Shooting Selfbows

Paul Comstock:
“Sometime around 1934 the term, ‘instinctive‘ was created not because
it appeared in print at that time, but because that marked the very beginning
of the National Field Archery Association, which grew bigger
and bigger in the following years and promoted ‘Instinctive Shooting’
heavily -- at least until fiberglass bows appeared.
One-time NFAA secretary John L. Yount in 1974 wrote a history of
the group’s origins, which I found online. A goal, Yount wrote, “was to
promote a shooting style, ‘Instinctive’ that would greatly increase the
number of archers.”
If we think a minute about what he wrote, he is literally saying the ‘Instinctive
Archery’ concept would ATTRACT lots of new archers. He did
not say ‘Instinctive Shooting’ would make the new archers accurate
shots. ‘Instinctive’ seems to promise accurate shooting without having
to do a lot of thinking.
The creation of the term was absolutely a reaction to and an attack on
the methods used by the National Archery Association, whose members
included very accurate and deadly bowhunters such as Pat Chambers
and Cassius Styles.
The methods of the NAA would have been confusing for novices for
several reasons. For example, no one could become proficient at NAA
methods without directly interacting with NAA members, including those
who were archery coaches. Not everyone
could do that.
Also, there were competing schools of thought in the NAA, such as ‘relaxed’
vs. ‘nonrelaxed’ which were competing ideas in the 1930s. Even
those terms are confusing, because ‘relaxed‘ in reality referred only to
a bent elbow of the bow arm, and ‘nonrelaxed‘ referred only to the bow
arm extended and locked at the elbow.
Unless archers were directly exposed to the NAA, trying to figure out
NAA methods was a mess, a real headache . . . a pain in ass! Yount
and others wanted to start over with something new, and ‘Instinctive’
was the best thing they could think of.