Welcome to Maxx Sports Guides
The Block Archery Target Article
. For a permanent link to this article, or to bookmark it for further reading, click here.
The Many Forms of Competitive Archery
from: Maxx Sports GuidesCompetitive archery could have been started by a couple of archers from the Stone Age with too much time on their hands, who wanted to learn who could shoot the furthest or the most accurately. Today's competitive archery runs includes many different bows and shooting styles.
There are flight bows used to shoot for pure distance. Competitive archery permits off-the-shelf bows to be used as well as customized or specialized bows manufactured to shoot arrows enormous distances. The world record for an arrow's single flight is 1327 yards. Flight shoots are typically held in places at airfields, dry lake beds, and desert plateaus to give the archers the space needed.
Field archery is a great way gaining a spark of adventure. With field archery you're shooting at targets out in the wild such as forests. Archers who get into this format of competitive archery, in spite of lost and damaged arrows, have a great time. Different disciplines in field archery permit archers to shoot at pre-known distances or at targets that need distance to be estimated in order to hit them.
3D archery is similar in many ways to field archery. The target course is always in a forest or wooded setting to allow for some very challenging placements of targets. The targets are plastic foam animal replicas. 3D competitive archery started in the U.S. but has expanded with great success to various parts of the globe.
Target archery in modern times began with Prince Regent of England who later became George the IV. The target, its size, and colors were established in the 1800s and today are mostly unchanged. Archery competitions were originally shot with the longbow and target arrows. Some of the records set in target archery still remain unbroken.
Some of these belong to England's Horace Ford, who was the single greatest longbowman target archer of his era. In 1972 the FITA world record for most points scored in competitive target archery was 1204. Currently, the record is 1361 points, but could change at any time. Clearly the skills of the archers continue to evolve.
Competitive archery is shot indoors at the World level. This is actually one of the few sports that permits women and the disabled to compete on equal terms with male archers of sound body.
There are new forms of competitive archery being developed for the purpose of bringing archery to a wider audience. There are now head-to-head competitions with archers getting eliminated at each successive stage, all leading to a showdown finale.
These competitions are now being used at the World level. Many archery clubs are also beginning to host them. There's a wide array of forms of archery. If you're new to the sport, you won't be disappointed if you give competitive archery a try.
The Block Archery Target News