The tactics below come from a conversation with Matt Zirnsak, owner of The Push Archery, recorded for the Trad Hunters Podcast.
Matt Zirnsak spends a lot of his time talking hunters out of obsessing over the wrong piece of their setup. Broadheads get all the attention: the sharpening videos, the durability tests, the cinder-block trick shots. Meanwhile, according to Matt, the single biggest factor in whether an arrow kills cleanly gets almost no airtime at all: whether the arrow is actually flying straight by the time it reaches the animal.
Target Tuning and Hunting Tuning Are Not the Same Thing
Matt draws a hard line between how competitive archers tune their setups and how a traditional bowhunter should. A target archer doesn't actually care if an arrow is flying perfectly straight through the air. What they care about is where two specific points on the shaft, called the nodes, line up at the moment of impact. As the arrow is flexing through space, the middle section bends one way, the tail and the front bend the other, and it oscillates back and forth. There are two points along the shaft that don't move in space. Those are the nodes. Aligning those nodes at the moment of impact is where the momentum comes from.
For a target archer, an arrow can be badly out of tune the entire time it's in flight and still be considered perfectly tuned, as long as the nodes line up on impact. Matt lays out just how far this can go. A group the size of a dime with arrows flying ten, fifteen, twenty degrees off at the tail is still better to a target archer than a perfect flight with a group three times that size. He's watched this play out at the IBO Worlds: arrows porpoising like a dolphin through the air and still scoring in the 10 and 11 ring, because for that archer only the impact point matters.
What Nodes Are and Why They Matter More Than You Think
The node is not a term most traditional bowhunters think about. But understanding it changes how you look at every shot you've ever taken at an animal. As an arrow flexes in flight, the nodes are the two points along the shaft that stay perfectly still while the rest of the arrow oscillates around them. When those nodes are aligned at the moment of impact, the full energy of the arrow drives forward cleanly. When they're off, even by a quarter inch, the back node continues moving forward off-plane from the front node as the arrow decelerates into the animal. That deviation bleeds penetration. A quarter inch of misalignment can be the difference between a pass-through and a lost blood trail.
Why Hunters Need Something Completely Different
A bowhunter doesn't get to care only about the moment of impact, because the arrow's job doesn't end there. It has to keep driving forward through hide, muscle, and bone. That means the nodes need to be aligned well before the arrow ever reaches the target, not just at the exact instant of contact. As traditional bowhunters, the goal is the arrow leaving the bow with nodes aligned and fully recovered as fast as possible, because almost every shot happens between five and fifteen yards.
That's not an estimate. It's a number the Push built from real data.
The Number That Changes How You Should Tune
The Push ran a public data project called Data Kills, collecting real hunting outcomes from traditional archers: bow poundage, arrow setup, broadhead, tune quality, hit location, and recovery distance. The average shot distance in traditional archery came out to 14 yards. At that range there is no time or distance left for an arrow to correct itself the way it might on a 40-yard compound shot. Whatever state the arrow is in when it leaves the bow is close to the state it's going to be in when it hits the animal. That's why tuning at standard target-archery distances of 10, 15, or 20 yards doesn't tell a traditional bowhunter what they actually need to know.
What Bad Arrow Flight Actually Costs You on an Animal
A hunter can do everything else right: good shot placement, sharp broadhead, solid draw weight, and still lose penetration to an arrow that wasn't flying straight when it hit. If those back and front nodes are even off by a quarter inch as the arrow strikes the animal, as it starts decelerating the back node is going to continue moving forward off-plane from the front node. That robs penetration. The energy that should be driving the broadhead forward is bleeding off sideways instead. For a traditional bowhunter at 14 yards, that's not a small problem. It's the whole problem.
The Test: Bullet Holes at 3, 6, and 12 Feet
Matt credits a method developed by Cody Greenwood for solving the tuning problem at the distances that actually matter to traditional bowhunters. Instead of paper-tuning from 10 or 15 yards back the way most archers are taught, the test happens right off the bow's nose: at 3 feet, 6 feet, and 12 feet. Clean bullet holes through paper at all three distances confirm that the arrow is fully recovered within feet of the bow, which is exactly what a 14-yard hunting shot demands.
Why One Clean Hole Can Lie to You
A single clean hole at one distance can be misleading. An arrow that comes out of the bow bending and correcting itself might pass through a hole at a certain distance as it's bending back the other direction, giving a false bullet hole result. You think you're tuned. But the arrow is still recovering at that distance. The fix is checking multiple points along the flight path before trusting the result. Get a bullet hole at 6 feet, step up to 3. Get one at 3, step back to 12. Only when all three distances produce a clean bullet hole can you be confident the nodes are actually aligned that close to the riser.
Perfect Flight Beats a Perfect Broadhead
Matt's broader point is about where hunters direct their attention. Broadhead design gets endless discussion because it's the fun, visual, shiny part of the setup. Arrow flight gets almost none, despite mattering more. He frames it through a comparison Cody Greenwood uses: fifteen-foot waves versus three-foot waves. They're both waves, they both make a difference, but perfect arrow flight is the fifteen-foot wave. It is so much larger a factor in the penetration and lethality of the system that everything else runs a distant second.
Given a choice between the ideal arrow weight and the sharpest broadhead ever made versus a perfectly flying arrow with a subpar version of everything else, Matt takes the perfectly flying arrow every single time. For any hunter chasing better penetration this season, that's the priority order. Fix the flight first. Then worry about the broadhead.
The Energy Transfer That Determines Everything
Matt frames the whole system as one continuous energy transfer: body to limbs, limbs to arrow, arrow to animal. Node alignment is what determines how much of that energy survives the trip. Every bend, wobble, and off-plane node along the way bleeds off energy before it ever reaches the animal. A hunter can generate plenty of raw kinetic energy at the bow and still lose most of its lethal value if the arrow isn't flying true by the time it arrives.
None of this is target-range trivia. It's a direct response to how short traditional bowhunting shots actually are. A tuning process built for 20, 30, or 40-yard target shots doesn't test what's happening in the first 15 yards of flight. And for most traditional archers, that first window is the entire hunt. Testing at 3, 6, and 12 feet closes that gap with nothing more exotic than paper and a stapler. The data from Data Kills backs it up. For a hunter whose average shot distance is 14 yards, close-range tuning isn't a fine-tuning exercise. It's the difference between a pass-through and a lost blood trail.
Matt Zirnsak is the owner of The Push Archery. If you would like to learn more about The Push, their products and courses designed specifically to help improve your performance as a traditional bowhunter visit www.pusharchery.com