How To Use An Archery Training Diary

The Archery Training Diary – Why “More” Isn’t Always Better

Keeping a training diary might seem unnecessary for archery at first; maybe you’ve already improved massively without ever using one. But it needn’t be complicated and take huge amounts of time. You will probably spend hundreds or thousands of hours working on your shooting, and not bothering with some sort of diary actually ends up costing you time, not saving it. A diary helps solidify your technique, and ensures you’re always moving forwards. In times of need (when you seem to have lost your form feeling), a diary helps you quickly get back to shooting properly. This could save you days, or even weeks of frustration and poor shooting.

You can watch the full video about keeping a training diary on YouTube (see below) and there’s also a written summary if you scroll down past the video. If you’ve not already, make sure to check out our Recurve Archery Basics, How To Learn Archery and How To Train for Archery guides.

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The Archery Training Diary – Why It’s Essential

A training diary can be different things to different archers. But essentially it’s a personal record of your shot cycle, how you’ve trained, how you feel and what you plan to do to progress. Simple.

In summary, your training diary will help you:

- - Learn new technique more quickly
  - Have a more consistent shot cycle day to day
  - Recover from a bad training session more quickly
  - Avoid switching focus too often
  - Prevent training overload
  - Identify patterns
  - Prevent illness/injury
  - Keep motivation

The Archery Training Diary – What To Include

This really depends on what your goals are. If keeping a diary is new for you, start simple and keep it quick and easy. This will ensure you can commit to writing your diary over the long-term. A brief diary done consistently is better than a detailed diary which is often avoided.

For a beginner/intermediate archer, the following is more than enough:

- - What you’re going to focus on
  - Your shot cycle
  - What you learned
  - “How much” you trained

We’ve made a template training diary page that you can use to get started. It’s really simple and quick to do.

For an advanced/serious archer:

For more advanced archers who are taking training really seriously, it can be useful to add an overview page to your training diary, as well as the daily page.

The daily page is always the most important part to complete. This is because it allows real reflection on your progress and gives great detail for you to review in the future.

There are endless metrics you could choose to track, but in order of importance I would suggest something like the following:

1. 1. Arrows shot
  2. Band drills done
  3. Light bow reps done
  4. Bow training done
  5. Gym sessions done
  6. Fatigue
  7. Motivation
  8. Resting HR
  9. Weight
  10. Scores

The Archery Training Diary – Key Mistakes To Avoid

There are some common errors you should be aware of when it comes to using your diary effectively. These are the most common mistakes:

- Thinking that shooting more arrows guarantees progress
- Not listening to your body. This leads to overtraining
- Not making the time to review previous training
- Creating a training program only involving shooting

I hope this was a helpful post – there are also loads more videos on similar topics (and many more) on the Online Archery Academy YouTube Channel.