https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov

it really is quite interesting!
4th column over is Amount. order by clicking the arrow next to it.

we could make a game of this, and find the doctor with the highest payoff!
so far, this one is my highest.

I took her video to be more skeptical of his historical claims, his assertions that he rediscovered them, and that modern techniques isn't valid, than if the trick shots work or not. She goes to show many of his techniques are still in use in some cultures.

Like others said, even from a fairly small knowledge window, it looked like trick shots. Back in the day you would have had to film on expensive film making hundreds of shots to get one that worked, it would have been more complicated to do this. Now with video, it is easier than ever to record it as many times as you need to get the shot that worked.

Would his technique work while hunting or on the battlefield is the main question. Take an arrow through the armor joints in the knee or whatever from his technique won't kill, but probably will hurt enough to take you out of the battle, which would be the point. Would it put a deer down though? Doesn't seem there's enough draw strength to really kill the deer or large game, rather it would torture the animal for an overly long period of time before it might finally die. My understanding of modern archery is to put the game down as quick as possible to minimize suffering.

We need to see him doing his things live. Don't let the myth busters do it, have him do it, in situations that would represent a battlefield. Have armored mannequins moving, some still, have him use his techniques, see how many of his shots would have taken that soldier out of the battle. Unfortunately, you can't safely test having him under fire at the same time since that puts a level of stress on top of everything. Have a deer mannequin and see if his technique would be effective at the sort of range you need to be at to avoid startling the deer, again at a stand still and in motion (generally you are going to wait for it to be still enough to fire anyhow in that case since it is rarely a matter of life and death to kill the deer or other game).

That all said she keeps saying archery is about what works, and it does seem to work for the situation he's in. The question is as I noted above would it work in hunting or the battlefield and even if not, would it work on regular archery targets live without many repeated filming attempts. Would it work at an Olympic style event better than modern techniques? If it could do better, or even near as good, as modern ones at competitions, then, even if it fails at hunting and battlefield situations, it could still be valid.

As an aside, the videos I saw of him weren't trying to sell anything specific beyond him perhaps. I haven't bothered to Google him up to see if he's selling stuff, or just demonstrating things for now. If he's not selling people on teaching in person or via video or whatever, then all the more reason to suspect he's just showing off trick shots the same way basketball trick shot videos do. In which case the historical research could have been lazy just because it was more in jest than anything meant to be taken serious. He could have been pulling a poe in that regards.

I have much more experience than the average person. Lars seems to invent and conjecture as much historical evidence as some other posters here, but what he does is very impressive. You could accurately classify it as trick shooting, but since archery is now a sport instead of a practical thing...it's all pretty gray.

What's neat is that Lars' technique works significantly better than current common practices...albeit in what are currently uncommon situations, such as riding horseback or running & shooting. There are 2 things that makes these kinds of situations difficult:

1) Keeping the arrow resting against the side of the bow and the handle. If you've ever shot before, most beginning shooters will have their arrow accidentally drop to the ground many times before they fire a successful shot. Even for someone who is more than a novice, a strong breeze can easily knock your arrow away from this notch. Shooting while on horseback or running is a whole new level of difficult.

2) Firing rapidly. Firing off many arrows in succession is a difficult thing, seriously. Despite Anna Maltese's dismissal of Lars' demonstration on why firing on the 'wrong' side of the bow is faster, it truly does remove many of the steps, and speeds up the entire process. In modern archery, Right handed people fire the arrow on the left side of the bow, and left handed people fire the arrow on the Right side of the bow. Reasons for this could be conjectured, but from personal experience, learning how to shoot the arrow from the wrong side of the bow is almost like learning archery all over again...it feels weird. From watching related videos, the way Lars holds many arrows in his hand, making sure to rotate each arrow into the appropriate knocked position each time, is a significant achievement that Anna did not touch on.

What's particularly impressive is that Lars has achieved improvements in both categories simultaneously by firing from the wrong side of the bow. To my knowledge, modern trick shooting is the typical shooting style simply with impressive feats of accuracy, or at best being able to throw an object into the air and hit it with one arrow. In comparison, Lars changed the way he shoots his arrows, and has been able to significantly upgrade the art because of it (throwing an object in the air and hitting it with 3 arrows before reaching the ground). In my opinion, this is beyond regular trick shooting, and warrants a reinvestigation on why modern archery is the way it is.

I completely agree with her about Lars on many points. He often (very often actually) makes his technique seem "the best in the world" when compared to ANY other technique (as there are A LOT of shooting techniques; some that need different bows, materials, and setups).

Kind of like being able to shoot through plate-mail... Lars would NEVER be able to pull that off (of course no one, with a shortbow and the wrong arrow--or tip--will be doing it either; the crossbow is as close as you can get to being small and puncturing plate) as it requires a huge amount of pull force to puncture plate (even heavy English oaken wood shields). The type of bow is a big issue, because that is where you get your draw strength. But, what type of tip you have on your arrow will determine whether or not it even goes into or just bounces off the armor...

However, for the most part, archers didn't try to puncture plate armor--because to be honest about it: it was HARD, it required a VERY heavy bow and expensive tips (of course the bows were also expensive, because they would not be made out of normal material--it might be a specially imported type of wood that could hold up to extreme forces; the string may also be made of something a bit different than normal). So, you didn't have very many people walking around with the innate ability to puncture plate. BUT, what most archers trained a VERY long time to accomplish was extreme accuracy, for one reason alone: armor.

Instead of trying to puncture plate or even chain, archers instead aimed for gaps or areas were there was no coverage (basically anywhere you bend or connect the armor to another piece or tie/connect itself together; so places like under the armpit or along the side of the body were the armor is pulled together and tied shut). Then they may not have to go through anything at all, or they will only have light leather or heavy cloth armor in the way--either way they will penetrate, and they will slowly kill their target by slowing them down and immobilizing them, then moving in for the finishing blow OR if they hit the right place they can just let blood loss finish them off...

But, this requires extreme accuracy, especially in battle AND especially so if you are firing from a horse (if you were lucky you were able to ride behind someone and concentrate solely on firing your shots, then you could add a bit of speed as well). This is the one place that Lars has horribly mislead people--OR he has made a really great breakthrough. But, if Lars never bothers to really demonstrate this stuff, we have no idea how great an archer he really is.

His entire video is one gigantic edit. Every shot and "trick" has been setup with the camera in the right place. The biggest problem is we don't know if it took Lars 1000 attempts to accomplish some of these feats (he makes it sound in some areas that it happens VERY fast, however...but due to the editing, or how he edited it, we actually have no idea if his claims are true) or if he did it in ten...or right off the bat...

That is why I said we needed to wait for Lars to actually talk to us about this whole thing, and to clear various areas up (records and competition). Because he has set a very high bar for himself, and from his own video he seems to be amazing--but, I like many know that if you edit enough and try something over and over again, you can make yourself look like an expert *whatever* whenever you wish to do it...

I agree heavily with her about his historic claims (and also mocking him on his "super clumsy" shots and setups to make fun of "modern" archers); she also points out, correctly, how wrong he is on some of those claims. Like everyone shooting from the left side; which somehow Lars, in ALL his studying completely and utterly missed. Which tells me one thing: she knows more about archery history than Lars actually does.

But, is Lars actually a great archer? Would Lars be a good archer in a battle, or more specifically his "technique"? Lastly, is he really an unique archer more than worth praising? We won't know until Lars does what I mentioned above; he must meet these criticisms head on.

If we allow Lars time to learn how to ride a horse; or it might be a bit more fair to just allow him to ride behind someone controlling the horse, which was a common practice even in battle (then make sure Lars knows how to also fire properly from a horse, since it requires controlling a horse--if you're alone--and staying on the horse using your thigh muscles...which is actually a pretty hard thing to do...and requires expert horsemanship; asking Lars to accomplish this is laughable, as this type of thing would have been a lifetime achievement in the past AND any archer that could fire fast, accurate, and ride a horse by himself...would have been a horrific force on the battlefield; then give him a sword/melee skill--make sure they have a lot of upper body strength--and a very well made, thick steel buckler and he'd be godlike; and then enough armor to protect from arrows...BUT this means you have to be very strong...otherwise you will never be able to accomplish ANY of the feats with the bow mentioned above; BTW, I'm mentioning a superhero right here, there "may" have been a few people like this in history, but they would've been very few and far apart...and more than likely used sparingly).

Mounted archers are extremely powerful against all units that are mounted yet slower than them and of course those on foot and without a long range means of attacking them (at least shorter than the mounted archer's range), this I will always agree with. We already know that mounted archery units could create absolute havoc in the past, see: Alexander The Great. However, eventually people figured out how to deal with this type of threat as well... But, horse mounted archers do have their "nemeses", namely foot archers--since they can take some time (if an arrow comes their way, they block it--it is much harder for a horse archer to carry around a big shield or at least just have on sitting nearby--or you can aim for their horse, which is why above I said that "superhero" like warrior would need a melee skill, because eventually they WILL be on the ground).

So, again, we have to wait and see if Lars bothers to respond to this video and to ALL of the others that have also been made (he did make a lot of people angry; as he did make some stuff up and possibly "overshoot" the mark on other claims and possibly even his own abilities...). I won't hold my breath though.

I think we can all come to a fairly logical conclusion on this. If Lars NEVER responds to anything, then we will have to assume that a lot of his "super-speed" with "accuracy" was due to one thing alone: editing.

Phew, I think that covers everything...it certainly was long enough!!!!

This was really good! It's pretty obvious now that most or all the history was invented by Lars, instead of studied. However, there are a few points that she didn't touch on or completely dismissed.

She makes a quite unsubstantiated claim that ancient people cannot measure time, and dismisses the entire speed advantage of the technique Lars is using. I would have liked to see how she would have addressed the account on the native american chief's abilities at speedshooting, where Lars pulled (invented?) an account that the chief could shoot 10 arrows into the air before the first one hit the ground, and Lars managed to break that record. Despite that a great deal of historical drawings are indeed poor at describing technique (just look at how many drawings depict the horse's gallop incorrectly), this is a metric that is easily recorded. Unless another modern archer has managed to come close to shooting 10 arrows into the air before the first hits the ground, the chief's technique has indeed been lost, and has potentially been revived through Lars.

Additionally, she mocked Lars a bit, calling out, 'where's his horse?', as if his technique wouldn't work on a horse. But, she then showed videos of people rapidly firing at targets while riding on horseback. Again, Lars' technique has a tremendous speed advantage, and he makes it obvious many times over that this firing technique can be performed during acrobatic stunts. If archery truly is about 'what works', this would work better.

Finally, she did a great job at pointing out how Lars was shooting with relatively little force compared to full draw on heavy bows. Indeed, where Lars shows he can pierce chainmail, he was shooting substantially slower, likely to pull back more weight. However, against unarmored or lightly armored opponents, it may not be necessary to pull back 80+ pounds. Instead of trying to invalidate his entire technique by saying he wouldn't be able to pierce full platemail without extremely high force, it would be more accurate to say that the tremendous speed comes at the price of lower force per arrow.

While Anna Maltese brought up many great points about historical fabrication and showed that Lars is overly sensationalizing his technique, she is committing the opposite sin by entirely dismissing the technique's advantages.

*promote
Also *related=http://videosift.com/video/A-New-Level-Of-Amazing-Archery-Skills
and
*related=http://videosift.com/video/Lars-Andersen-shoots-arrows-the-fastest

Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Saturday, February 7th, 2015 9:16am PST - promote requested by original submitter RFlagg.

A New Level Of Archery Skills has been added as a related post - related requested by RFlagg.

Lars Andersen shoots arrows the fastest has been added as a related post - related requested by RFlagg.

The one part that I did have probably the most griped about (OK they were two, and @Trancecoach's article mentions it too). First, the catching of the arrows in mid-air. I really believe that those shots were actually (delivered/shot) towards Lars at a low speed; sure he caught them and did his thing, but had it been WAR I highly doubt he'd be pulling this stunt off every single second (plus, eventually he would hurt his hands, which is the utmost no-no for an archer). Lastly, the splitting of the arrow in mid-air. Again, this had to be semi-staged (for a huge laundry list of reasons). That is why I mentioned at the start of my comment that is was utterly obvious that this guy is a trick shooter and that also means he uses/engineers/ and applies all of the "secrets" of his trade to make his audience go: "OOoooOhhh, AaaAAaawwwWw!)...

I will also agree, as I said, until Lars comes out and talks about this or goes to competition, I have to sit partially on the fence on this. It looks neat, but there is so much editing and camera angle shenanigans, plus whatever else they decided to throw in (like pre-scoring arrows that get "split" in mid-air). We have no real idea what the range, power of his shots are--and as also noted we also don't know how much he had to try to get this all correct, which means we have to also wonder what his actual accuracy is too.

It could be real, but I'm going for the 50% real, 50% marketing setup. Still neat, especially if he can ever do it live.

Interesting that he chose that analogy.

If someone said to me he's the 'Bruce Lee playing ping pong of archery', I would take it to mean it's all faked. (Bruce Lee never played ping pong with nunchaku, it's a well known fake).

I asked a friend of mine about it. He has represented his country in archery, so I trust his opinion on it.

Paraphrased:

Yeah, it's real.
No, it's not that impressive.

He didn't "rediscover" any of the techniques he claimed to. Most of them have been known for ages, and the change for modern archery was intentional and well known. the whole "studying ancient manuscripts" etc etc is bollocks

the catching arrows thing: difficult but not impossible. you use a very light bow, and it's actually not that hard

his accuracy is mildly impressive. not what I'd call amazing at the ranges he shows

he is fast, i'll give him that

@eric3579 I never had an issue with all the details of what he is doing -- couldn't care less about bow strength and armor. I was more curious if he is ACTUALLY DOING IT, or if this was some sort of CGI.

I did find this one article about him, posted Jan 2015, with these two quotes that spoke to my issues:

"This guy is the Clint Eastwood of archery," says Tim Wells, professional bow hunter and host of the TV show, Relentless Pursuit. "Or if I was talking to someone who had never shot a bow and arrow, I'd say he is the 'Bruce Lee playing ping pong of archery.' We have all played ping-pong and none of us can play with nun chucks — that's what this guy's skillset with a bow is comparable to. He's a badass."

Experts agree that the skills demonstrated in the video are unbelievable, but also completely real. "His skillset is tremendous," says Byron Ferguson, owner of the Bare Bow Archery School and star archer on the History Channel's show, Extreme Marksmen. "These shots are legitimate, despite some video editing. His speed is almost unbelievable."

Read more: http://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/outdoor/the-story-behind-lars-andersens-new-level-of-archery-video-20150126#ixzz3Q3tKMqJK
Follow us: @mensjournal on Twitter | MensJournal on Facebook

I can't tell if they have met this guy or not, or if they, too, are just looking at the videos. That other "world record"? All I can find is more videos and nothing from Guinness or anyone else.

So at present, I am going to stay neutral as to whether this guy is for reals or not.

67 seconds seems a pretty long time for just ten arrows, which suggests they have some requirements that would probably disqualify this guy here. Distance, accuracy, draw force of the bow, something?

Just trying to figure out how fast an Arrow looses kinetic energy, this is a neat site.

http://www.huntersfriend.com/carbon_arrows/hunting_arrows_selection_guide_chapter_5.htm

This is obviously a very great skill and at the same time it has its faults. It's also obvious to anyone with common sense that he IS a "trick" shooter. I mean almost every demonstration in the video IS a "trick" shot of some kind. Would any of these things come in handy in war... Certainly, many of those "tricks" would put him at an extreme advantage--especially if he could do this extremely well on horseback (and you must be a GOOD horseback rider, motorcycles don't count--a horse is a whole different story; especially if you plan to do some of the *feats* I'll mention below, while in combat). He would be even better if he had mastery over the shorter bow(s) he uses in this and also a longbow for long targets and heavily armored enemies.

As for him penetrating chainmail, that is a good question and I do believe he could quite possibly end up penetrating the chainmail in some situations while (possibly still getting through the chainmail) being stopped in others (he shows being able to penetrate mail with an under armor of some type, but we don't get a lot of details about that situation to be honest). It depends on how his bow is made, the string it has, the type of arrow he is using (or the tip, to be honest), and his draw strength (along with this is range). On the chainmail side it depends on what type of chainmail the enemy is using and then whether they have an under armor of some kind--and again, range.

The problem in this video--except for a few shots--is that he does shoot very close in many of the cases; within 30-20 feet. In a close combat experience--which wasn't necessarily unusual for archers in the past (especially as I mentioned mounted ones--of course you'd be nuts to not be mounted at these ranges--or at the least be a swordsman as well...which was even more rare) he would terrorize opponents... Unless they are wearing plate or other heavy types of armors, then he is in a bit of trouble. But if he really does have great accuracy, then even many of these armors types wouldn't necessarily help you--and could eventually lead to your own death.

I say we give this some time and see if Lars gives us more answers (like "records", competition, types of bows and arrows, chainmail used, etc...).

I think you're underestimating the draw on some of those bows as well. They look like kids toys, but classic short bows (rather than modern compound pulley bows), particularly horn ones, can range from 45 to over 100 pounds draw. You don't need a deep draw to propel an arrow at killing speeds, particularly at targets under 20 feet. Even in chainmail.

^I noticed in this other video (below) of a different shooter using one of Lars' 'tricks', similar speed and accuracy is achieved by using the method of holding the arrows in the bow hand, and could be sped up by more than double the shooting speed if the method of notching the arrow on the outside were used. This other video shows how useful speed is in 'battle', and shows just how much only one of Lars' tricks speeds up the shooting speed without diminishing accuracy.
I admit, it is odd that Lars is not recognized as the fastest arrow shooter by Guinness, but not definitive. Some people just don't care about recognition or Guinness. I'm now on the fence, but still leaning towards it being 'real'.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Rapid-Fire-Bow-Shooting-From-Horseback-Mongol-Hun-Style