Ox String For Archers and Bowhunters

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Most training focuses on gear, sights, and technique.  Those are all important, but 80% of archery is above the neck...mental and visual, and when you've got that dialed in, you can shoot better with any bow you pick up.

The "above-the-neck" stuff is what drives (or limits) your ability to perform because it's the foundation that all skill and technique is built on.

It's what will let you squeeze the last drop of performance out of the bow and gear you've got.

But most archers struggle with one or more of the following and they act like a parking brake on performance and no training or course has addressed them all, until now...

Each of these, on their own, can cause inconsistency.  Combine 2-3 of them, and it's super-frustrating.  Possibly enough to quit.

People chase after the problem by buying throwing money at new gear, attachments and modifications, when the solutions are normally only a few minutes away in their brain...and it's just WAITING to take the brakes off and let you perform.

But each of these problems acts like a parking brake on performance.  

This training is the difference between performing at your best SOME of the time and taking the brakes off and performing at your best ALL of the time.

This may sound like a lot, but after working with thousands of shooters and archers, I've distilled the process to help all of these issues down to a few fast, simple sequences of drills that you can do at the home, at the range, or in the field.

Just one of these drill sets has been been shown to improve performance up to 288 TIMES faster than full day training with a nationally or internationally known instructor using traditional methods.

And when you use these drills before you train, compete, or hunt, you'll improve faster, retain skill longer, and perform better and more consistently under stress.

Unbelievable?  Absolutely.

True?  Yes...but let me tell you how.  

You can either read, watch, or do both.

If you'd rather watch, I've got a video of a presentation below that you can watch.

My background is in using vision and neurology drills to improve tactical performance for military, law enforcement, and civilian self defense.  What I found over the years as an bowhunter myself and working with shooters who were also bowhunters & archers is that the same drills that improved performance with a pistol or carbine in high stress situations also helped archers in practice, 3D courses, competition, and hunting.

The video is one that I presented at a national shooting expo to a room of more than 100 shooters where I walk them all through some of the drills I mentioned above.  

I had them do assessments, some quick drills, and then re-assess and you can see just how dramatic their improvement was in real time.  

You can even do the drills at home and experience the same results they did.  It was primarly for concealed carry pistol, but the fundamentals of improving vision, calming the mind, and improving brain function apply more to archery than to pistols.

And will give you a small taste of how I can help you hit more bullseyes...

If you want more detail, keep reading.

I mentioned eye dominance earlier.

Right eye dominant and left eye dominant are the easy ones.

11% of the population has Cyclopean or "central" dominance where the brain combines the images from each eye into a hybrid 3rd image that doesn't exist in reality that appears to come from an eye in the middle of the forehead.

Another 10%-20% have "shared dominance" where the image that they try to use for sighting appears to come from the corner of the eye, rather than the middle of the pupil.

That gives us 4 different types of eye dominance...5 if you split out right and left shared dominance, which I don't.

Anything other than having stable dominance at a single eye is going to cause unnecessary misses.

The most common solutions for central or shared dominance are patches, smudges, squinting an eye, and bow/sight modifications...

They all work, but they kind of suck.  The modifications are expensive and nobody likes wearing blinders like a horse.

Since my main focus has been vision training for tactical applications like surprise ambushes and self-defense, none of those options are practical.

So I had to come up with ways to help shooters consistently nail targets under stress in surprise situations with both eyes open...no matter how uncomfortable or unnatural it was when they came to me.

I didn't have months or weeks or days to help them...I had to develop ways to help shooters stabilize eye dominance to one eye in just a few minutes.

And what we figured out pretty quickly is that the eye dominance drills that I taught for tactical applications also work incredibly well for archery and helped shooters shoot bullseyes, perform better than ever on 3D courses, and make cleaner kills in the field with both eyes open...sometimes even when they'd never shot that good with 1 eye shut or covered.

The big bonus here was that the brain doesn't like having one eye covered or blocked.  It's draining.  It changes our head orientation and posture and oftentimes causes a tight, stiff neck and back.  When we can finally shoot with both eyes open, a lot of that tension melts away and many archers find that when they shoot with both eyes open they had more endurance, more consistency, and had more energy at the end of shooting.

2.  Egocenter < This is a crazy one.  Imagine that you're looking at a target with your bow pointed down.  This works for both instinctive shooting and sighted shooting, but let's assume instinctive for a second.

When you bring up your arrow, you want the tip to come up in between your dominant eye and the target...not to the right or left.

When we do this correctly, it's because of something called the "egocenter" or "origin of aiming."  It's the point in our head that the brain has defined as the origin of aiming.  If we draw a line from us to our target, the start of the line would be the egocenter.  

When our egocenter is located at our dominant eye, the tip of the arrow will automatically come up between our dominant eye and point of aim.  When it's located at the corner of our eye or bridge of our nose, as it is for many, then we miss to the side or a delay of .15-.50 seconds as we realize we need to correct aim and then verify.

This is an easy, quick fix and it can tighten groups incredibly fast with almost no effort.

3.  Eye alignment.  People understand that eye alignment issues like being cross-eyed or having a lazy eye cause challenges, but because of how the cones of the eye are concentrated in the center, an alignment issue of as small as 1 degree (too small to see) can make a big difference on archery performance and cause us to miss towards our non-dominant eye or sometimes even see double targets.  The Ox String is the easiest, most portable tool to help with this.

4.  Eye coordination.  Many people's eyes are in alignment when looking at a stationary target but when we try to track a target, the eyes move at different speeds or one eye moves smoothly and the other "skips" or is "jumpy."  To add to the frustration, it's common for eyes to be coordinated in one direction, but not in the other!

Few shooters have ever known how to figure out if they have this issue, let alone how to fix it, but you'll learn how in the training.

5.  Reaction time / Vision speed.  The more of these issues we have, the harder our brain has to work in order for us to make hits.  As we address them and are able to see quicker, then we're naturally able to react quicker, shoot quicker, and hit quicker.  In the training, you'll learn specific drills you can do to upregulate the brain's visual processing speeds.  My story was dramatic and not-typical because of concussions, but these drills allowed me to increase the speed that I could shift focus by 6X!

In the basic version of the Ox String drill, shooters hold one end of the Ox String at their nose and either hold the other end with their other hand OR fully extend the Ox String and either attach it to something solid or have a training partner hold it.

Then, they focus on one of the beads.

In the image below, I'm focusing on the green bead.

If your eyes are both pointed at the green bead and your brain isn't suppressing (turning down the intensity of) the image from either eye, you'll see an "X" form at the green bead.

But many people don't see an X at the bead...and that's a problem.  

In the images below, I'm showing 6 different versions of what people might see if they're visually fixating on the BLUE bead.

The brain might also partially or completely suppress (turn down the intensity of) the image from one eye or the other and make sections of string fade or disappear completely!

Each of these negatively impact performance in different ways...causing frustrating misses to the right & left, high and low.

And "getting the X" is only the beginning...

Once we get the X with one bead, then we start getting the X at different distances, increasing speed, and doing drills to increase our ability to shift focus quickly in any direction, track targets in all directions clearly, get the eyes working together better while moving, and more.

And the impact goes WAY beyond shooting better...

Any time someone is seeing anything other than the x at the bead, it's a sign that the brain is burning excess oxygen and glucose when we try to aim, move, or read and it's like trying to go through life with the parking brake on...we'll probably get where we're going, it'll just take longer and performance will be a little sluggish.

Using the Ox String allows us to quickly identify these issues AND oftentimes dramatically improve performance in just a few minutes.

And I've used it to improve performance with archery, shotgun, pistol, and rifle (regardless of the sighting method), martial artists, and athletes involved in golf, basketball, football, baseball, volleyball, soccer, pickleball, cornhole, billiards, golf, driving, trail running, and any sport or hobby that involves movement.

Even for non-active people, these drills help reduce eye strain when doing screen work, can reduce headaches and neck tension, improve reading speed & enjoyment, help with stair/obstacle navigation and fall prevention...and much more.

This is possible because we've got 20+ areas of the brain that are responsible for visual processing and vision accounts for 70%-80% of our sensory input.  When there are unresolved issues with vision, it can have a major impact on every area of our lives, whether we realize it or not.

And the quick & easy drills you can do with the Ox String are some of the highest leverage drills you can do to help with all of these things at once.

You may have seen "beads on a string" before...About a century ago, a Swiss-born optometrist, Dr. Fredrick Brock was struggling with eye alignment issues and did not want to entertain surgery as an option.

He realized, even back then, that when the eyes are not aligned correctly, the brain has to work harder than it should to process the images from the two eyes, to avoid threats, and to avoid tripping and falling more than necessary.

People make the mistake of thinking that the eyes have to be WAY out of alignment for it to matter, but a tiny deviation of even 1 degree (smaller than what most people can see in a mirror) can have a huge impact on everyday life AND performance.

So, he created a vision training tool called the Brock String that is basically a string with colored beads on it that allowed him to correct his own eye alignment issues, and then thousands of patients over the course of his career.

In the decades since, millions of people have been helped by the Brock String...including me.

I've used the Brock String with hundreds of tactical athletes, ball sport athletes, people with reading challenges, and people concerned about reducing their trip & fall risk with fast, dramatic results.

My good friend and creator of the US Navy SEAL Sniper Training Program, Chris Sajnog, had such good success with the Brock String that he called it "Front Sight String."

But the Brock String has always had a knotty problem.

It works best when it's permanently tied to something...and that's not good for archery or other sports.

As soon as you try to put it in your pocket or a bag, the old-school Brock String has a magical ability to become a jumbled mess of knots.  And then you have to waste 5-10 minutes de-tangling the string just to do a couple of minutes of drills.

I knew there had to be a better way...

So, over the last decade, I've used or created 50+ alternatives to the Brock String to solve this knotty problem...but the Ox String is the only one that's so different and so improved that it's worthy of a patent.

The most dramatic feature of the Ox String is that it's retractable and portable.  It fits in a pocket or bag so that you can always have it near and it will never get tangled.

The beads are quite different than what has ever been used on a Brock String before...the diamond-like facets, the specific shades of colors used, and even how the silver interior and primary colored exterior subconsciously interact with the brain to automatically pull the eyes into alignment all make the Ox String dramatically more effective than an old-school Brock String.

The Brock String is great...and you can make your own by simply tying a few knots in a shoelace, but the Ox String will allow you to do much, much more.

Until now, the Ox String has only been available for people taking my live Vision Training for Firearms Instructors course ($700) or the See Quicker Shoot Quicker 2.0 training ($97), but today, you can get your own Ox String for only $27!

Great question.

It depends on which package you get.  You've got a couple of options:

I'm Mike "Ox" Ochsner.  I'm one of a handfull of neurology based firearms instructors in the world.  

I wasn't always a neurology professional.  It was kind of forced on me.

In my mid-late 30s, the consequences of 15+ concussions where I lost time caught up with me.  None of my concussions were from heroic deeds.  I've had more than my share of hard impacts with rocks, cement, trees, fists, and heads.  And more than a lifetime of being next to people shooting .50 caliber rifles with muzzle brakes.

As a result, I had vertigo most nights for a few years, my eyes stopped tracking correctly, I had constant headaches, I went from being very athletic to falling often (and getting more concussions), reading wasn't fun anymore, my hand-eye coordination stopped working, and I had constant random pains on the left side of my body.

Life sucked and it was hard.  I wasted a ton of energy "seeing," not falling, and not running into things.

I had to make a choice of whether this was my new "normal" or if I had another option.

Neurology, and specifically vision training, helped me get my life back...in less than an hour with a neurology trainer.

On a hunch, I started using some of the drills that helped me with shooters I was working with, and saw explosive results.

I was hooked.

I dove deep down the neurology rabbit hole...training with Next Level Neuro, Z-Health, Wharton Neurology, and more.  Hundreds of hours of neurology continuing education...including more than 100 hours of live training this year alone!

Neurology and vision training changed my life.  It took at least 10 years off the clock and allowed me to become a master level shooter with a subcompact.

In the process, I wrote a book on neurology based gun training that's been called the best firearms training book in existence and used by elite military, law enforcement, and civilian instructors and shooters.  More recently, I was the co-author of the best selling book, Red Dot Mastery.  My presentations at firearms instructor and neurology conferences have been called the best in 20 years, and I've had the opportunity to help thousands of shooters use neurology and vision training to unlock performance that they didn't think was possible for them.

And I'd like to do the same for you with this training.

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