Joel Turner’s ShotIQ system revolutionizes precision under pressure, from archery to SWAT—like his son Bodie hitting a penny 60 times in a row at 20 yards. Born from a SWAT hostage rescue where he shot left-handed with borrowed gear at 11–12 feet, Turner’s method dismantles subconscious sabotage by replacing instinct with structured mental cues (e.g., "Here I Go") and closed-loop control, proving even elite archers like Tim Gillingham still falter without it. His "shot control house" framework—aiming, concentration, execution—exposes how modern shortcuts (celebrity barebow trends) fail beginners, while his mechanoreceptive triggers and Mongol thumb ring adaptations reveal traditional archery’s brutal demand for discipline. Beyond shooting, this approach reshapes focus in high-stakes fields like medicine or sales, turning anxiety into repeatable mastery through deliberate repetition. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm very happy to talk to you because, you know, I think that what you teach applies to not just archery, but it applies to life, it applies to anxiety-filled situations, and you have figured out this one element Of archery that so many people can't seem to put their finger on.
And it's the anxiety of the shot.
You have figured this out in a way that is so useful, and it's so repeatable, and I think it's so important.
And I think a lot of people are going to go, you're going to just talk about archery shots?
I think this applies to life.
What you've done with your ShotIQ system, And so let me explain to people that don't understand this.
Bow hunting and archery, especially competitive archery, it oftentimes boils down to this one moment.
And when you have one moment and there's so much anxiety on this one moment, people have a tendency to panic and to rush through things.
And I think people have found that in life, in many situations, in different occupations, in different practices and disciplines.
This anticipation and anxiety of one moment where they lose their mind and they don't even remember what happened.
You have figured out a way to make a system where you have very clear, defined guidelines that people can follow where they could stay in the moment and not lose their fucking mind at this moment of anticipation.
Right.
The success speaks to itself.
Your son, who's an incredible archer, who's been taught by you, using your methods, is now...
It was so funny because he just won Lancaster, the Lancaster Classic, which is another huge indoor archery shoot.
And when you shoot Lancaster, you're in the practice range.
And he came in first seed because he shot the second ever—well, there's been, I think, five people now in history that have shot— Well, four people that have shot a 660 qualification round.
He shoots a 660. So he shot one last year, 660 last year.
So he was the third one in history to do it.
And then this year he did it again.
So now he's the first person in history to shoot two 660s back to back.
So then he gets, so he comes in the elimination rounds, wins those.
And so he comes in first seed for the big shoot off, which is you're up on a stage and it's just you, it's head to head.
So it's you and another person.
And, uh, When you start, you come in first seed, the person that's in front of you that maybe came in fourth, fifth, sixth, whatever, they get to shoot out on the stage against somebody.
So they actually get to zero their bow because the lighting's different and it's huge.
I mean, you're trying to hit this penny.
And then they have a 12 ring that's the size of their arrow.
Basically, it's like 27 diameter, 27 64th diameter.
And so he comes and he shoots those two 10s, not an X. And then he starts, then he hits an inside out.
And he looks, he turns, I'm in the coach's box behind him.
He turns to me and goes, it's sighted in now.
And I'm like, sweep the leg, boy.
Right?
That's what I always tell you.
Sweep the leg.
And it was just donut after donut after that.
And then the other guy caught up, shot a 12 to catch him.
And so now they got three-arrow shoot-off.
And the first arrow is for score.
And they have that 12 ring.
And Bodie's sitting there listening to the guy.
And Bodie's got his stabilizer, because everybody usually steps, there's a red button on the stage.
If you hit that red button, you then, you know, then it's a 12. Then you've got to shoot for the 12. So he hits the red button, but he hits it with a stabilizer.
So the guy's explaining the shoot-off, and Bodie's just hovering his stabilizer over, just looking at the guy, right?
And he's like, are you done yet?
Are you done yet?
And finally just dunk, and he hits that red button with a stabilizer, and then just shoots a 12. And the other guy missed the 12, so it was pretty cool.
So now I know that that's the core problem in shooting, right?
Your mind will not allow you to cause your body impact as a surprise.
And it took me a lifetime to figure out what the true problem was.
And that's where everybody's kind of skipped around it.
So there I am at five years old shooting this 30-30.
Oh, I pressed the trigger perfectly one time.
And as soon as I felt that recoil the second time, when I racked that lever and I shot it the second time, I guarantee you, I closed my eyes, clenched my body as I pressed the trigger.
It's smoke, fire, noise, all kinds of negative things that happen, right?
And I was experiencing the same thing in archery.
I started shooting a bow when I was seven.
And by the age of eight, I'm locked completely off a target, meaning I would draw the bow back and the targets level with me and I'm aiming at the floor, right?
And then you would jump that thing up as we see many archers do now.
They're locked off target.
They jump up and let the string go at the same time.
It all gets linked together so that your body can brace you for impact.
And people don't see archery as an explosion.
They see it as, well, it's just shooting a bow, right?
Shot anticipation or shot control is a lot easier with a firearm because the explosion happens in the apparatus.
It imparts recoil on you, but it's not actually—the explosion is in the apparatus, whereas in archery, the explosion is in your body, right?
It's that sudden release of energy that happens, so shot anticipation with archery is a hundredfold what it is with a firearm.
So I get in the academy and I bought a different pistol.
I bought a 1911 that's got a much shorter trigger stroke on it.
And I basically fixed a mental problem with mechanical means at that point because I got through the academy starting to realize what I needed to do to control a shot.
But with that pistol it was easy.
And my buddy was so bad in the academy with his Glock that he had to then—he bought my pistol from me because that's the only thing that got him through the academy was buying my pistol from me.
I bought another one, so we both fixed our mental problem with mechanical means.
And I ended up taking first in firearms in my academy class, not knowing how I did it.
But that's where I started to feel this love for instruction because I got to help some people with it.
And so things progressed.
Two years in law enforcement, then I got a firearms instructor because I had this interest in firearms and kind of figuring things out.
And then I got on the SWAT team, same time, 2003.
So that's, you know, I spent 18 plus years on the SWAT team and ended up being the sniper team leader and then eventually the team leader for the team.
But it was becoming the lead firearms instructor for Washington State that got me the experimentation that I needed.
Because I was starting to figure out how do I get somebody through a shot?
How do I get a police officer to concentrate on a trigger press when it's the only thing that's going to save them or somebody else?
And it came to me one day.
It was just totally by accident because I'd heard all the normal stuff in firearms instruction.
Front sight, front sight, front sight.
You know, you stare at your front sight hard enough and things are just going to work out for you.
Well, that just doesn't happen because in most gunfights, most people will tell you they never even see their sights.
So, I had this recruit that we call, we had one in every class, we call him Nervous Nelly, right?
I mean, this guy was just super anxious, and you can tell the different personalities that people have.
Just when you put a gun in their hand, they're nervous, and this cat, all these movements were super fast, and he was just a jittery dude, right?
Nervous Nelly.
And he's shooting 20 yards, and he's bouncing bullets off the floor at 15. So his rounds are hitting the 15-yard line.
And I'm like, oh, my God.
You know, it doesn't put a lot of confidence in the police force.
So I go over to this kid, and I call him a kid.
He was probably, I don't know, eight years younger than me or whatever.
And I get on the driver's side of his pistol.
I'm looking at his finger.
I'm like, okay.
I want you to press the trigger just to the pressure wall.
Don't make it go off.
He's like, okay, yes, sir.
And as soon as I got done with that instruction, his finger moved right to the pressure wall.
I'm like, okay, start pressing the trigger, but don't make the gun go off.
And so as soon as I saw his finger move, I start talking to him.
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All right, keep pressing, keep pressing, keep pressing, keep pressing.
And as I'm watching his finger, I'm looking at this and I'm like, it's moving at the same rate I'm talking.
And he's working through it and all of a sudden, pow, it goes off to the surprise right through the 10 ring and the target.
He's like, sir, that scared the crap out of me.
I'm like, yeah, it's supposed to.
So then the next time, he shoots again, and I changed my cadence of speech, which changed his cadence of movement, and that's when the light bulb went off for me.
I'm like, okay, we've got to figure this out.
I had complete control of this kid's mind at this time, but I had to get him to do that.
And that's where this whole thing started into neuro-linguistic programming and all the sciences that we went down the rabbit holes on to really figure this stuff out.
I didn't know what that was, and so I have lots of very smart friends, and so one of the doctors that was on a sniper crew for a neighboring agency, he was their ER doc, because most SWAT teams have an ER doc that's assigned to the team.
And so I'm training him in some of this stuff, and he's like, oh, that's neuro-linguistic programming.
I'm like, stand by, doc.
That's a big word, right?
I got to know what that is.
So I started looking into that, and it was mostly like Tony Robbins, self-help, get yourself out of addiction, you know, get yourself out of the gutter type stuff.
But what I took it as is it was the route to concentration.
Because what you say is what you think.
And I needed people to think and to concentrate on a specific movement.
What I'm asking people to do is just shy of impossible.
I'm asking you to override your own central nervous system with concentration.
That is just shy of impossible, but it's not impossible if you know exactly how to do it.
But when I ask that question of all the people that I train, it's like, how do you concentrate?
It's a control system in your mind that governs your movements.
And open loop is where your mind wants to go because it's efficient, it's smooth, it's automatic, right?
So when you first learn a movement...
You may learn it in steps and it's very choppy and you have to think about each specific motor program that you're doing, but then you eventually put that into a package through practice, right?
So we go from the cognitive stage of learning to practice stage with the goal of becoming automatic.
And that's where people, they do the same thing with shooting, but in shooting, the only thing you're getting more efficient at is bracing you for recoil.
You're not getting more accurate.
I mean, there's 80-year-old dudes that come into my class that have been doing it this way for 70 years, and they just get worse, right?
Shooting is one of the only things, the more you do it, the worse you get, especially in archery.
If you just follow the natural path of the human mind and learning, you're going to get worse because you're going to get more efficient.
Your subconscious thinks you're getting better because you're getting better at bracing for impact.
That's what it's built for.
But consciously, we know, like, uh, I didn't control that one.
And then it's like, well, I control about 50% of them.
And then it just gets worse and worse.
So your mind open loop means your brain.
Huberman's going to kill me for this because this is so simplistic.
I'm sure he gets way into this.
But open loop is your brain sends a motor program to the effector.
The effector is just the muscle group that receives it.
So in that, the motor program is usually too fast for you to gain feedback in it, like shooting a basketball, swinging a golf club, right?
Those are all movements that have to be smooth to keep the totality of the movement going.
But in shooting, if you use open loop for the trigger, it's too fast, and you're not doing anything to mitigate all the other muscle contractions that are coming in to brace you for impact, right?
So it's the flinch.
It's all that stuff that gets put in there.
And so that's open loop.
That's where your mind wants to go.
It's the default.
If you don't think about something, you're going open loop.
Like when people black out and stuff, they go super efficient on the trigger.
They don't remember what happened because it was a negative event and it was all subconsciously driven.
Now, closed loop is a movement that's slow enough you could stop it anywhere within it, right?
There's a certain speed at which you can gain the feedback that you need to, say like in the signature test or if you're pressing a trigger, right?
Or if you're working your hinge, you're working that thing slow enough and you're concentrating on the movement and you're working it slow enough, you could stop it anywhere within it.
And that just doesn't happen.
It has to be decided upon, right?
And that's the big kicker.
That's where people try to jump over the problem because you have to decide.
If you're doing a movement that's going to cause an explosion and you're trying to do it slow enough you could stop it, That will never just find you.
You have to concentrate on that movement.
So you got to know how do you concentrate, right?
Well, you got to talk yourself through it.
And you got to know what decisions you need to make at what moments in the shot because there are moments in the shot when autopilot is going to try to take it, right?
And that's what happened to me for 13 years in my bow hunting career.
From 14 to 27, I was going completely automatic, right?
I was so engulfed in trying to kill that critter or aiming good or whatever it may be.
My mind was never in the movement that it needed to be.
So that's the difference between open and closed loop.
And when that guy told me what you're doing works but it's not right, he taught me about open and closed loop control systems.
But what he never taught me and what I noticed from all the textbooks and all the stuff that we did, it had never really been put into shooting.
It had never truly been put into shooting.
So he kept asking me, what's this decision you keep talking about?
What's this decision?
I said, well, you have to decide to go closed loop.
It's not just going to happen.
He's like, I don't think so.
I'm like, let's go to the range.
Right?
So we go to the range, and he did the same thing that everybody else did.
He couldn't get himself to go closed loop because he just kept trying to do it.
I shot my first controlled shot on an elk with my longbow.
41 yards with my longbow.
It was the most gorgeous aero flight.
I mean, it was perfect.
But I never blueprinted it.
It was just another yay me moment, right?
So 2011, 12, 13, and 14 come along, and I killed a bunch of critters in that time frame, but I wasn't controlling my shot still.
But I was at least present enough to be aiming and all those things, but I still wasn't getting through my shot, essentially punching the trigger.
So December 14, 2014 was my big, that was, I shot a big black-tailed buck, and I didn't control my shot.
I shot him at 8 yards, shot him right in the heart, and it was raining, and it was right before dark, and I'm like, I was happy that I shot the buck good, but...
I was pissed because I didn't control my shot again and realized that by this time I'd been a SWAT sniper since 2003, right?
Scared to death.
Scared to death on how it was going to go because all that time between 2003 and 2014, thank God I didn't get in any tactical situations where I had to actually press a trigger because it would have been just like a coyote.
I guarantee you it would have been just like a coyote and that's where a lot of cops are these days.
They don't know what's coming and they don't know how to control themselves at this moment of truth.
So I've got this sounding board of bow hunting where I'm still, some are good, some are not good.
It's still a mystery to me because I never blueprinted it, right?
So December 14, 2014, I shot that buck and I was pissed and I sat in my tree stand.
Now it's dark and it's raining.
I'm like, I got to figure this out.
Because it's just a ticking time bomb in the tactical world for me to be in a tactical situation.
So I sat there in that tree stand like, what was it about that shot in 2008?
And what was it about that shot in 2010 when I actually controlled myself?
And I was so conscious in those two shots that I'm like, it was the decisions.
It was the decisions that I made.
Because I remember on the hog in 2008, I drew back and I had the same anxiety and all the craziness going on.
It was the same feeling of weakness that I wasn't going to perform well, but I was at full draw.
Now I'm locked off target, which hadn't happened in a long time.
But I was so conscious in that shot, for some reason, I don't know if I was pissed off or what it was, but I went, I ain't doing this again.
And I let that shot down.
And the next time I drew my bow back, I'm like, I'm shooting this shot perfectly or I'm not shooting it at all.
And that was the first time that it ever meant more to me to stay in the shot process than to actually kill the critter.
And that was a huge thing for me.
But again, I never blueprinted it.
And then I remember on that hog, so the second time I drew my bow back...
Before I drew my bow back, I said, I'm shooting this shot perfectly or I'm not shooting it at all.
And I started to draw my bow back.
And as I drew my bow back, I felt it slipping again, right?
And I said, nah, I'm going to do this right.
That was another decision that I made, which upped my presence.
Didn't know that at the time, but that upped my presence.
So I got the full draw.
Now I'm aimed exactly where I need to aim.
All I gotta do is let the arrow go.
It's aimed perfectly.
All I gotta do is let the arrow go.
But because I'd upped my presence so much, I remembered, oh yeah, stupid, you gotta pull through the clicker, right?
Had a little clicker device on my longbow, which when you expand through that, it clicks, mechanoreceptive trigger, all that stuff.
So I'm at full draw.
Here I go.
That was the first time I'd ever said, here I go, in a shot.
I said, here I go.
And that reminded me, oh yeah, I'm supposed to talk myself through this, right?
This is 2008, so I was starting to figure some stuff out in the firearms world.
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Keep pulling, keep pulling, keep pulling, keep pulling, click, boom, I shot that shot.
Whereas what you're doing and what you're teaching with archery and what I've learned from you is that if I say to myself while I'm shooting, if I'm talking to myself and I go through this whole list, center the bubble, center the site, You know, relax the shoulder, draw, pull, pull, pull, release.
And when it releases, I'm in control of the whole thing from top.
And there's all these anxiety-driven thoughts that just, get it out!
But if you stay in your own thought process and talk to yourself, so like when I'm at full draw on an animal, I'm like pull, pull, pull, plop.
All I'm thinking of is these mechanics of making that shot release instead of all that other shit.
By forcing myself to say pull, pull, pull at the final things I eliminate.
Any possibility of shit going wrong, because all I'm thinking of is those words.
All I'm thinking of is that movement and those words, and it's magic.
And so many people in the world of bow hunting don't know this.
More people know this now because of you, but I remember when I first found your stuff online, I was like, Okay, this makes sense, because I knew it was a mindfuck, and I was shocked at how mindfucky it is, because I'm a martial artist, so I'm used to just reacting to things.
I'm used to relying on training and just moving automatically, but you cannot do that with archery.
It requires stillness And calmness and being centered and in the moment in a very unusual way.
That's like pool.
And that moment of everything relying on this one thing that you're doing.
You might have shot thousands of arrows in practice, but that doesn't mean jack shit.
Right now you have to get this one arrow out perfect.
Right.
It might be a giant animal that's a screaming bull and you're shooting through a window of two trees that's 12 inches wide and 50 yards away.
And you're like, holy shit.
There's so much.
Oh, don't hit the tree.
Oh, don't fuck this up.
Oh, you fucked it up last time.
You can fuck it up again.
Don't miss.
And all those different things.
If you just...
Have this thought process in your head, going through your pre-shot routine perfectly, pulling back on the bow, centering your bubble, centering your pee, pull, pull, pull, swap!
But when you look at some of the texts that are associated with that, it's this blank-mindedness and all this stuff.
However, most of those cultures use what's called a mechanoreceptive trigger.
And people never knew about it, right?
Why is it in keto archery that the tip of the arrow is so much bigger than the arrow, than the arrow shaft itself?
And in those old texts, the arrow is not ready to be loosed until the point touches the knuckle, right?
So mechanoreceptors, I'm sure you know this, but they're sensory receptors in your skin cells that give stimulus.
So like if you and I are sitting here, BS, and I put my hand down on a hot stove, The mechanoreceptors and the skin cells of my hand send this to my brain.
That's hot.
My brain then sends the motor program that gets my hand off the stove.
It's how Olympic archers shoot with a clicker, right?
So they draw their arrow back and they've got it underneath the clicker, and then as they pull the tip of the arrow out from underneath the clicker, it clicks against the side of their bow.
That sound wave is picked up by the hair cell, the mechanoreceptors and the hair cells of the ear.
It sends it to the brain.
The brain sends the release motor program.
So, you know, you'll watch them.
They're expanding through it.
Click, boom.
They'll shoot the shot.
Same in Kudo archery.
Same in Bhutan, right?
In Bhutan, they tie a wire underneath their arrow.
They'll wrap a little piece of wire or a piece of wood on there like a toothpick that will touch their knuckle.
Right?
So there's been these ways of doing things for millennium, right?
But we all want to be more pure, right?
We all want to, oh, traditional archery is just, you know, drawing back your longbow and letting it fire.
Well, that's, I mean, you go to any traditional archery event and you see most people don't even get to full draw before they let it go.
I've never seen an animal so jumpy, other than axis deer, which also evolved around tigers.
Yes.
So I have this bow that has set up a Garmin sight, which I love.
And what a Garmin sight is, it's a range-finding bow sight that uses a dot.
So instead of having a pin, so just explain it to people at home.
The way you sight an archery bow, a bow for bow hunting or bow for archery, is there's a program that you run the arrow weight through, the speed of the arrow, you shoot your arrow through a chronograph, the weight of the arrow, the draw length, and all these different components go into a program called Archery Advantage.
And that program will give you a sight tape.
You put that sight tape on your bow, and it's calculated to the weight of the arrow, the speed of the arrow, and it shows how much drop the arrow's going to have over 20 yards, 40 yards, 50 yards.
And it'll show you exactly where that pin has to be.
So you would have to range with a laser range finder.
You get your number.
Oh, it's 56 yards away.
And then you dial it perfectly to 56 yards, and that will calculate exactly where that arrow is going to be when it gets to 56 yards.
What I love about this Garmin sight is, at full draw, you just press a button, and it ranges, and then it gives you a pin.
Well, I'm at full draw on this Neil guy, and I've had a couple of problems with this Bow sight where it didn't range.
So I'm at full draw, and I have a 90-pound bow, so it's a lot of weight.
It's very heavy, and I'm pulling it.
It's not a heavy bow like physically, but it's heavy to pull back, and I'm holding it back, and I press it.
Nothing.
And I press it again, nothing.
So then there's all this shit in your head.
It's like, oh Jesus, he's gonna get away.
oh no you're going to make a bad shot and I'm like no no no no no no no no no And then the third time I press it, finally I get a pin.
And I'm like, pull, pull, pull, flop.
And this arrow flies perfect.
It hits this animal quartering away, broadside, punches straight through the animal, and the arrow goes 30 yards away.
But the Neil guy runs like nothing's wrong with it.
In a full sprint, when the arrow hits it, I'm like, oh no.
I'm like, how am I even going to find this thing?
130 yards it went until it died, but we didn't know where it went.
You know, it's heavy brush in South Texas.
And I'm talking to the guide and he's like, when we shoot them with rifles, we have the client who has a round in his rifle and then the guide also has a round.
So the client shoots the Neil guy and then the guide will do a follow-up shot because that's how tough they are.
I'm like, maybe you should have fucking told me that before.
Because I was not even with him.
I had snuck away.
I'm like, just stay back because I'm going to try to move around these bushes and get within boat range.
And so I'm thinking, boy, I'm pretty sure I made a great shot.
Like, I have to...
I don't know.
So luckily...
We map the area, we do a grid, and we find the animal.
If you shoot an elk at 52 yards, when you go to the spot where it hit, you're going to find drops of blood, and you're going to be able to do a blood trail, and you'll be able to find your animal.
And they don't run like Neil Guy run.
This thing runs at a cheetah clip.
I mean, full blast, full sprint, and just till it died.
But it was a perfect shot.
And it would not have been...
I mean, the anxiety of the sight not working, me pressing the button, nothing.
Me pressing the button, nothing.
Oh, fuck.
And I'm at full draw here, and I'm trying to stay calm and stable, and then finally press the button and get the thing.
But if it wasn't for being conscious in the shot, pull, pull, pull, swoom!
And I hear that whap!
You know, that sound that you hear when it hits the vitals, when it goes through the ribs, through the body, and it went out the front shoulder.
I mean, it was a perfect shot.
But it was because of your program.
It was because of your teaching.
And this was after I'd already worked with you and Peter Atiyah at his house, and we were messing around.
I had it very keenly in my head what needed to be done.
So the difference is that you're a very determined person, and that's the missing ingredient in most people, is they're not determined enough to actually make the decision.
And so they go shoot their bow.
And they shoot their bow and they're punching the trigger, maybe just a little bit, right, in practice.
So they're literally practicing their own failure in a high-stress event, right?
So they're punching it a little bit, a little bit, and their mind's just making them a little bit more efficient, more efficient, and they're practicing this efficiency.
They're practicing their open-loop trigger work.
And then it comes to a high-stress event, and then they go ultra-efficient, and none of that stuff that you're talking about is in their head.
They're only thinking, holy shit, I don't have a pin.
We'll just make things happen, and your autopilot will take it away from you like that.
But you, because you practice making decisions, you practice finding determination.
These are strange things to practice, but we're just using archery.
We're shooting firearms or whatever it is.
We're using those as the medium for practice of these very mental things.
You use your bow to practice your concentration, right?
You saying pull, pull, pull doesn't just happen.
It has to be decided upon.
And that's what long ago, that guy at the academy could not figure that out.
And his ego was too high to actually go, oh, maybe what you're saying actually has some merit.
Because what am I? I'm just a dumb cop, right?
So it's very interesting.
But I see people all the time go to the range.
And they practice their own failure.
Even professional archers do the same thing.
And then they meet Bodie.
And the shoot-off, and Bodhi's going to shoot his process no matter what, right?
So it's really cool to see that and to know, like, you put Bodhi on a critter, it is done for.
Well, the fact that you've trained him since he was a young boy at this, and this has been the way he's learned archery— Like, with his age, at your understanding of it, it all came about really at the perfect time.
And, you know, Bodhi started shooting a bow at ten and a half months old.
I mean, I had, at two weeks old, I had him in a front pack and, you know, shooting.
He's seen thousands of arrows go downrange.
I had a bow in his crib, and at ten and a half months, he finally picks that thing up upside down, right?
He would prop himself up against the couch, draw back, fall over, and then, you know...
Shoot his little string off.
But then at two and a half, he's shooting balloons, flying balloons with his bow in the kitchen, suction cup arrows.
At three years old, I buy him his first compound.
And index finger trigger at three years old, and he's punching the crap out of that thing.
Of course.
At three years old.
That's all his mind knows is to brace for impact, right?
So at three, I bought him attention-activated release.
And what that did, just like me in the academy, I fixed a mental problem with mechanical means.
So at that age, you know, what does a three-year-old have for determination and decision-making skills?
Nothing, right?
So even up into early teens, these kids today don't have enough determination to override their own central nervous system, right?
So you put them in a tension-activated release that makes decisions for them.
Push the safety in.
Draw the bow back and aim it.
Safety's still on.
That's the calming effect.
Safety's still on.
Weapon's not even hot yet.
They get their aim done, and then they separate from that by letting go of the safety.
And then if they don't pull, their bow's not going off.
So it makes the decision for them.
So from about three years old to about nine years old, that's what Bodie shot was attention-activated release.
Until I saw it in him that that's all he knew and that he could run anything, right?
And he's heard me do the speech and so many times that I didn't sit Bodie down and go, okay, boy, this is how we're doing it.
He just heard it so many times and me teaching other people and me, you know, showing him like, we don't do that.
To the point where he would go to the range, little tiny kid, right?
And he'd look up at somebody.
Oh, you punched that one.
Like, boy, that guy's way bigger than your old man, so let's just, on that, right?
But it was so funny.
But now it's just, you know what's happening in Bodhi's mind, and you can see it in his eyes, and you see that squint, you know the concentration is there.
And the only advice that I ever give him is keep it moving.
Because I know that if he keeps his release moving, I know that his conscious mind is in his release, and it's not in the aim.
People, they are so infatuated with the aim.
It's just, it's crazy.
They all try to control something that they have no control over.
Once you put the pin on there, it's done.
Just watch it to keep it, right?
Watch the picture.
And people are like, do I concentrate on the pin or do I concentrate on the target?
I'm like, you don't concentrate on either one of those.
You just watch the picture.
Make it so they're both fairly in focus.
They're on different focal planes, so they're not both going to be in focus, but they are so infatuated with it.
That's why they weight their bow up so much.
They can't step away from it, and certain personalities have a difficult time stepping away from the aim.
They want to control that.
You can't control it.
No matter which way it moves, its next movement's always back to the middle.
So let it do its thing, and don't slow it down too much.
By the time you process that, and that's why people super weight their bows.
Like you'll see a lot of pros have like 50 ounces of weight on their bow.
Because, and that's strictly for their human psyche, that is to calm themselves down because they see that slow pin movement.
But what we're trying to get is a surprise break, right?
You're trying to get it, concentrate on this movement so you don't know when your bow is going off, so you can't, your mind can't put the pre-ignition movements in there.
But then you couple that with a super slow pin movement.
Well, now it's in the 9 ring, and if you keep going, you have the surprise break.
If it breaks in the 9, and it is a 9, like on a Vegas face target, if it breaks in the 9 and it is a 9, it lands in the 9, then your bow is obviously too heavy.
You've slowed the rate of return down too much.
It's just like, you know, you have to be able to break a shot in the 9, and it still hits a 10, if not an X. And that's how we tune Bodie's bows Everybody's like, oh, Bode's so steady.
He's not that steady, right?
People think that because they don't see his stabilizers moving very much, but he keeps them light so that his pin can break anywhere in the gold and it'll hit an X. That's how we do that, right?
We're not trying to catch it because that's open loop trigger work.
There's some guys like Tim Gillingham and Kyle Douglas who are like elite, world-class archers who hold their bow steady, they put the pin right there, and then they pop, they hit it.
When you talk to those people, they're of a very specific personality.
They're calm dudes, right?
I talk to them all the time.
They're calm dudes.
They're good dudes.
They're just calm.
They have a specific personality.
So they superweight their bow and they're able to process that and they get it there.
But it bites them in the butt every now and again, right?
So, and you can't stop that because you don't know what pre-ignition movement's coming.
And you see that in the shoot-offs where, you know, they shoot amazing to get to the shoot-off, but then there's one in there that they didn't catch, right, that they went open loop on.
Well, they go open loop on all of them, but there's one that they got a little too efficient with it, right?
And this is nothing against those guys.
They're amazing shooters.
That is the other way of archery, right?
Super weight your bow and catch it when it's in the middle.
But you have to have a super light trigger to do that so that your pre-ignition movement is minimal, right?
So you don't have to have much of a movement.
I mean, it's so light when you actually work on their triggers.
That's the other way of doing it.
That's not what we do, right?
I want fast pin movement, and I want closed loop movement on the release.
And that seems to be a higher level.
Like, when you go to Vegas now, there's a whole other level, right?
They would have to probably lighten their bows up and become friends with the movement because if you have that super – like their pin moves really slow.
So if they have it moving slow and they continue with that movement, if it breaks in the 9, it's going to be a 9 because it can't get back to the middle fast enough with how they have it weighted.
They have to have the pin movement so slow that it comes into the middle and there's enough time for them to recognize, okay, it's in the middle, send the signal to the release, right?
And this is all happening in thousands of a second, but it's only there for a microsecond.
Right?
Until it floats out.
And the problem with that system is if you go open loop on the trigger, you don't know what pre-ignition movement's coming.
Is it a micro-collapse?
Do you grab your bow slightly?
Do you winch your face?
All those are going to deviate your point of impact.
And you're trying to hit a penny every time.
You know, that's just an indoor archery.
If you're shooting like safari, you're shooting 101 yards.
Archery is such a proving ground for mental control, and it's one of the things that I love about it.
One of the things that I love about it is archery doesn't give a fuck how many people like you, whether your friends text you back, whether your wife is upset with you.
Archery doesn't give a fuck.
If you don't do it right, it doesn't land where you want it to go.
And I know that sometimes I can do it right.
And so there's this mindfuck where I'll just be...
I have to stop practicing sometimes because my shoulders are sore.
I've shot hundreds of...
I've been out there for hours.
I'm like, okay, now your body is not recovered enough to do this.
You've got to stop.
I get obsessed with it.
And what I'm obsessed with is this ability to recreate the movements and the mindset that you need in order to do it efficiently and accurately and then do it again and again and again.
And then...
You also have to avoid this thing where I like to sometimes, I'll make a shot, it's a perfect shot, and I'm like, good, I'm dialed in, and then I don't do all those things when I'm drawing back.
I just draw back, I center my peep, and I just fire another arrow.
And it doesn't matter if it went in there.
I'm like, don't do it that way because you're not doing it the way you're going to have to do it if you're on a big bull in the woods.
If you see a big bull in the woods and it's, you know, the 16 yard gap in between two trees and that's where his vitals are.
You gotta have all your I's dotted and your T's crossed.
You can't just rely on the fact that you've already shot 50 arrows in a row, because you haven't.
You've hiked up this mountain.
You're exhausted.
There's all this shit going on.
It's such a mindfuck, like almost nothing else I've ever done.
Besides pool, which is also a mindfuck, but in pool you get to shoot a bunch of other shots.
You get to shoot the one ball to the two ball.
You're warmed up to the three.
You get good position on the four.
You're rolling.
With archery, every shot is the nine ball.
Every shot is the money ball.
And you only get one shot.
And you might go five, six, seven days without shooting any shots.
What's fascinating to me is it's made my rifle shooting so much better.
I'm so confident with a rifle.
When I zoom in on something with a rifle, when I'm looking down that scope and I've got that crosshairs on it, I know all I have to do is just pull, pull, pull, pull, pull.
Like if I'm prone and I'm laying the rifle over my backpack and you have all these points of contact.
It's so much easier.
It's so different.
And that the difficulty of archery, it enhances and educates all these different aspects of your life when it comes to dealing with stressful, high pressure situations.
It makes you stay in the moment.
Because you have to stay in the moment in stand-up comedy, too.
When you're doing stand-up comedy, you can't think like, oh, I hope they laugh at this next one.
Oh, I hope I don't fuck this joke up.
Oh, I might be losing the crowd.
You can't think any of that.
You have to be...
If I'm talking about coffee or something like that, whatever I'm talking about on stage, I have to be thinking about that coffee.
This motherfucker's not even thinking about what he's talking about.
They know.
It's a weird thing.
And it's the same kind of thing.
Like, you have to be in that mindset.
And I've had shows before where maybe I was too relaxed or too confident or too whatever.
And then you'll stumble a little bit.
And then you've got to re-establish where you're at.
And you've got to stay.
And you're like, uh-oh, uh-oh, we're losing control here.
You might have fucked that joke up.
Get back in the mindset.
Think about what you're talking about.
Bring these people back to you.
Get in there.
It applies to so many high-pressure situations, is that the mind gets away from you.
You see it in traffic accidents where people panic and they hit the gas instead of the brakes, or they just fucking don't know what to do.
They freak out because they can't stay calm in the movement, in the moment, and just concentrate on what they're supposed to be doing rather than the desired result they want to achieve.
And that's why I think archery is one of the ultimate proving grounds for mental control.
How do you get yourself in that zone before your deal on stage or whatever?
You know how you do it now because you've done it hundreds if not thousands of times.
Yeah.
When it comes down to like life or death stuff, that's where, you know, you're a very determined person, just in the way you live your life.
It's Cam, very determined person, right?
So that's how you get to where you get to.
It's the first ingredient in this whole control factor is having enough determination to do that.
And, like, you have a why.
You have a why as to why you're doing this.
My why was I was scared to death, man, in the sniper world.
I was like, man, I hope it doesn't go bad.
And I'm like, that can't be the mindset.
Holy mackerel.
But it is the mindset of most cops because they don't have a why.
You know, if a cop's never been in a gunfight or a shooting, their why is artificial, right?
And it's scary the first time that you do that.
You know, having that why and seeing, like, I was in an HR where I, you know, had to use lethal force on a person that was, I had to put a round this far from another human being's face, right?
And it was, that's my why.
So when I do training on the team, it's like, you guys don't understand when you're, when you see, when you're looking through your optic.
At a reticle and there's somebody's face on the edge of the...
I mean, their face is fully in your scope and the reticle is right on the edge, right?
And you have to put the round past their head.
That's your why, right?
So that's your why for all this tactical training that you do.
But if you've never been there and done that, you have to learn how to manufacture determination, right?
Can you imagine what failure would be in that situation?
There was an unarmed, barricaded subject with a hostage.
And you never know.
That's all the information you get on the call-out, right?
So, we go there.
I get there, and it was weird because on the brief, I walked up to the house, and the SWAT commander briefed me at the At the head of the garage there, and it was light-colored concrete.
It's dark.
You know, we didn't have a bunch of lights on because the operation is active in that house right there, but the room was in kind of the back of the house.
And I remember he's talking to me, telling me the situation, and I'm looking on the ground and I'm like, what is all that stuff on the ground, right?
And I'm looking at these dark patches on the ground.
So I turn my flashlight on and it's blood.
There's blood all over the place on the walkway down from the garage.
I'm like, what is up with that?
And he's like, well, this guy stabbed his cousin and then took his own daughter hostage.
Used her as a human shield with a knife to her.
So that's how SWAT got called and all this stuff.
So I get there.
And I got to be, I'm up on a ladder over a wood fence, and we're about, I'm only like 15 yards from the window, but we can't see anything in the window.
And the negotiator's on the phone with this guy, and he's not really making a lot of sense.
He wants to talk to his girlfriend, blah, blah, blah.
He's got his daughter in there with him, and we can hear her through the wall, right?
We can hear her.
Sometimes she's screaming.
Sometimes she's crying.
Sometimes she's laughing.
So we don't know what is going on in there, right?
And this goes on for the negotiators are on the phone with them for a while.
And then finally, the decision's made.
Like, we have to get in there because it's starting to go south in negotiations.
I mean, he's already done that to his cousin, right?
I mean, stabbed him in the face and legs and arms, big K-bar knife.
It was not a good situation.
So, yeah, and he's already used her as a human shield, right?
When the cops, what happened is there was a big fight went on.
The cops got in, got everybody out.
Then they realized the daughter was hiding behind a couch.
So they go back in.
They restack up.
They go back in.
Now he's got the daughter around the waist, using her as a human shield, knife to her, and he kicks the door shut on a bedroom.
That's what starts the SWAT call out.
So I'm looking in this window.
It's got blinds on it.
Negotiations are going south.
We lose comms with the guy.
So finally, we're like, we got to get comms with this dude, so we're going to put a throw phone in.
So we put a throw phone.
A throw phone is like a box.
It's got a phone in it so the negotiators can talk to the dude.
And so we put that in there.
My buddy rips the blinds out.
When we rip the blinds out, there's the dude again.
I can't see him because I can only see like half the room.
And he's in the right corner of the room, and I'm over this fence.
And The window guys are yelling at him to drop the girl, drop the knife, you know, to get him all the commands, and he's kind of working his way along the wall.
He's got her around the waist, so he would hold her up above, you know, so they can't get a shot.
And so he's moving his way across the wall, and then he moves his way across this wall and ends up in this corner.
Sits down and pulls her up over the top of him.
And so the window's on the same wall as this corner, and I can't see any of this stuff.
I'm the sniper team leader, so I work my way around, and I get to this gate.
I'm like, they called fire priority to the window team.
So, because there's like six dudes at the window, and nobody's shooting.
I'm like, why in the F are these guys not shooting?
Because I couldn't see what they saw, but that's what's going through my head.
So I... I get off the ladder.
I run to this gate.
It's weird, the stuff you remember.
They had this...
It was like one of those latch type of locks.
And it had a bolt through it with the nut all the way buried.
And this bolt was like...
It felt like it was this long, right?
So I'm having to unscrew this freaking bolt, right?
I'm screwing.
It's the finest threads I've ever felt, right?
So I'm unscrewing this bolt.
Finally, bing!
I get that.
I go through the gate.
I come around.
I come up to the window.
And...
There was another officer that had basically his face planted against the window so that he could just barely see through the sliver because it was on the same wall.
And he wasn't shooting, and I'm like, why are you not shooting?
And so we actually ended up having to remove him off the ladder because I don't know what he was thinking.
He wasn't hearing us.
We were giving him commands to get off the ladder so I could get up there and evaluate the situation.
And I'm shooting my sniper rifles.
It was a gas-operated.308, and lowest power on the scope was 4.5.
And I told the admin years ago, I'm like, I need lower power because it's going to be close probably when it does happen, and sure enough, it was.
So I get up on this ladder, and I put my face against the wall, and I can just see through the sliver.
I can see him sitting, and I can see her sitting in his lap, basically, and he's got his arm around her.
And the team keeps giving them commands, and I'm looking at this shot, and I'm evaluating what's going on, and I'm thinking to myself, I'm going to have to shoot him left-handed.
And I'm thinking, lowest power is four and a half.
So I do an optic check on the wall, and I'm like, that ain't going to work.
So I'm thinking to myself, I'm going to have to shoot him with my pistol.
So I'm thinking, I'm going to have to shoot my handgun.
And then I'm thinking, I always preach, handguns suck for killing stuff, right?
So that's why I always tell my guys, handguns suck for killing stuff.
We don't use handguns if we don't have to.
But I'm thinking, I got the wrong tool.
What am I going to do?
So I'm thinking, wait a minute, stupid.
There's six guys standing at the window that have the right tool, right?
Because they all have their assault rifles.
And...
So the first guy, and it just happened to be the guy that we pulled off the ladder, I'm like, give me your rifle.
He's like, what?
Go give me your rifle.
So we swap rifles, and he says HK416. And the reason he said that was because on an HK416, if you flip to safety twice, you go to full auto, right?
So don't want to do that in a precision environment, right?
So I'm like, roger that.
And so I got up, and the window's broken at this point.
So when you step up to the window, you're literally walking on broken glass, okay?
So I step up, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
The glass all pops underneath my feet.
And I push the rifle.
I've got to shoot left-handed, right?
So I push the rifle in and I come around the corner.
Now the rifle butt is in my bicep with somebody else's rifle, right?
But I know this rifle is zeroed because it has to be zeroed.
Because to get through my qualification a month earlier, it had to be zeroed, right?
So I knew that things were good.
But I also knew that you've got to aim two and a half inches higher than where you want to hit because that's a mechanical offset, right?
Difference between bore height and sight height, two and a half inches.
So I push the rifle in the window and I come around the corner and I look and the little girl's looking right at me, right?
Because all the broken glass.
So she's looking right at me and I bring the reticle up and it's full pop brightness.
Right?
I can't see anything.
Because he had it set for a white light shot.
So when you turn your super bright flashlight on, on your rifle, it will blare out your reticle.
So you've got to have your reticle turned way up.
Well, he had it set for a white light shot.
But I wasn't going to do a white light shot.
So I looked and I'm like, oh no!
So just like you're thinking your thing didn't turn on when you're looking at this Neil guy, I'm looking at this red sun in a dimly lit room and I'm like, this ain't gonna work.
So I pulled the rifle back out of the window.
And now I've got to work on the buttons on this site.
Well, this isn't my rifle, right?
So now I've got to find the button that dims the red dot.
So I mess around with this thing, and the whole team is outside, and they're watching this, right?
Because they're going to go on my shot.
Now, this dude had the door barricaded with a TV and a TV stand and all that stuff, so they were going to have to hit the door hard.
But they were going to get a running start at it, but I moved them out because they were right on the other side of the door, but I didn't know if my round was going to go through the wall or not, so I moved them out.
So we got them out.
So they're all watching this shit show, basically, of me on this optic.
And they're thinking, what are you doing, Turner, right?
And I'm thinking, I'm like, shit, I just gotta get this thing turned down, right?
unidentified
So I mess with the buttons and I finally get to the right one.
I don't know, because he was, I mean, who knows what kind of mental state he was in, and I was trying not to be too, that's why I didn't turn on any lights or anything.
So I come around the corner again, and I look in there, I'm like, okay, I got the right brightness, but it's too close, right?
Like her head was like an inch, because what I'm looking at is this.
So like this is the back of her head.
I'm looking at his eyeball.
So I got like an inch.
I'm like, nah, it's too close.
So this was in December.
A year earlier, it was 364 days after I made that decision in that tree stand, when I mapped things, right?
So now between December of 14 and December of 15, now I have control of what's going on.
And I made that vow, right, long ago that I'm not going to shoot an uncontrolled shot.
So I come around the corner, and I'm looking, and she's, of course, looking at me, and it's close.
I'm like, nah, I ain't gonna do that.
So I'm waiting, and then he moves his head back, right?
I'm like, okay, two and a half inches of mechanical offset, but his face is all covered in hair, like this giant mop of hair.
So I couldn't see the geography of his face at all.
Like, I'm going, I want to put it in his eyeball, but I don't...
I can't see it, right?
So I'm just going by the curvature of his forehead.
I know I've got to aim two and a half inches over that.
So I put it up there.
Safety's off.
Fingers on the trigger.
It's a two-stage trigger.
So I took the first stage out.
Here I go.
I remember saying that.
And then when I'm working on rifle stuff, it's kind of an audible exhale.
So that's my concentration guidance.
So I put it two and a half inches over where I wanted to hit.
Safety's off.
Takes the stage out of the trigger.
Here I go.
And he moves his head back, right?
And he pops it back against the back of her head.
And it's funny the stuff you remember because I remember his hair swishing.
So now he's back and it's too close again.
So I'm like, I'm waiting.
He moves his head back again.
So he moves his head back again.
Now I've got better, you know, it's faster for me to aim where I need to aim.
It's so fascinating how the mind is geared to survival, geared to react quickly to high stress panic situations, the adrenaline pumps, but you don't have an operator's manual.
On how to navigate the various stages of anxiety and these states that only occur rarely under very high-pressure situations, and you don't have a lot of experience with them.
You see that in street fights, where people who don't have training, they have no idea what to do, and you see the walls just I'll never forget this.
I mean, this is a clearly untrained person.
We were at the comedy store, and the comedy store is on Sunset in Hollywood, and there was a fight that was taking place across the street.
And there was all these cars that were passing by while watching these guys yell at each other and push each other.
And then I see this one guy whose eyes are squinting and he's decided to engage in this guy.
And I don't know if he's intoxicated.
I'm sure he's intoxicated.
But they're talking shit and they're pushing.
And then all of a sudden I see him.
Literally like closed eyes like squinting head up in the air and he's swinging like with open hands and then a bus goes in between Him and I and the guys fighting and then when the bus passes he's out cold He's out cold and the other guy walks off and I'm like wow like watching that guy panic and watching that guy in a situation where He'd probably never been before,
didn't know what to do, had talked himself into this terrible situation where he's an untrained fighter, an untrained guy who's fighting with another person.
And this guy's also untrained.
They both sucked.
But this one guy kept it together slightly more and cracked this dude with a haymaker, I guess.
I mean, I don't know, but he was just out cold on the street.
And I remember thinking, wow, anxiety is crazy.
It's...
Those the heart beating the adrenaline pumping and all that it's like those moments Overwhelm people where they can't stay in the moment.
Yeah, and I think what you've done with your shot IQ course is You've given people not just the tools to be effective at archery, but the tools to understand how to control your mind and During high pressure situations and stay in the moment and do the thing that's difficult to do under those high pressure situations.
And not just want it to be over with quick.
You just want it to be over with.
And you see that in fights too where guys swing when the guy's nowhere near them.
They'll just do stuff because they just want to...
And they leave their face exposed and they throw technique out the window.
It's just anxiety.
Yeah.
And knowing that these things exist and having like a followable course where you can, this is what's going on in your mind.
This is how you control your mind.
And you have to talk to yourself.
You have to be able to stay in the moment.
And the best way to stay in the moment is to actually have words going off in your mind.
Yeah, and once we figured that out, now we can start to attack.
What sciences do I need to figure out that deal with this stuff?
And I was lucky to have the right people in the right places to figure this stuff out, but it's putting it in that package so that you can define your job, and then how do you attack it, right?
It's such an amazing thing that you've done that I really feel like it should be mandatory.
I really do.
I think there's so many people that go out into the woods to hunt archery, and they don't know what's going to happen when they pull that trigger the first time.
They've never done it before.
So the first time they ever do it, it's like, whoa!
If they knew what you're teaching, I really think that the rate of success would go up exponentially and the rate of bad shots taken would go up as well.
That would go down.
I really believe that people would be far more effective.
What's amazing that there's all these different people that come up with all these different methods to try to beat target panic.
And one of the things they do, they work on the mechanics by blind bailing.
And what blind bailing is, for the people who don't understand archery, is you literally stand in front of a large target like a bale, like a bale of hay, and you stand close to it.
And all you're doing, you're not even thinking about where you're going to hit.
A lot of times you close your eyes and you're just going through the mechanics of the shot.
So the mechanics of the shot Get programmed into your system, which gives you a little more confidence that you know how to do the mechanics, but it doesn't stop you from freaking out at the moment.
It just doesn't.
And so all these people that have all these different methods, it's really like someone who doesn't understand what's really going on trying to explain it to someone who also doesn't understand what's really going on.
Is that good for defining and refining your movements as an archer?
Certainly.
You should teach someone how to blind bail when you're first learning archery because you want them to be able to understand how the shot should break.
But without the knowledge that you're presenting of what's going on in that high pressure situation, they're going to spaz out and they're going to go open loop.
And people spend months, like, you should blind bail for six months, or maybe you start with a close target and then you move it out slightly, slightly, slightly.
All that is trying to get you to do is separate from the aim.
Don't waste six months of your life shooting a blind bail.
Let's shoot a good shot, blueprint it, understand exactly how you do it, and then you have to test it on a target.
And, you know, some people are like, well, as soon as I, and this is even in my course, and I have to take this out because I filmed that course in 2015 and 16, and since then, the online course, I've got lots of updates to it, but there's one portion of it that I need to take out because in there I say, and this is how it was when I first started, when it was in its infancy, if you detect an error, let the shot down, right?
That makes sense, right?
If you detect an error, let it down.
I don't say that anymore because now every time you detect an error, like let's say that you draw back and you're like, oh man, I'm really shaky.
Oh wait, I'm not supposed to be thinking about my aim.
Let it down, right?
Well, your subconscious just won that shot.
It's like, oh, if I get Joe to shake and recognize that, he'll bail out of the shot.
Your subconscious does not want you to create an explosion in your body.
It never just intuitively wants that.
So if it can get you to bail out of a shot, it will.
So now, when you detect an error, when you are training, when you detect an error, you're not allowed to let down.
You have to stay at full draw and fix it in the shot.
Recognize the problem, understand how to fix it.
Maybe another here I go to increase your presence so that you can concentrate.
But you have to fix it in the shot.
We don't let people let down anymore.
And people are like, oh, the archery instructors are going to lose their mind when they hear, like, oh my god, Turner's telling people not to let down.
I let down in tournaments if I have a shot that went stale because I wasn't thinking about the right movement.
Shot maybe goes stale.
You'll see Bodie do that every now and again.
There's a certain point of pressure in the bow where you're not going to hit the X. There's too much pressure built up, right?
You're just not going to hit the X. So if you have time to on the clock, you let it down.
But recognize, what was the problem there?
Ah, I wasn't thinking about the movement.
I was thinking about my aim or whatever.
Very interesting when you look at Bodie's interview from Lancaster in 21, or 22, actually, when he shot that 660. Because they interview him right after that shot, and he let it down before he actually shot his 60th arrow for the 660. And he tells you exactly what's going through his head.
He says, oh man, my pin was jumping from red to red.
And he left it at that, and I'm like, well, that's why it went stale, because you're thinking about your pin shaking on a target, so you're not thinking about moving the release.
And then they ask him about the next shot.
Well, it was good enough, so I just kept my release moving.
That's the one I bought Bodie when he was three years old.
And it separates it for you.
It's a mechanical fix to a mental problem.
The problem is that it's so based on preload, how much you're pulling when you let that safety off, That there's no professional archer out there that shoots attention-activated release.
Because it's not the most accurate system, but it's the easiest one to control because of that safety, right?
And it makes the decision for you because if you don't pull, your bow's not going off.
So what I do in my clinics when I have somebody that's not determined enough to make a decision, like they just keep punching the trigger.
I don't know why this isn't working.
It's because nothing works for you in shooting, right?
In shot control, nothing works for you.
You have to work for it.
The only thing we're teaching you is what work needs to be done and how to do the work.
But when you take this tension active release, if they just won't stop punching whatever other release they're doing, I'll take that tension active release and I'll screw that sucker down where it won't go off, right?
So, okay, here's how it works.
I tell them how it works.
Push the safety in, draw back and aim, then take the safety off, and you've got to pull.
Okay, yeah, no problem.
So they push the safety in, and this may be a person that hasn't even been able to aim yet.
Like, they're always locked off target.
Safety's on, they draw back, and now all of a sudden they can aim because the safety's on, right?
So now they can separate from that aim.
They're like, okay, and they kind of timidly take the safety off.
I should be able to fill this table with releases and go, there you go, Joe.
And just, you know, index finger trigger, thumb button, hinge, tension activated, pick it up, understand how the trigger works, And control it, no matter what.
If you are a stone-cold killer and you have a system on how you do it, that's awesome.
But it's when you try to put it to somebody else, right?
Like, I didn't grow up being a good shot.
I grew up being a horrible shot, but just loving shooting so much that I wanted to figure it out.
And then I had these sounding boards of, you know, my determination well was deep with the sniper stuff, but I had this sounding board of bowhunting where I was constantly failing, right?
If you have a system and you know how you do it, if you know exactly how you're going to shoot your next shot, then you don't need to change a thing.
But if you don't know, if there's any mystery in that, then that's a problem.
I mean, do you want to be the person that, you know, somebody calls you in a big old bowl or whatever and you botch a super easy shot that you certainly should have made?
There can be no mystery.
So if you don't have mystery, more power to you.
If you, you know, if there's any mystery in it, you better get it out.
So that breathing, and I don't know if it was on your podcast, but Huberman was talking about that you inhale through your nose.
And then you give it an extra inhale, so you inhale to the top, and then you do it again, which inflates different stuff in your lungs.
We always did combat breathing, right?
In through the nose for four, hold for four, out through the mouth for four, hold for four.
That was what we always did in tactical stuff, and that's the only breathing techniques I've learned.
I listened to Huberman's thing and I used it at Vegas this year because Vegas, indoor archery, is strange because it's just a yellow line on the floor.
It's the only thing that makes me nervous.
I shake like a dog crapping tax when I'm on that yellow line and say, this is your first scoring end and everybody knows what that means.
They're like...
I mean, it is a thing in indoor archery because your target is so small, right?
And if Bodie misses the 10 ring when he's shooting for his 900 in Vegas just to get to the shoot-off, if you miss one time, your weekend is done, right?
And then you give it an extra, and you'll feel the tension, right?
And then it's a long exhale through the mouth, and I'm sure it does the same thing that combat breathing does, that box breathing, but it worked better.
And it's faster, right?
Box breathing is, you know, you've got several four counts in there when you may not have enough time for that.
Are you surprised that you're the only one that's put this to archery?
That you've mapped this out?
We're talking about who knows how many hundreds of thousands of people are involved in competitive archery and bow hunting.
Are you surprised that the amount of time that people have been doing this and the amount of time that people have been dealing with it, as you said, There's like an entire industry that's built around target panic, but that no one has ever gotten to the root cause of what this is and recognize that not only is this applicable to archery, it's applicable to all high-pressure situations where you have to physically perform.
And I know you've changed the way a lot of people shoot.
And I've talked to people that use your program.
And I've talked to, like, Peter Atiyah, who is one of the most brilliant guys I know, is 100% all in on what you've taught.
And not just with that, but also with pistol shooting.
He's like, it's completely changed the way I shoot my pistol.
Completely changed my accuracy.
The results have been phenomenal.
And he's like, it's just so amazing that, you know, a person who, and I think it's very important that you experience so much failure, because you had to come up with a method.
So it's really kind of an amazing thing that sometimes you'll have these complex problems in these industries that are overwhelmed with people.
It's not like there's a tiny amount of people doing it.
But one person finds this doorway like, hey guys, there's a way out of this.
We've got to go this way.
And if enough people listen to you, again, it's one of the reasons why I want to talk to you about this.
Like, are you going to have a whole fucking show on archery?
Yes, but no.
Because I think it applies to so many things in life.
The ability to stay in the moment and not lose your shit and have in your mind the very specific task you're trying to do and think about that only.
And do so with words.
Do so in your mind with words, so even though your fucking heart is racing, anxiety's at an all-time high, there's all this adrenaline, you still can execute.
Yeah, so we're trying to figure, I mean, I'm constantly racking my brain like, how can I have the most impact?
I've had a lot of impact on the shooting world.
How can I have impact on other things?
And I've had people tell me they use it for presentations.
I've had them tell me they use it for closing sales.
I've had them talk about, you know, just how they use it in business.
Maybe a CEO making a decision.
Surgeons.
Like I said, I had a surgeon come to me and he said he completely changed how he instructs Surgery after the signature test and after learning, he already knew open and closed loop control systems, but doctors seem to learn that stuff very early on and it's not used that much in medical fields.
So it's way back in med school.
So they don't really, it was something they just kind of stored away and they don't think about it anymore.
But now when they have to teach somebody how to do something and they see the right movement, they gotta, how do I keep that person in that movement?
You've got to know how to translate this.
And it comes, you know, guides use it especially, right?
Hunting guides.
You've seen guides that are like, shoot, shoot, shoot!
That you could expand this to many different things and that you could come in and explain, almost through archery, you could explain this to people and they could apply it to other things in their life.
Because I find myself using it in other things where I'm in high pressure situations where I just talk myself through it.
And I stay in my words and in my conscious mind and it makes a big difference.
Like, I have at my disposal, you know, lots of people send bow-de-bows, right?
So I have a garage full of compounds.
I shot my last critter with a compound in, I think, 2009. Actually, no, that's a lie.
I shot a critter with a compound this past season just for—it was a particular type of bow that I wanted to shoot a deer with.
But compounds in general, I shoot so much that they don't give me the challenge that I'm looking for.
As far as, you know, shooting, competing, I love to watch my arrow fly.
It is mystical to me, like Ted Nugent, right?
The mystical fly of the arrow, that's been real for me since I was seven years old.
So for me to control a shot with a longbow is the ultimate for me.
And like I said, I mean, I do lots of elk calling.
I call them in close.
It's a very effective weapon in my hands.
But a lot of people pick it up for the wrong reasons.
They pick it up because they want the simplicity, they want the tradition, they want all that stuff, but then they lose any skill level that they have in their shot.
And it's, you know, I originally started shooting barebow years and years ago with no sights because I could never put a pin on the target.
No, the people that do it, the people that shoot recurves and traditional longbows, they say that there's nothing like it.
They say that once you develop accuracy with that, that it's like...
Like Aaron Schneider, who's an amazing shot.
He shot for a few years.
He only shot with a recurve bow because he wanted to show everybody that he could be just as effective as hunters are with compound bows and high-tech equipment.
What people need to understand is that a compound bow is very difficult to pull back in the beginning, but the nature of the cam system and the mechanics involved in it, it has a very high let-off.
So a lot of bows have like an 80% let-off, which means, for the people just listening, it's 80% less hard to hold it than it is to pull it.
So when you're at full draw, I can hold a full draw for a minute and a half, two minutes, and stay there.
As long as I'm not completely trying to be absolutely steady and aiming, I can hold a full draw and just relax my arm and then lift it up and then go through my shot process and I'm not compromised.
So your body mechanics come into play and a holding position and all that stuff.
You know, there's this purity of traditional archery where people, like, they don't want to shoot with a mechanoreceptive trigger.
Like, they don't want to shoot with a clicker.
They don't want to shoot with...
I've come up with all kinds of stuff.
Tab sear, grip sear, internal triggers, feather to nose, all this stuff that's all in the online course.
But...
People don't want to shoot it because they don't think it's pure, right?
But they're really chasing the ghost.
Like I've come up with some new triggerless ways to shoot triggerless that are really cool where we incorporate like a safety system, but it's very difficult to shoot a stick bow just by allowing your subconscious to tell itself when to let go.
You are constantly dealing with pre-ignition movements.
Yeah, that's what I don't understand, because I would think that with you, when you want this surprise shot, when you're shooting traditionally, and I know you were using a thumb ring for a while, like the Mongols do.
Arrow comes in this way, so then they grab onto the arrow.
Remember, they're riding their horse, right?
So they're bouncing up and down, and then they grab onto it, and they push the arrow forward, and they knock it, and they put their thumb around it, and it's the pressure.
Of their finger against the knock that holds it against the bow.
So that arrow is pointed way out to the right, so you have to actually flip it so that the string comes behind the arrow so it shoots straight where you're looking.
There's been so many different holds on a string, and it was all based on basically wartime, and did they have to shoot off a horse or not?
There was pinch draws.
There was different ways of holding a bow upside down.
There was I don't know specifically what the Comanches did, but all kinds of different ways of holding the string, and it was all based on necessity, or the length of the bow, you know, particular length of the bow, so it could be over a horse, shoot it mounted, shoot it, you know, like what we do now, we have blinds that are too short for stick bows, so we shoot shorter recurves, you know?
I mean, it's how archery started, as far as I know.
So, I just, I love shooting that way.
It's really the sight picture that you get when your arrow's on the other side of the bow, and when you have a modern bow that's cut to center, you don't have to do the katra thing.
So when I draw back, like, so when I hunt with my thumb, I don't have to judge range because I'm looking at the arrow from the side, right?
Well, a lot of people use it as a method of meditation.
It is a martial art, but for a lot of people, there's something about, and I think this with a compound bow as well, there's something about The concentration that's required to shoot a great shot that clears your mind of everything else.
It's almost like a cleaning.
Like a cleaning of the subconscious and all the stuff that's bothering you.
It's such a fascinating thing where you take difficult tasks and use them as a vehicle for developing your concentration, your potential at other things.
And then that's when, I mean, you're constantly bringing your mind back.
You're shooting on one foot.
You're shooting on balance balls.
So you get practice in bringing your mind back where it needs to be.
And a lot of people don't do that.
They just shoot and shoot and shoot.
And one of the things that bothers me is, you know, there's celebrities out there that will take instruction from somebody, and I watch them shoot, and they punch the trigger their first time they're doing it.
It's just this thing where you know that this is going to lead down a very particular path that you've been and I've been and so many other people have been.
You don't know what you're getting into here, you know?
Do you think that someone can be a trigger puncher, meaning command that trigger, but do so along with these principles where you're like drawing back and aiming, setting it in, and just pull, pull, pull, pull, pull with your finger and have it go off?
So if you can work an archery release, index finger trigger, like you would a fine rifle trigger, then more power to you.
It takes massive mental fortitude to do that.
So we usually start people with the pulling where you hook in and then you pull your hand through the strap.
And then once they gain control of that and they blueprint it, then we move them on to what we call the power squeeze, which is you link a couple of motor programs.
So you actually, you're increasing expansion and you're moving your finger.
And one gives the other guidance.
And you're guiding them both through words or sounds.
And that's more accurate.
Because the main thing with release aids that people need to realize is...
No matter what the movement is, it's got to be closed loop, and it can't move the head of the release.
Like if you are, like let's say you're shooting your hinge and you're pulling on it, but you're not actually rotating it.
You may be pulling but not rotating, so you're just increasing pressure in the bow.
That arrow's not going in the X. Right.
Right?
So you have to be able to link those things up and know what the movement actually is that you need to do.
Not so much, because when I explain it to them, they're like, because I'm talking about exactly what they do, and I know what's going through their head.
And if they are, I know where their success is.
Is it very high level, like there's no question that you're going to do it, or is there still some mystery in your shot?
And it's easy for me to explain because of where I've come from.
I've been in the trenches, right?
I was not good at this stuff.
I don't think there are any natural-born shooters.
I think there are natural-born decision-makers.
And that's where you get these determined people that make decisions, and they can be successful in whatever their field is, especially if it's shooting or whatever.
If you don't have enough determination, and that's where young people fall off because they don't, I mean, they haven't seen the adversity, right?
They don't have the perspective.
They don't have the determination to actually override their own central nervous system.
So you see lots of little kids that start out punching the trigger and their parents don't know what to do with them and the kids just get frustrated and then they leave, right?
I think archery in general, but concentrating on a specific thing that's difficult to do is so valuable for life.
Because if you can do that, it makes other things that seemed to be difficult before you encounter the extreme difficulty of archery, makes them seem easier.
I think that's the key to life, is to do difficult things.
Because if you do really difficult things, it makes other things less difficult.
It basically, I mean, I shot those, it all comes back to those two shots because I'm like, okay, I said this at this moment, I said this at this moment, and I said this at this moment.
And that was the mapping of the decisions.
And then once you do that, then you just, how do you put this, you know, where do you need to put the concentration?
You need to put it in shot activation movement.
How do you put it there?
By talking, right, or making a sound.
Could you stop it?
That's the test, right?
You're not truly in closed loop if you couldn't stop it in the middle of it.
And then what decision did I make?
And those four questions basically encompass the blueprint.
If you can answer those four questions, you know exactly how you did it.
Then and only then can you repeat it.
And I put it in this analogy of the shock control house.
So if you are about to shoot a shot and you know what this moment feels like, you're like, oh my god, this is going to happen, right?
That bull's coming in and it just turns broadside or you're standing on the line in Vegas like, okay, this is it.
You are now on the porch of the shot control house, but you don't get inside because the door's closed.
Your shot process lives inside the house.
And so there you are on the porch.
How do I get the door open?
You got to decide, right?
Decisions open doors in the shot control house.
So I say to myself, I'm shooting this shot with control no matter what.
Because it used to be, I'm going to shoot this shot perfectly or not at all.
But that was a bailout.
Remember the letdown thing, right?
That was a bailout.
That gave me that option of letting down.
I don't say that anymore.
Now it's, I'm shooting this shot with control no matter what.
Because no matter what is a determined statement that we use in everyday speech, yeah?
So I'm shooting the shot with control no matter what.
Door opens, right?
And then you drawing your bow back is you stepping through the door.
The first room that you walk into is the aiming room.
And everybody wants to stay in there.
That's where all your buddies are, right?
Like, hey, Joe, what's up?
Stay in here with us, right?
There's all kinds of crates.
There's disco balls and all kinds of things going on in there.
And you're like, man, this is pretty cool.
I think I'll just have a seat on the couch.
And that's what most people do is they sit on the couch in there and they never get out of the aiming room.
So what I want people to do is get your aim done quickly.
Don't be bringing your pin up from the bottom or down from the top.
You shouldn't be able to tell me what position or what direction your pin comes from.
Just stick the damn thing on the target and then watch it to keep it.
So don't linger in the aiming room, right?
Don't look at the pictures on the wall.
Don't sit on the couch.
Don't talk to anybody in there.
Just put on the blinders and walk through the room.
Well, I want to thank you for being here and I want to tell you that what you've done has been very, it's been very helpful to me and many, many other people and I really do believe that it translates to other things in life.
It's so important to understand what's going on in your mind and how your mind is trying to fuck you over.
Just years of evolution and just anxiety is all trying to fuck you over, but you can avert that and you can bypass it.