Matt Zirnsak from The Push Archery has watched hunters fall apart in the most predictable ways. A deer hangs up just out of range, the season's one good chance is standing right there, and suddenly a hunter who can put an arrow through a playing card in the backyard can't get his pin, or his tip, anywhere near where it needs to be. Matt has been there himself more times than he can count, and he's built an entire teaching philosophy around fixing it.
Two Voices, One Volume Knob
Matt's mental framework starts with a distinction he credits to mental performance coach Joel Turner: there are two voices running in a hunter's head under pressure, and only one of them can be controlled. You have your thoughts, which you have no control of. They're just going to bubble up. Those are the panic thoughts: don't get busted, this isn't going to happen. Trying to silence them is a losing fight. The other voice is the thinking side, and that's the one with a hand on the volume knob.
You Can't Think Your Way Out of an Adrenaline Dump
When a deer hangs up and the whole hunt starts unraveling in his head, Matt doesn't try to force calm. He works a sequence. First get the breathing under control to get the heart rate down, then start thinking, then start controlling the shakes. He's honest that the shakes never fully disappear. They're part of what he loves about hunting. But the goal isn't eliminating them. It's staying functional through them. Constantly talking yourself through the moment. If it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. Calm down. Stay in this moment. Enjoy this moment.
You Can't Practice Adrenaline in Your Backyard
Matt's most direct piece of advice cuts against how most hunters actually train. You can only get better at shooting during an extreme adrenaline dump by shooting under extreme adrenaline dumps. That's the only way. You can't practice it in your backyard. You can't practice it at your local 3D league where all your buddies are there and there's no real pressure on the line.
His solution is blunt: go get beat in public. Go to Lancaster. Shoot 60 arrows with your entrance fee. Those 60 arrows are going to be high-pressure arrows where your knees are knocking, your hands are shaking, your breathing is erratic, and your heart rate is elevated. That's 60 arrows. For some hunters that's a lifetime of bowhunting pressure compressed into a single day.
What makes competition valuable isn't the score. It's the repetition. There's always another arrow right behind it. By arrow 20 you start being able to actually diagnose the symptoms that happen during an adrenaline dump and then put pieces of the shot process in place to prevent them. A missed deer often means waiting weeks for another chance. A blown arrow at Lancaster just means the next one is already on its way.
Go Get Beat in Public
Matt has taken this further than most, deliberately seeking out public pressure through Keychain Challenge videos and live shooting on social media. Everybody wants to shoot well on live in front of everybody. Those things jack you up. He lost one of those challenges to a teenager on camera last summer. He didn't enjoy it. He doesn't regret it either. That moment, while he didn't like losing, is playing into the armor he carries into the moment of truth. Every high-pressure rep adds another layer.
Alignment First, Anchor Second
Underneath the mental game, Matt points to a purely mechanical failure point that undoes traditional bowhunters in cold, elevated, high-stress conditions: alignment. The number one thing that breaks down when shooting from an elevated position while cold is alignment. Not form in general. Alignment specifically.
The problem is that most archers are taught a sequence that skips a critical step. People draw, anchor, aim, shoot. They need to draw to alignment, then anchor, then aim, then shoot. There's an extra step in there. Draw to your alignment, get all the way back, and then come in and nestle into your anchor point. Skip that step and the string-side elbow ends up in front of the string path instead of behind it. The bow starts trying to fold you over. Your brain screams to get out of the uncomfortable situation. And then you can't run your shot under pressure. There's no way.
Your Anchor Is Your Rear Sight
Matt treats the anchor point with the same precision a rifle shooter applies to a rear sight. A robust three-point anchor with hard bone-on-bone contact points creates a repeatable plane. An eighth of an inch off at full draw translates to inches of error at the target. The difference between wounding a deer and killing one sometimes comes down to exactly that margin.
But he's careful to separate the two steps most hunters collapse into one. Anchor is not a substitute for alignment. Prioritizing anchor without getting to alignment first is exactly what causes hunters to short-draw when the pressure is on. The sequence matters. Alignment first. Always.
Why the Two Halves Can't Be Separated
Matt gets asked constantly whether hunters should focus on the mental game or their biomechanics, as if the two compete for attention. His answer is that they're the same problem wearing different clothes. Good proper alignment puts your body into a relaxed state, or at least a less stressed one. Less stress means more access to the thinking side of the brain that lets you run your shot process from a mental execution standpoint.
A body that's mechanically compromised, folded over, short-drawn, misaligned, is already flooding the brain with distress signals before the mental game even has a chance to matter. Fixing alignment isn't just a form correction. It's removing one more reason for the panic voice to take over the volume knob.
What Eleven Missed Deer Actually Taught Him
Matt missed eleven deer before he killed his twelfth, and he's candid that there wasn't a single lightning-bolt moment that fixed it. Looking back at that stretch now, he's almost grateful for how badly things went. The arrows he was using were extremely out of tune. Some years he was shooting extremely lightweight arrows, 320 grains, and just didn't know. The information wasn't there. There was no single insight that turned things around. Just a slow accumulation of better equipment, better tuning, and more reps under real pressure.
That incremental process is exactly why he pushes hunters toward deliberate, repeated exposure to stress rather than waiting for the season's one real opportunity to be the only training rep they get. A hunter who only feels an elevated heart rate a handful of times a year is working with a tiny sample size to learn from. Stack sixty competition arrows on top of that, shot under real pressure with real consequences, and the sample size and the learning grow dramatically faster.
The Stack of Habits That Holds Up When It Counts
The system Matt now teaches is not a switch that gets flipped once and stays fixed. It's a stack of habits: alignment before anchor, breath before thought, self-talk instead of silence. Rehearsed under pressure until it holds up automatically when a whitetail is standing at fifteen yards and the whole season is riding on one arrow.
None of it replaces practice at the target. All of it is what determines whether that practice actually shows up when it counts.
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