Compound Archery: Accessories, Basic Form, and Arrow Selection For Beginners with LeAnn Star

Today I have a bit of a different backdrop. Normally, I'm in my backyard teaching basic recurve archery. Today, I'm actually in Centerville, Utah. Centerville, Utah is just north of Salt Lake City, about 20 minutes. And I was actually referred to this archery shop by a few friends in the archery industry. And this is called Wild Arrow Archery. Thought I'd come up here today and do something a little bit different. Today, I decided that I'm going to flip the script and I'm going to get an actual lesson, but not in recurve archery. I'm going to go for the compound. I have a coach today. Her name is Coach Leanne Starr, and she's going to show me all the ins and outs of the compound bow. So today we're going to go over how how to pick out a compound bow. What accessories do you need to get started and all the basics to form getting started in compound archery? All right, guys, let's get inside and let's go shoot some arrows. I'm here with Coach Leanne. She actually competes in both recurve and compound archery. So she's going to tell us the first thing that we need to know. And the first thing is, what is even the difference between the compound and the recurve? So Leanne, tell us, what is the difference? The biggest difference between a compound bow and a recurve is that you notice on a compound you're going to have cams. So you've got two cams here. This actually allows lead off. Lead off means that I'm not carrying, if this is a 20 pound bow, if I draw back, I might only be pulling 12 pounds. OK. Instead of if on a recurve, if I'm pulling back 20 pounds, I'm holding 20 pounds the whole time. OK. Yeah. So there's there's lead off. So a little bit faster feet per second with the compound. A little bit more forgiving for beginning shooters. Recurve develops and you have to have great form shooting a recurve and you learn that over time. If our form is a little bit off, a compound might be something you're looking for. That's it kind of helps us with our mistakes. So it's a little bit easier with a compound when you first get started shooting. A little bit easier. Yeah, absolutely. Perfect. So now we have the compounds in hand when we're shooting the compound to even pick out a compound bow. What is it we need to know to get the compound? You want to know, make sure that the bow is the right poundage for you. OK. Or the right draw length. With a recurve, draw length really doesn't matter too much. It does with the compound. A compound is actually set for a specific, your specific drawing. And again, go to a bow shot. They'll they'll find that drawing. And that's what I did. I reached out to Coach Leanne. And the first thing that she asked me is, what is your draw length? What poundage bow are you looking for? The thing that's going to be trickier, though, is your poundage because you just don't know yet. Yes, you don't know. So a great way to to kind of encumber kind of the whole thing is a great little I'll just call it a starter bow, a youth bow, a bow that grows with you. That way you can adjust your draw length and poundage as you grow. OK, so youth bows really are one of the best ways to learn. OK. Even as an adult, having a youth bow is great because it grows with you. OK. Grows in poundage, grows in draw length. If you were to just go and get a 50 pound bow, what that means is that the limb itself may only go from 40 to 50 or 50 to 60. And so you're very limited in your poundage. So if you're new to shooting, I personally do not recommend going and buying a 60 or 70 pound bow. You'll definitely be overdrawn and cause injury. And that's the last thing we want to do in archery is cause injury. But when new shooters, if they find something online, you know, Craigslist or eBay, you know, those kind of things. If you don't know your draw length, it's going to be confusing. But finding a bow specifically for your draw length would be just as much of a challenge, too. OK, so it kind of seems talking about this, it seems like the best thing to do is go to your local archery shop and try to get somebody to help you. And they can help you figure out your draw length and your bow length. So that's going to be ideal. What you're looking for is to get started. We have our bow picked out. We figured out our draw length. We know the weight of our bow. What are the basic things that you're going to need on your bow to get started shooting? So tell us a little bit about what is on the compound bow. OK. Well, obviously, you're going to need a sight, a rest, but more importantly, a D loop on the string. So unlike a recurve where we shoot fingers on string with a compound, because we get into weights that are a little bit heavier than what we could pull with a recurve, we're going to have a release aid. But in order to use the release aid, you have a D loop on your string. So this little right there. Yeah. So this actually helps aid us pulling back the bow on this competition bow. You do notice that you do have a long stabilizer. This is not necessary for a beginner shooter, but it does help reduce vibration. It helps balance the bow. That's the purpose of the stabilizer. But most of the time when you're first starting out, you don't necessarily need one. If you do feel like you do need a stabilizer on your bow to help balance it, there's you can just get yourself a nice small stabilizer. The benefit of a small stabilizer is it's less cumbersome. It's actually a little bit lighter. If you can feel the difference between that bow versus the big difference. Yeah, much lighter. If you plan on hunting or 3D archery where you're going through the trees and shooting 3D animals, sometimes a shorter stabilizer is great. You're not going to get hung up on the bushes or the grass. Right. Kind of tell us about different options for sites. OK. These two sites here. This one's made by Spot Hog. This is made by Shrewd. These are a little bit more intricate and very detailed in precision when it comes to sites. So and this is a single pin. You can get some options, great basic sites that might have a three pin option or a five pin option. I like for a 3D setup, a single pin with a slider so I can get distances out that way. Yeah. Yeah. So and so a good basic site would be maybe a three pin site that just sits on the bow. Then you can set that distance at 10 yards, middle pin, 20 yards, other pin, 30 yards, so on and so forth. Or you can if you're one of those long range shooters, you can go 40, 50, 60 if you've got the right poundage for that. Tell me a little bit about I notice the arrow rests are a little bit different. Can you explain like the difference between this one and this one? Yes. So this particular arrow rest here, this is called the whisker biscuit. That's the whisker biscuit. That's great for beginners because it it kind of holds the arrow onto the rest. OK. So it doesn't fall off. OK. As a new shooter, you get really it's frustrating to have your arrow sit on a rest and fall off. Is that a common thing? It is a very common thing. It's a common thing for beginners. OK. So so that's a whisker biscuit. It's great because it holds it on there. A disadvantage to this particular rest is that it will affect arrow flight just a little bit. So if you're going to you're not going to get those type of moves. Yeah. If you start to grow competition, you're not going to get the the type groups that you want. OK. This this particular rest here. This is a drop away rest. So as I pull back on the string, this rest is going to come up. So it raises the arrow up. So there's decreased resistance or contact on the shelf of the riser here. Great, great design. Great rest. I like the drop away rest. Do beginners like this? It's a little confusing for beginners. It is if you're looking for nice tight groups. Some versions are a little bit trickier. OK. The bow that you're holding here, this is a blade rest. OK. It is also limb driven. So as I'm driving or as I'm pulling back on the string, that blade is going to rise up and you're going to the arrow's going to sit on there. OK. The durability on these are great. They will get a little bit of wear and tear. You do have to replace this blade quite often. Depending on how often you shoot. Are they pretty expensive to replace? No, not much at all. No. So we've kind of gone through the bow, all the accessories that you need to get started with the bow. Now we're going to start thinking about how what do we need to pull the string back? So there's a lot of options for release aid. So Coach Leanne is going to show us some of the different options. And she's going to also let us know what is the best option for a beginner. As she said, there's a ton of different options. There is a wrist sling, which is a trigger sling. This is a thumb release. Basically, what you're doing with the thumb releases, you're holding it in your hand. So this is a handheld release and you're activating the trigger using your thumb. The other style is a hinge release. And this is it's back tension. But there's a hinge here in the front is as you release and certain pressure and certain angles of your wrist basically break this and the bow goes off. And another style shooting, this is a back tension or resistance release where I'm pulling through the shot. The thumb is this is a safety feature. And then I have to pull through the shot in order for this to release. It takes a long time to kind of build up the right amount of tension and relaxation in the shot to where you can correctly execute these with great precision and performance. OK, these are all great releases when you get better. These are great. But for a beginner, I would recommend just this is a wrist strap release. It's going to go on the wrist here. It just basically is a trigger release here. So you can control. I love this one here because it's actually string. So I can adjust it on there and it's soft. And so if you're hunting situation and you're a new shooter, you can tuck that in. It's quiet, but it's easily adjustable kind of thing. There are different styles like this. Maybe we'll have a hard piece of metal or a hard piece of rubber on here. I don't like them because sometimes they're too big. OK. Are there ones that don't adjust? And so you're just stuck if it feels too long or too short. There are. I would find some definitely find something that's adjustable. And who makes this is true. This is true. We'll put a link for this one if you want the adjustable. Yeah, this is their shooter. This is their shooter series kind of thing. OK, it's great. I recommend this to all my new shooters. Perfect. OK, that's great. Great information. And you're going to put this on to where it's fairly snug. OK, so snug. That's my next question. Yes, loose, snug. You still want to be able to feel your hands and your fingers. But you don't want this so loose that it's rubbing up and down. That will definitely change your anchor point. And when we're shooting bows, anchor points are very important. With this, you actually want the tip of the release here. It's on the spring. You want to come to the base of your finger. So find my finger here where the finger and the palm meet. That is the length of where you want your release to be. All right. Great information. Yeah, that's great. I would never have known that. Yeah, this is this is great. It feels short and it'll be really awkward when you're drawing. But when you're actually in that draw process, this actually does give a little bit, but it easily lets your finger behind the trigger here and then execute that shot, you know, when you're ready. Yeah. So with this one. So as you can see, it does feel a little bit short. I'm going to open this is a little spring trigger here pulling this little lever. I don't know if you can see there. Yeah. So there's there's the trigger and it opens. OK, this will actually lock onto your D loop as you draw back and get into your anchor. Then you can easily put your finger over the trigger. Now, when shooting a trigger release, you do want the trigger to be between first and second knuckle. You want to get deep into that. OK, get deep into that trigger between first and second knuckle is good. Relax the tension in your wrist. A lot of new shooters, they get really tense or their hands go out like this. Lots of tension, lots of tension back here. And as a coach, if we have tension places that we that arrow is going to go all over the place. Right. So when you're drawing, your finger is going to go behind the trigger. This is most important safety reasons. One, if if your triggers there. So go ahead and just since we have the string, go ahead and put your finger on the trigger and then try and draw back with your finger on the string. OK. OK. Safety thing that that arrow is going to go down. It's going to fly and pull back all the way. And it surprises us and we might hit ourselves. So I just instructed, you know, get that finger on the string. Finger always behind the trigger. A little bit. Yeah. You don't want any tension on that trigger at all. OK. Then all I'm going to do is I'm just going to give a little bit of tension, but I'm going to show Terry here that this soft part of our hand is part of where we want to anchor the jaw line of right through here. The jaw is a very consistent anchor point. We want to get back to our jaw bone. OK. OK. So that's one anchor point. And we'll talk about anchor points again. OK. This is an anchor point. We want to get started. So go ahead and draw back with the palm facing towards the ground. You want palm down. You're going to draw back to that. That's perfect right there. And we have a natural little pocket. It just feels. Yeah, it feels like it feels good. So I'm going to put a little bit of tension. OK. OK. Now, slowly bring that first finger around the trigger. And then you're just going to let that finger sit on that trigger. OK. OK. Between first and second knuckle. This is great. OK. And then all you're going to do is just a light squeeze. Oh, and it already came off. And that's good. Yeah, that's good. That little, ooh, that surprise you. We want that surprise when you're shooting, you know, with a gun. You want that surprise. OK. OK. Yep. All right. So now you know what to expect. Let's get you behind the bow. That sounds great. All right. With the stance, you do want a nice, comfortable stance. OK. Feet shoulder width apart. That's great right there. But your front foot, you're going to bring back just a little bit. OK, so if I was to draw a line on from your foot, I want the tip of your toe here to come to the base of your big toe on this. But it just gives us a nice, natural, open stance to the target. OK. OK. When we're shooting, posture is always a great thing, too. We want to look like a capital T. OK. OK. We want shoulders over our hips and our hips over our feet. OK. Lots of new shooters will actually have like, I call these the mom hip or they lean back or, you know, it's just we're off kilter a little bit. We want to be nice and tall. OK. OK. But that's a great stance to start with when you knock on. This is actually super important. You want to knock between that D loop. So if you can get a close up shot right here. So the knock is actually attached to the stream between this D loop. And as you can see, it does kind of create that letter D. That's why we call it a D loop. Now, the next thing is we always teach new shooters is the grip. OK. Or we want to hold our bow, not necessarily like a tennis racket or a baseball bat. OK. We actually are going to push that bow towards the target. So what we're going to do is we're going to open up the palm of our hand. That's going to be towards our target. And we're just going to put the grip on the thumb part of the hand right through here. OK. One thing I show them is like everyone has a lifeline on their hand. We want the back part of the grip. I call it the spine of the grip. Basically, it's going to be on the thumb side of that lifeline. If we happen to get too deep, what happens is now I'm moving that arm towards the string. OK. And with compound, you know, hitting that arm right there doesn't feel great. I mean, it doesn't feel great with recurve either. It's already lined up really close. Yeah. Yeah. So we want the grip right there. That's perfect. And that thumb is going to be relaxed, pointing towards the target. Our knuckles, we want to be at a 45 degree angle right here. Now, best thing to do that left arm is now going to go straight. OK. OK. Go ahead and bring the bow up to where the back of the hand is level with your eyes. The back of my front hand is level with my eyes. Yeah. And then you're going to push the bow to the target as you pull back to our anchor point, just like we learned before. Right into our jaw. Three anchor points. We've got our jawbone, nose to string and off the corner of the mouth. And then we're going to look through that peep. So on a compound, we have a peep and we want to match it over our scope. And then when you're ready, just get that finger around the trigger and lightly squeeze. Now that she's got great stance, she knows how to hold the bow because we don't want to grab it. We're just going to right here on. Go ahead and clip on to the dilu. I'm going to look in that grip position and kind of get that right along the meaty part of your thumb is your grip. Left arm is straight straight. Now, this is also another thing. Women, we like to be a little bit hyper mobile. We like to pop that elbow up a little bit. Right. All we want to do is we still want to keep that palm towards our target. But I'm just going to drop and roll that elbow down out of the way. So drop the shoulder, rotate that elbow. Drop the shoulder, roll that elbow down a little bit. OK, OK, perfect. Go ahead and bring the bow up. OK, my fingers behind the trigger. Yeah. And then drop that. Get into that. There you go. That looks much better into that drawing. You want that nose right on top of the string. Go ahead and wrap that finger around the trigger. Nice and slow. There's three anchor points that we want to cover. OK, two of those anchor points are going to be physical. And then we have a visual anchor. OK, the two physical ones is actually where we're going to be touching or there's something going to be touching our body. OK, so our hand member, we talked that the soft part of our hand here is going to be into that job. That is our first anchor point that we want to hit every single time. OK, our second physical anchor point is going to breathe the stream to our nose every single time. OK. So if you don't wear glasses, you do kind of want it to the tip of the nose. OK, but touch off the corner of the mouth and a corner. OK, so it is going to be slight of an angle. OK, now, depending on the length of bow, this is obviously a youth bow, maybe a shorter drawing of beginner bow. You're going to have a shorter axle axles. You're going to have a steeper string angle. Oh, it may not feel. Yeah, so it's going to get a longer bow. You still want same anchor points, but maybe that's a taller axle to axle, which means basically the measurement from top of the cam to the bottom. OK, the third point is our visual anchor point with a compound bow. We're going to have a peep and on top of that, a scope. OK, what we want to do. So here's your here's our peep and it splits the string. So it actually lines up in front of our scope here. As you look through, you'll see the ring of the peep will cover the ring of the white. OK, OK. Yeah. It's a little high right now because of the string angle. Once you get to your draw, it will actually level out. OK. All right. Also, a very, very important part of that is you want that to be perfectly over your scope. Get right into that anchor point and then nose to string. You're just dropping your nose down to the string. Now the peep should line up. Yep, it's in there. It's in there. Good. Now you're slowly going to bring that finger around the trigger. Now put your pin. Perfect. Oh, go ahead. Yeah. Pin on target and then squeeze. You want to create what's called back tension and back tension is where you've got that. So remember that little squeeze in the shoulder blades? That's how I you're learning a little bit about that tension. OK, so new shooters have a tendency to be super stiff and the elbow doesn't move. That's why they get maybe an aggressive punching the trigger or just that aggressively. Right. OK, if you let your finger hook onto the release and I'm leading with my elbow. OK, all I'm doing is I'm executing my shot, not shooting my shot. I'm executing my shot. Nice, tense or nice and relaxed. And I'm leading and pulling with my elbow. So the first thing when people they're like, what arrow do I need? And you walk into a bow shop and as you can see, you're going to find the the entire bow shop is lined with arrows. What do these numbers mean? Do I need a 250 spine or do I need a 600 spine? So just a quick lesson on spine. The higher the number, the softer the spine. OK, that's also going to vary on your draw weight. OK, so in compound, what I do is like for my new shooters, I recommend maybe a 500 or a 600 spine arrow. OK, where it's stiff enough that they're durable, but it's soft enough that you're going to hit target. OK, if your arrow is too stiff or too weak, you're going to you're going to notice that in the flight of the arrow. OK. Yeah. So the stiffness of the spine is super important. If you go to a bow shop and they try and sell you on a 250 spine, which is super, super stiff. Yeah, it's more designed for a hunting shaft or a higher pounded bow. And you're trying to shoot out out of a 30 pound compound. You're definitely going to notice the imperfections in your flight. OK, good recommendation. My personal opinion for a bow anywhere from 20 to 40 pounds, even as heavy as a 50 pound bow is maybe that 500, 400, 500. OK, that's a good starting point. But if you go to your bow shop kind of thing, they'll cut it down to size. You do. There are some certain parts on the bow that you don't want the arrow to stick way off at the end of the bow. There are certain points. I just maybe off of the front of the riser a little bit. Oh, just a couple inches off of your rest. Yeah, is a good place to a good place to start as far as arrow length goes. Yeah. But like your local bow shop will address those kind of things. So kind of. Yeah. Back to the same theme. Local bow shops are great because you're going to even if you order that arrow off of Amazon, it might be hanging way off the bow because they're just going to give you the longest stock size arrow that they have. Yes. And then based off your drawing, you're going to need to get that cut down. So kind of takes you right back, right back, right, right, right. Right back to wild arrow archery. As an adult beginner, go ahead and get that arrow cut down. You're done growing. OK. Yeah. As a youth archer, maybe keep that little bit of extra length. Save mom and dad. Great idea. Just save that. Save mom and dad that little extra money. Yeah. You're going to be growing in kids. We all know how fast kids grow. Great, great tip there. Yeah. Leave that arrow a little bit longer. Well, Coach Leanne, I just want to thank you. You are awesome today. Coach Leanne Starr, she's here at Wild Arrow Archery in Centerville, Utah. If you're looking for a coach and you're in the area, come see her. You run adult and youth classes. Adult and youth classes. It's all different levels. All different levels. OK. And compound and recurve. Both compound and recurve. She does everything. I do everything. Yeah. Compound, recurve, barebow. Yeah. Yeah. Ages eight, eight and up. Tell us a little bit about kind of your background in archery. How long ago you started competing? You were telling me a little bit about your competition career. So tell me a little bit about that. I started shooting elementary school, junior high school in PE class, of all things. Right. Growing up in Wyoming, that was it was a great PE class. Yeah. I kind of got out of competition or just archery in general as life life goes on, you know, get married, have a family, move around. Yeah. After we retired from the military, my husband was in the Marine Corps for over 21 years. We ended up back in Utah and picked back up archery. And these guys can't get rid of me. I'm a quick line and sinker. Been here ever since I started getting into the competition side of it. I am trying for that red, white and blue jersey. My greatest accomplishment was four in Vegas. That's all in Vegas. And that's thousands of archers from all around the world. So that's a great accomplishment. That's awesome. Well, I feel like I hit the jackpot today with Coach Leanne. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for meeting with me and doing that today. And hopefully you guys have learned some new tips, new tricks, some new stuff on form equipment. If you have any questions, you can leave them down below and we'll try to get back with you soon. All right. Have a great day. Happy shooting. Bye guys.