Archery Fundamentals by Teresa Johnson
This review is of the second edition of Archery Fundamentals. This book contains around 150 pages of a good sized text font – so is easy to read but with only black and white images.
Archery Fundamentals contains 12 chapters. These are bows, arrows, accessories, shooting recurve, shooting compound, alignment, anchor points and releases, taking aim, maximising performance, scoring, equipment maintenance, competition and traditional archery.
The beginning of Archery Fundamentals starts with telling you about the different types of archery field, target etc and then shows a few warm up exercises and goes through the different bow types you could purchase. It then finishes this chapter off by you choosing your correct hand and installing nocking points and arrow rests.
The second chapter is all about arrows and it talks about which arrows to buy and spine type, length, what they are made of etc. It also tells you about points, wraps, vanes etc. The following accessories chapter brings in finger tabs, sights, quivers, clickers, arm guards etc.
There is then two chapters telling you about the basics of shooting a recurve and compound bow as well as discussing all the different parts of the bow.
It’s then onto body alignment, grip, anchor points and release in the next chapter. Chapter 7 is about taking aim and we are introduced to using sights, dealing with the wind etc.
The maximising performance chapter talks about what to do when things are going wrong and your arrow flight is strange or arrows are not going where you want them. The book then gives a chapter over to instruction you about scoring. There is then a chapter on bow maintenance. This includes what to carry as spares, checking tiller, checking alignment, repairing your bow and inspecting your bow and arrows.
The book finishes off by looking at competing and having a coach and finally about traditional archery.
Overall thoughts
I suppose the title of this book really gives away the contents of it – Archery Fundamentals. This book is really for beginners and covers just the basics you really need to know when you are starting archery. So this is a great book for beginners, although I don’t think it would suit the intermediary archer.