It’s All In The Wrist…Learn A Simple Archery Tip!

Hey archery friends this is Coach Tara. Today I want to give you a quick easy simple tip to help keep you in a nice straight line when you're shooting archery. I always tell my archers on the first day stay in that letter T position. The straighter your line is to the target with your shot the straighter that arrow is going to fly down range. A big big big mistake that archers make on the first day is their wrist placement and it's super easy to fix. A lot of times what happens archers don't even realize that they're doing it but when you first start out you're trying to put all that tension in your pants. You're pulling back with the forearm and the fingers and what happens is when you pull the string back your wrist is caved inward. Okay so it's inward. The problem is when it's caved inward as you can see is now my elbow is facing in this direction. We want the elbow behind us when we're shooting. So make that quick fix and all you have to do is keep your hand nice and flat. Keep the wrist flat. You got to start focusing on that wrist positioning. Most people don't do that when they first start shooting. So everything's going to stay nice and flat. Even what you can do is you can pull that wrist out just a little bit. It's going to feel a little bit weird at first but this will kind of help line you up. Okay so it'll feel a little awkward if you don't if you're used to doing it and when you set up now you can get that elbow behind you a lot better than when your wrist is caved inward and your elbow's sticking far out. All right so I'm going to shoot two shots for you. The first shot I'm going to have my wrist caved in. So I really want you to pay attention to where my elbow placement is as I draw back. We'll draw and on the second shot I'm going to actually go ahead and keep that wrist nice and flat and then on that shot also check out where my elbow placement is. Okay you might notice I didn't get an explosive release on that. My elbow was a little bit more out here than behind me. My wrist was caved in. It's hard for me to get a good anchor position. All right on this shot right here I'm going to keep that wrist nice and flat. My hand's going to stay nice and flat. I'm at a little bit of a different angle. The first shot I'm going to have my wrist caved in. So really keep an eye on what that looks like when it's caved in. So I'm going to set up. See how it's caving in towards me? It's really hard one to kind of get into a good anchor position for me and I know my elbow's sticking out really far. Okay so it's more like you're opening up instead of getting that follow through because you're just not at the right angle to get a nice slip off the string. So check out this shot. I'm going to have a nice flat wrist on this one and see how everything lines up really good with the anchor position and how I get a good follow through. Much better. Much cleaner. You're going to be a lot more accurate. A lot more consistent. A good thing you can do is have a friend videotape you or you can even kind of set up a camera and videotape yourself because a lot of times you don't even realize or know that you are doing some of these small little habits and then you can really see what is your wrist doing when you're shooting. A lot of times you'll find that there's a lot of tension in those fingers when you first get started in archery. It's going to be super easy to fix. It just takes a little bit of practice. All right. Have a great day friends. Happy shooting.