
Lars Andersen: a new level of archery [video] - ivank
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEG-ly9tQGk
======
hoopism
This is so close to being a real-life Kenny Powers highlight video
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjvZOh4OzBs](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.

------
dsr_
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.

~~~
Gargoyle888
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.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
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 ;-)

~~~
paulgerhardt
"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.

~~~
scott_s
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.

~~~
BashiBazouk
Samurai as well. Very skilled horse archers.

------
regularfry
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.

~~~
tormeh
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.

~~~
mcguire
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOHGUExSGH8)
(and for background,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XomJdLZGyCM](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.

------
tlear
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)

~~~
greetings
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](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.

~~~
tlear
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...](http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=11131&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0)

------
moron4hire
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...](http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/nobody-knows-what-
running-looks-like/381171/)

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

~~~
DominikD
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. ;]

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

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

~~~
arvinjoar
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.

------
sandworm
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).

~~~
cgh
"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.

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

------
lisper
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.

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

------
SlipperySlope
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.

------
eridius
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.

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

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

~~~
zaroth
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.

~~~
wavefunction
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-...](http://www.kotaku.com.au/2014/06/game-of-thrones-has-cgi-in-the-
weirdest-places/)

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

------
afsina
Somewhat related, a historical book on archery: [http://tuba-
archery.com/article/arab-archery.pdf](http://tuba-archery.com/article/arab-
archery.pdf)

------
Zibulon
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).

------
zackmorris
Caution! Do not split incoming arrow with remaining eye.

~~~
pavel_lishin
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.

~~~
tootie
It's possible the incoming arrow was blunt.

~~~
pavel_lishin
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.

------
akinity
I bet this dude plays a mean lute!

------
ph0rque
Now all we need is a Gatling-like automatic bow that you reload while shooting
with other hand at the same time.

------
brosky117
Lars Andersen: a new level of archery

Narrated by the one and only Lars Andersen

------
codelyra
myth debunked: [http://geekdad.com/2015/01/danish-
archer/](http://geekdad.com/2015/01/danish-archer/)

------
borgchick
this is absolutely amazing!

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

