Lars Andersen: a new level of archery [video] | Hacker News Reader

Lars Andersen: a new level of archery [video]

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330 pointsivank81 comments

This is so close to being a real-life Kenny Powers highlight video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjvZOh4OzBs).

I realize this guy is immensely talented and probably in the top .0001% of this chosen field... but I laughed the whole time as he roller bladed, jumped and spun while shooting arrows.

Just needed some cool flame effects.

None of these are forgotten archery techniques. Some of them are acrobatic, some are silly, some are unreliable. (Some fall into more than one of those categories.)

Modern Olympic archers are all about accuracy, with no points for speed other than an overall time limit.

If you want to learn archery with both speed and accuracy, you could do worse than to find your local SCA group.

A Royal Round is a set of six arrows (or bolts from a crossbow) shot at round targets at 20 yards, 30 yards, 40 yards, and then as many shafts as possible at 20 yards in 30 seconds. That gives a maximum score of 90 (6 arrows x 5 points for each bullseye x 3) plus the 30 second score.

A rank of "Bowman" is awarded to someone who can average 60 points over three Royal Rounds.

Master Bowmen average 80 points.

Grand Master Bowmen average at least 100 points.

And the Ludicrous Bowmen -- there have been 25 of them, so far -- have managed an average of 120 or more over three Royal Rounds. I've met five of them.

I'm not an archer of any rank. But my take on this is that he's trying to represent or reproduce the skill of archery when archery was essential to war and hunting. Great skill in an Olympic competition is certainly an impressive achievement but it may be worthless outside the clearly defined rules of competition.

Between your 120 bowman and this guy, which one wins in battle and which one brings home fresh meat for dinner. I think I'd rather have this guy on my side.

When archery was essential to war, it was still only "stand and loose" - foot archers typically planted stakes in front to ward off cavalry, or would be on hills or in front of woods. Basically stand still, shoot the buggers, run and hide if anyone charged.

As for hunting, that is extreme slowness, and perfect accuracy because you won't get a second shot, and if you move at all before loosing the animal moves too. Hunters wait.

So apart from firing in the saddle, archery was and is about stillness, accuracy and yes, in war, speed.

The guys able to put 30 arrows into the attacking targets at 50 paces will win the war, and the guys setting snares will fill the pot ;-)

While the notion that "stand and loose" was important in war seems sensible to me, the implication that mobility and shooting speed were irrelevant does not. Being able too shoot fast seems like an immensely useful skill when confronting a mass of enemies that move, have armor and actively try to avoid getting shot. More shots per minute would mean more chance to actually inflict damage.

Also, what about smaller confrontations that did not involve a wall of charging cavalry/footmen?

While the acrobatics is silly, what this guy is doing is impressive and indicate skills that could be applied more broadly.

"Stand and loose" is an ok strategy but "Ride and Loose" let the Mongols capture more territory in 25 years than the Romans did in 400.

Hardly the "only" strategy.

The Commanche were also particularly effective at it. The combination of their horse riding and archery skills made them more lethal than the US Army, until the revolver was invented. Before the revolver, firing on horseback was a non-starter because reloading was almost impossible; a Commanche could fire dozens of arrows in the time it took one reload. I read about this in the book "Empire of the Summer Moon" by S. C. Gwynne.

Samurai as well. Very skilled horse archers.

It's weird that you don't see the benefit of being effective while moving when your rebuttal includes 'run'. Not to mention that there are plenty of situations where stakes/hills/woods as a static defense don't apply - if you're attacking; if you're sieging; attacking a town, fighting in the streets; if you're not taking part in a large set-piece battle; so on and so forth. If you're part of a small patrol and encounter the enemy, you fight them then and there, no time to plant stakes or move the site of the battle.

Likewise, you need to be able to move around as the battle progresses. There's no point standing behind your stakes if the enemy you need to put pressure on is 200 yards away over a meadow. All the zen-like calmness in the world and impregnable field position isn't going to help you if the enemy doesn't come within range.

Being able to reliably hit a very small target at 70 yards at full draw is exactly what I would want for hunting. That game is easily spooked and can likely evade you better than you can chase it. Why in the world would you want to get any closer than necessary and be moving while attempting to shoot it?

Not to mention that his 10 shots at the beginning of the video are no where close to full draw. I'd suspect that even if he did hit an animal with hide that it would not be a lethal shot.

Hunting at 70 yards? All the bowhunters at my club practice below 50 yards.

That's exactly my point. Olympic archery is at 70 yards, and they are very consistent at hitting the inner rings of the target. That extra distance would be great for hunting.

would it be ok to write the amount in m - this yard values still have no meaning to me and probably many others here

Had to look it up

70 yards = 64 metres

50 yards = 45 metres

You might be hunting bison or hunting on horseback(or an ATV).

Could you or anyone share some youtube videos of such events, possibly? I've managed to find only some crossbow one, it didn't look very fast in comparison, but also crossbow is inherently slower. I'd be very interested in seeing the examples of what you're talking about.

Also, I'm confused by the explanation you provide for the score counting. Is it 90pts max over 3 rounds, + 30 seconds extra? Is the bullseye during the 30s also counted for 5 points? If so, then score 120 means 30 points over 30 seconds, means 5 seconds per arrow on average, yes? If so, then the show by Lars Andersen is much faster. If not, then can you please explain it more clearly to me?

Also, can you explicitly say which techniques are silly, which are unreliable, which are "acrobatic"? It's hard to discuss (either disagree or agree) when you're so vague. For example, as to handling the bow, in some video about "ancient Japanese archery" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egiXLXwhvzs#t=10m45s) they seem to be also keeping the arrow on the same side of the bow as Lars, and keeping more than 1 arrow between fingers; while some random SCA bowmen guys I've googled up on youtube seemed to be handling it "on the inside".

There are a fair number of such videos; consider https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3T8V5woO7zQ (2013 Royal Tournament in Atlantia)

Of course Lars is much faster: he's showing you an edited compilation of the best things he's ever done. A Ludicrous Bowman can reliably hit the bullseye on each of thirty shots in a row, and then also shoot somewhere between 6 bullseyes and 12 lesser shots in 30 seconds... and then do it all over again.

That video is for a crossbow.

> Modern Olympic archers are all about accuracy, with no points for speed other than an overall time limit.

I'm pretty sure his point is that "Modern Olympic" archery isn't as useful for hunting or fighting, given that it's been heavily optimized for stationary shooting.

The acrobatic/silly/etc. things he's doing in the video while using a bow aren't the technique he's learned; it's the actual bow-work itself (the binocular sighting, tweaking which side of the bow the arrow is on, being able to move quickly from unarmed to shooting, using a thumb-release technique, moving the bow itself to add arrow velocity, etc.) that - from what I gather - allows him to maintain that sort of demonstrated accuracy despite the non-archery things he's doing in the meantime.

IMHO, he is shooting a bow that's too light for hunting or fighting. I'd say he shoots below 30 pounds, which works for what he does, but nothing else.

At /r/Archery people were loving this guy, or hating him for doing a fake video, but not despising or underrating him as a silly acrobat.

I'd love to know the draw weights of the bows he's using. One of the differences between the sort of archery he's doing and the standard recurve competition shooting you'll see is that the latter is much slower, more relaxed, with very defined, conscious aiming. The idea is to do precisely the same thing, with your whole body, over and over and over again. His aiming is completely instinctual. Because of the way the arrow will drift away from the bow sideways if you put it on the right, I doubt it would be worth using the bow as part of your sighting at all.

On the one hand, I can believe he'd be able to do this sort of thing quite easily with low-powered bows. On the other, you really wouldn't want to be holding the sorts of positions he gets into for very long at all if they were heavier.

I'd also, just for interest's sake, be interested to put him up against an experienced modern recurve archer at, say, 40 metres. Close range trick-shots would, I suspect, lose out to more refined technique over much more than that.

Try hitting a moving target at 40 metres. You'll probably miss. He'll probably miss as well, but he'll have a significant edge being able to shoot while moving closer towards the other archer.

Kyudo is a very nice and sort of meditative experience. I'm guessing it's the same for other forms of stationary archery. It'll really teach you how to work your bow. Slowly and methodically. No one who practices kyudo expects to be able to fight a battle with it. This guy pretty much shows why.

The samurai to which kyudo is descended from certainly expected to win battles with it...

The samurai were noted horse archers so they seem to have adoped the move and shoot approach for actual combat as well.

I imagine that in combat (as bows were used when these techniques were "lost") you didn't have to be bullseye-accurate. Close to where you were aiming is often good enough.

On the other hand, he manages to be bullseye-accurate (as evidenced by the size of many of the targets he managed to hit - including hitting other arrows mid-flight).

Actually not so hard - below 30 meters, you can have that kind of accuracy with not too much effort IMHO - in recurve archery, we shoot only 3 arrows, on separate targets, starting at 50 meters, to avoid breaking arrows (the next one hitting the preceding one). At 30 meters, I can let go of sight and a lot of technique and still be "bullseye" as he is.

He is very specifically releasing quickly. I didn't see anywhere an attempt to hold a bow in position for a long time to aim --- just like throwing a ball, you don't have to hold it cocked when you are an expert.

How are these trick shots, and not refined? Those sound like belittling statements. He has done good research and discovery of how ancient warriors fought. It is fair to call them different techniques, but not refined vs unrefined. It would take some serious practice to duplicate the masters in either style.

So you want to compare sports archery vs combat archery and expect the results to be anything less than obvious?

Your comment does make me consider, though, whether longbowmen use a technique more similar to the modern sports technique than to Andersen's here. Kind of like how sniping is more similar to target practice than urban combat.

Maybe, maybe not. :-)

Accuracy vs. volume of fire is not an easy question to settle, given that they can't be compared directly, but require very different tactics and training.

Check this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOHGUExSGH8 (and for background, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XomJdLZGyCM ).

Most of the depictions of longbowmen in battle that I've seen make me suspect that they're going down the volume-of-fire route.

From the trajectory of one of his outdoor shots, IMHO, he shoots 25-30 lbs.

A lot of it makes a ton of sense. But draw weight of the bow and weight of the arrows make a huge difference. Would be really interesting to see him do this even half as effectively using and 80-100lb warbow with heavy war arrows. Weaker stuff will not punch through even the worst armour at any kind of decent range. Also I wonder if this works with light flight arrows used to harass enemy at range and kill horses.

His technique does show how bad it was for the horses and why Mongols needed to bring as many remounts as they did. Battle between two horse archer armies must have been a real horse slaughter.

Also that mail shot, I bet cash that is a crap butted mail. Try same with riveted mail covered with gambeson and see what happens(nothing, this arrows will bounce like it was a wall)

On a castle tour in the UK there was a discussion about the advantage the longbow gave the English. Something that I had not considered was that shooting an arrow up at an angle, allowed it to accelerate due to gravity on the way down, and that was a large component of its velocity at impact. In this way the amount of energy it lost due to air resistance was minimized. Much more complex than I expected.

I very much doubt that the arrow will gain any velocity going down that it didn't have when shot upwards. Remember that the arrow needs initial vertical velocity to reach any height.

> Weaker stuff will not punch through even the worst armour at any kind of decent range.

They do show his arrows piercing chainmail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-cl=84503534&feature=playe...

With heavy war arrows you can easily shoot through riveted mail and layers of gambeson. In this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ32VnjOQ28) you can see a war arrow going right through rived mail and 8 layers of gambeson.

This Guy is bowyer and historian, and will be presenting research about this very subject at a medieval studies conference this spring.

Have not checked HN in couple days, hope you notice this. I misspoke in my original comment I was referring to a jack not gambeson as arrow protection oops. And even bigger problem is that mail he uses is bad quality you can see from ring density and thickness. here is a great set of tests http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=11131&postdays...

IMHO, he doesn't have the technique to handle 80 lbs.

The use of ancient paintings as "proof" that the archers used the right-side of the bow made me think of this: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/nobody-kno...

Just because it's in a lot of pictures, doesn't mean it's really what happened.

Sure, but he specifically mentioned studying historical sources. If he's into something like, say, what ARMA folks do with fencing manuals, we're not talking about looking at a bunch of sketches and having random ideas. Historical manuals have annotations explaining what is being pictured, with motions described and what not. Sure you'll have botched icons but if text contradicts what you see, you'll test all variations and draw conclusions based on what's effective. Just because this poor video picked the flashiest imagery he had at hand doesn't mean this is what he's using as a reference.

WRT several adjacent threads here it's important to keep in mind that arms and armor changed over time. It's easy to say "meh, quality chainmail wouldn't have been pierced using this bow and this arrow" but it's quite likely that these techniques were rarely used by the time regular army had access to proper protective gear. He mentioned firearms in his video and noted that fast archery declined because of it. Could be but firearms were result of "we need more power to penetrate that armor" which in turn was caused by "we need better protection from these heavy swords" which were response to armor, and so on. I bet folks who were into art of war some hundreds of years ago had their own version of Moore's law. ;]

So Legolas surfing down the stairs on a dwarf shield while shooting 5 orcs wasn't so far from the truth after all?

This perfectly showcase how to make a true master of his craft look like a SNL sketch through amateur video making skills.

Might be intended, since it's comedic. I mean nowadays we have Yung Lean and Tim & Eric, and all that sort of stuff, wouldn't surprise me if stuff like that inspired the style of the video.

As someone who owns a bow (old bowtech patriot) and has spent countless hours in the woods with bows, this guy is a gymnast, not an ancient archer.

(1) Archery has never been about speed. You don't need to be a hunter to appreciate that hunting does not involve any bouncing around like a woodland sprite.

(2) Arrows are not bullets. The do not kill quickly. Shooting at people five or ten feet away is suicide. Even if you hit them through the chest, they will live long enough to get you back. Only in hollywood do targets ever fall down dead when hit with arrows.

(3) The "ancient" archery this guy idolizes never existed. Arrows made from natural substances (wood, bone etc) are not this accurate. Ancient hunters shot very close to animals, so close that they did worry about the animal turning on them (see 2 above). In war, using indirect fire to cover distance, archers always fired en mass. They also drilled to create consistent trajectories in order to concentrate fire. They did not aim at specific targets.

(4) Leveling an arrow on the left of the riser (bow) doesn't require more movements than on right. The arrow is drawn by passing the pointy bit through the bow, between the string and riser, and then drawing it back. One motion, never letting go of the arrow. This is how I was taught to shoot fingers. As for holding extra arrows in your bow hand, this is certainly possible, but you better be careful when pulling them through a closed fists. This guys is using dull target heads, not the bladed tips used when actual trying to kill things.

(I say "fire" but the proper term is "loose", for releasing an arrow).

"The "ancient" archery this guy idolizes never existed."

In the video, he says he picked up his ideas from old manuscripts and so forth that show such archery techniques in action (arrow on the right side of the bow, arrows carried in the shooting hand, etc.) and quotes one source (Babylonian? Can't remember) saying these archers had to be able to loose three arrows in 1.5 seconds.

Also, he makes a case for close-quarters combat. I think possibly he's studied this stuff more than you have? His basic claim is that he's re-discovering forgotten techniques so it makes sense your mainstream knowledge of archery wouldn't cover these things.

Teucer from The Iliad certainly makes a lot more sense to me if I imagine him fighting like this.

Concur. Besides, he is probably shooting less than 30 lbs which is enough for his stunts, when you want to be shooting 70-80 lbs for hunting. Given his technique, I'd like to see him pull that. As for "war", I've seen medieval estimates of 140 lbs, which always left me wondering, because after 20 years pulling 45 lbs myself, 140 lbs just means "injury" to me.

When I was a boy we visited... not sure, Granada I think. There were both a museum and shops around that sold swords, of the old broad type. They weigthed a lot. The teacher made us notice the size of armour. That people were very short and still could wield 15 kg effectively.

I am very skeptical of your claims. Turkish archery and bison hunting were very much about speed and being able to shoot from a mobile target at relatively close enemies.

I don't know much about archery, but it seems Mongol-style horseback archery would differ a lot from longbow-style stationary shooting in terms of speed and being able to shoot on the move (just like snipers are very different from cavalry in that sense when it comes to rifles.)

In war... archers always fired en mass

There are more kinds of battle in war than set-piece battles between large hybrid armies.

I wonder how many takes he had to do before getting the video of splitting an arrow in flight. It's pretty damn impressive either way, but I still have a hard time believing he can do that reliably.

If i read the description right, it took him 14 tries.

This is so awesome.

I hope that filmmakers and storytellers learn about how ordinary warrior archers should be actually be depicted in historical and fantasy films.

That video was neat, but it looks entirely like underpowered archery. Was it really guns that made people not care about this kind of thing (fast archery on the run)? Or was it simply more powerful longbows that meant archers would shoot from further off?

On a related note, in this video he catches an arrow out of the air. But that air must have been moving relatively slowly. There was a Mythbusters years ago where they investigated the myth of ninjas catching arrows, and determined it was impossible based on the time it took for a martial arts master to close his hand (measured with a high-speed camera) vs the time it took for an arrow to pass through the air. But this was assuming longbows fired from a castle wall. Those arrows will be going significantly faster than the ones seen in this video.

Yes the arrow is slow, because the bows are not heavy, probably in the 25-30 lbs range.

I thought this was going to be his older video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zGnxeSbb3g. But he's improved. Splitting an incoming arrow???

And not even that but unloading with less than a second after spinning around from facing the other way? It actually puts Legolas to shame.

A second's quite a long time. Depending on the weight of the bows he's using, a quick, explosive release might be the only way he can actually put enough energy into the bow to get a shot off at all.

I wouldn't worry about his bow weight. The trajectory of his arrow on one of outdoor shots show he is not even shooting 30 lbs. You can hold that as long as you want.

The previous video did a time comparison. He shot 7 targets to Legolas' 6. In this video he's noticeably faster.

i wonder what happen when he fails

Well, and they CGI'd the most of the movie's Legolas' "arrows" as well.

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2014/06/game-of-thrones-has-cgi-in-...

Every arrow fired on Arrow is CGI due to crew and actor safety.

We just saw the time it worked. And he had a big grin on his face. How many times did it fail?

Probably quite a few, but what's your point? That he shot enough arrows that it eventually hit without requiring significant skill? I tend to believe his success is above that of chance.

The actual odds are not really that important as what you really care about is not the odds that that specific odd thing happen but how many odd things happen given enough time.

One of the more amusing examples was Ripley(sp?) from the 3rd Alien movie does a long distance one handed backward basketball shot that they were going to use CGI on. The funny thing is watching the movie you see very honest surprised emotions which seem almost to believable.

However, the actress actually made the shot during the take which is why all the actors have a much more believable WTF expression than normal. The only thing out of place is the actress expression where she must have been trying really hard not to blow the take.

Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOrTfA8QZyI 4:35

Anyway, my point was if she missed then nobody would have thought it odd. They were not going to try again until it happened, but once it did happen they wanted to use that 'good luck'. It’s sort of the best take effect, walk around and take 1,000 pictures and the chances are something unusual happens in that shot. The odds of that specific unusual thing happening are not high, but the odds of some unusual thing happening is.

One of the potential failure modes is getting hit with a arrow, so even failures are impressive.

Somewhat related, a historical book on archery: http://tuba-archery.com/article/arab-archery.pdf

He seems to be shooting a very light bow, from the trajectory of his arrow in one of the outdoor shots, and his technique probably wouldn't work very long for a heavier bow or more arrows, because he doesn't seem to be using his back very much. (I'm an archer).

Caution! Do not split incoming arrow with remaining eye.

Yeah, that's where I did a double take and actually paused the video to confirm that he's not wearing any goggles, and doesn't appear to be wearing any protective gear whatsoever.

It's possible the incoming arrow was blunt.

True, but even a blunt arrow will put out an eye. And depending on where it hits you, it can put quite a damper on your day.

I bet this dude plays a mean lute!

Now all we need is a Gatling-like automatic bow that you reload while shooting with other hand at the same time.

Lars Andersen: a new level of archery

Narrated by the one and only Lars Andersen

myth debunked: http://geekdad.com/2015/01/danish-archer/

this is absolutely amazing!

Very impressive! But I can't help but think of George Michael in Arrested Development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-EouZi1mvQ

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