is full of the same text from six different guys: a photo of a ragged one-hole group at 20 yards, and some version of "ready."

They aren't. And neither was I, for about a decade.

A 60-arrow session in the backyard proves your bow is tuned and your form holds up when you're warm, loose, in a t-shirt, standing flat-footed, shooting the same distance you've shot all summer. Nothing on opening morning looks like that. You've been sitting for three hours. Your shoulder is cold. You've got a jacket on with a chest pocket that wasn't there in July. You're 18 feet up, twisted 40 degrees left of where you thought he'd come from, and you get one arrow.

One. Not the eighth arrow of a warmed-up end. The first one.

The cold-bore arrow is the whole game

Rifle guys have known this forever. A cold-bore shot is its own thing and they log it separately. Bowhunters mostly don't, and it costs more than people admit.

Here's what I do from two weeks out until the season ends, and what I'd tell you to do starting tonight. Walk outside in whatever you're actually going to hunt in. Don't warm up. Don't stretch. Draw once, at an unknown-ish distance (pick a spot, range it after), and shoot one arrow. Then go inside.

That's the session. One arrow. Log where it hit.

It feels like you're wasting the evening. You're not. Twelve of those between now and the opener teaches you more about where your first arrow of the day actually goes than any 100-arrow marathon. And the first arrow is the one that matters. Nobody gets a second on a mature buck at 25 yards.

My buddy Derek shot 3D all summer two years ago, best form of his life, and then hit a doe in the shoulder on September 20th from a saddle. Low and left, about four inches. He'd never shot one arrow cold from a saddle in a jacket, and the jacket sleeve caught the string. He knew it the second it left. Four inches. That's the whole difference.

Shoot it from the height, in the clothes, from the angle

If you hunt out of a tree, at least a handful of those cold arrows need to come from a tree. Not a deck. A tree, in the saddle or the stand you'll actually be in, at the heights you actually hang. Bending at the waist with a bulky jacket on is a different shot than bending at the waist in shorts. Your anchor drifts. Your peep picture changes. Your 3rd axis error shows up for the first time all year, and I've written about why that pushes you left. You want to find that now, on foam, not on a deer.

Twist, too. Set the target where you don't want it. Hard left for a right-handed shooter. Behind the tree on the strong side. Those are the shots you'll get, because deer don't read the shooting-lane plan.

And shoot with the broadheads you're hunting with. If you've done your work the field points and heads land together, so this is just verification. If they don't land together, you don't have a practice problem, you have a tune problem, and two weeks is enough time to fix it if you start tonight and not on the 28th.

What I'm looking for in the log

After a dozen cold arrows a pattern shows up. Mine runs about an inch low when I'm cold and stiff, which I just know now. That's not something to fix at this point in the calendar. It's something to know. If yours is consistent, aim for it. If it's scattered, that's a form issue under load, and the right answer is usually shorter draw or a lighter holding weight, not more arrows.

The number I actually care about is how far my cold first arrow lands from my warm 20th. If that gap is under two inches at 30 yards I'm hunting to my normal range. If it's four, I'm cutting my max range for the first week of the season and I don't argue with myself about it. That's a hard rule, and the Range tab in The Forge is where I keep the numbers so I can't talk myself out of it.

The group at 20 yards told you the bow works. The cold arrow tells you whether you do. Go shoot one. Just one.

Then run your setup through the shot-scenario matrix in The Forge, plug in your real cold-arrow spread instead of the summer one, and let it tell you what your honest max range is for opening week. It'll probably be shorter than you want. That's the point.