NASP Archery Form Tip: How to Hold the Bow Correctly

I recently coached a lot of NASP kids, and I noticed one very common thing that a lot of the kids were doing, and that is holding the bow incorrectly. Just because this is called the bow grip does not mean you should be gripping your bow. Like I said there in the intro, I recently got done working with a bunch of NASP kids from 10X Archery Club, which won the Battle of the Club's Backyard Archery Championships, along with Break the Barriers, who we'll be visiting soon. But 10X Archery had a bunch of NASP kids, it's actually the club that they are, it's a NASP club. They use this bow here, the Genesis, and many of them, most of them in fact, have an issue with how they put their hand into the bow. It's very easy and very common to make this mistake because the bow grip is called just that, a bow grip. So they grab onto the bow and hold onto it like they would grip just about anything else. This is a very common issue that most beginner archers make, is they grab onto the bow, because it's called a bow grip, but also they're afraid to drop the bow. And I'll show you how you should place your hand into the bow grip for higher scores, because when you grab onto the bow like this, and you grab onto it, you can do exactly what I just did there. It's called torquing the bow, where you twist the bow left and right, and it can make a huge impact point change on the target downrange. So if you're not sure why your left and right groups are very wide, it could be because you're grabbing onto the bow and you're twisting it on accident. It also allows you to have more control on the bow, too much in fact, to have this vertical variance as well. You'll hit low if you do this, you'll hit high if you do this. And because your hands are already on the bow like this and you're gripping onto it, it's also very common for people to grab onto the bow very sharply the moment they let go. When they do that, they're actually influencing the path of the arrow's flight. And so because of that, it changes where the arrows land on the target. There's a much better way to put your bow hand into the grip, and every high-level archer does it in this manner, for the most part. Now, one thing you have to abandon is the idea of holding onto the bow grip and having a ton of control. This feels like you'll never drop the bow, and again that's why most people start this way. However, the best way to actually put your bow hand into the grip is to do what is called stop, right? So if I tell you to stop, you'll notice from this angle that the back of my hand is flat. When I grab onto the bow like this, my hand is in this position when I'm grabbing onto the bow, where the pinky is pointing forward and I'm telling you not to stop. There is no stop here. This is a stop, right? That's a stop. Now, the next step is to take your knuckles, and if you were to look at the four knuckles where they meet your hand, you want to try to have that at a 45 degree angle relative to the ground. So most people, when they say stop, it's more of a parallel line, parallel to the ground. You want to have that 45 degree angle. And then, what you do is, you take your bow grip and you put it like so into your hand. Just like that. You saddle it into the V in between the index and thumb, like so. And then, you pay attention to what is called the lifeline. See that fold, that crease right there in the middle? That lifeline is your guide on where you should and shouldn't be touching the bow grip. Anything to the thumb side of that lifeline is absolutely ideal to be touching the bow. Anything to the pinky side of that lifeline should never touch the bow. So if you look here, with my hand in that stop position, the knuckles at 45 degrees, the pinky side of the lifeline is not touching the bow grip at all. The only way that that happens is if you make the knuckles, that line there, more vertical to the ground, and then I grab onto the bow like so. So now you'll see the lifeline is compromised when I'm in this position here. That is not ideal and that is not how you actually should properly put your bow hand into the grip. It's taking those knuckles, turning them 45 degrees, and making sure that the pinky side of the lifeline never touches the grip itself. The big secret here is keeping the back of the hand flat to me, not letting the pinky's side of the hand move forward. When I do that, it's easy to grab the grip. You can use your arrow rest kind of as a reference point here, and you'll see from this view All four of these knuckles are kind of in line with the actual rest itself. If I compromise and let the pinky go forward, grab onto the bow, now you'll see the knuckles are actually forward of that arrow rest, and that's how I'm able to grab onto the bow. Flatten that back of the hand, keep those knuckles at 45 degrees, and then what do you do with your fingers? Right? Because before, you had a place to put them in the bow grip. Now, they're just kind of hanging out in space. So I like to take the pinky, the ring, and the middle finger, and curl those and touch the palm. So if you look at the hand itself, the fingertips are touching the palm like so, keeping those knuckles at 45 degrees, and then just resting that index finger on the front of the riser like that. I'm not squeezing it, I'm not gripping it, I'm not squeezing it here, I'm just cradling onto the bow and letting it rest into my hand. Now I said most people grip the bow because they're afraid to drop it, totally understandable, you don't want to do that in a gymnasium, it's very loud when your bow hits the ground, so you hold onto it. However, in this position here, the bow is not going to actually jump out of your hand if you keep your hand relaxed. But there is something that I will recommend that you can pick up, it's very very cheap, it's called a finger sling. And I believe that every NASC club should have a whole lot of finger slings in their kit, along with all the risers, or bows rather, arrows, quivers, all that stuff, arm guards. You should also have finger slings too, and I'm going to show you how to actually use one here in a second. Now a finger sling, you don't have to purchase. You can also make one out of some free garbage material yourself. This is an old shoelace of mine that I turned into a finger sling. So if you have any shoes that you're about to toss out, pull the shoelaces out of them and you can make your own finger sling. I will have a link down in the description below and a card at the top up there to how to make your own finger sling and how to use it properly. And I will also have a link to an actual regular ready-made finger sling and a wrist sling as well as a NASC legal bolt-on wrist sling for NASC archery that you can also use in case you're interested. They all do the same thing and what they do is they go around the bow and prevent you from dropping the bow. You cannot possibly drop it when you're using this thing correctly. And so when you have your knuckles at 45 degrees, you're saying stop, resting these three fingers down, resting that finger on the front. When you go to shoot, you can't possibly drop the bow. It's attached to you because of this string, the sling, right? And so you should have no fear of actually dropping the bow. So if you take a look at a few different shots here, you'll see that when I'm grabbing onto the bow itself, I could actually torque the bow, especially when at full draw, where I can twist the bow left and right. I can also make it go up and down as well. And that's going to affect where the arrow goes on the target massively. But if I put my hand into the bow grip correctly, you'll see that I'm just cradling the bow. I'm having the back of that hand flat to me when I'm at full draw and I can actually see the back of my hand. That is going to be your dead giveaway to make sure that as an archer, you can see the back of your hand or as a coach from behind the shooting line, you can see the back of their hand when they're at full draw. Also from this side, from this view, you can see that my fingernails are visible because I'm grabbing onto the bow. But if I put my hand into the bow grip correctly, you'll see that they disappear, all but the index finger on the front of the bow. Putting your hand into the bow grip correctly does a few different things. Mainly what it does is it allows the bow to actually deliver the arrow with the least amount of influence possible. You don't want to twist the bow, torque the bow, grab onto the bow, or otherwise influence how it's delivering the arrow at that moment of you letting go of the string. If you do your job correctly and put your bow hand into the grip correctly and just cradle it, the bow will be much happier and your groups are going to be much better downrange. After working with 10X Archery and watching a bunch of their NASP shooters, I realized that I believe there's a bit of an information gap there, especially on this channel. So I'm going to be working on some videos on how to better shoot a NASP bow to make you a better archer if you are a NASP archer or if you're a coach out there and you want to learn how to coach your NASP students a little bit better. So because of that, I'm looking for a little bit of feedback, some common issues that you may deal with, or some common things that you have questions about. Please comment below and let me know what you want me to include in the next video and I'll do my best to address that. There's a few things that I have in mind, but if there's some hot topics, I want to make sure I touch on those and get you the best information that I possibly can on how to better shoot a NASP bow. Because ultimately, this only gets you through high school. There's not really anything after NASP, right? There's no NASP college program or anything like that. So many people will want to graduate past this Genesis bow into something else, and I promise you the stuff that I'll show you on how to properly shoot the Genesis is going to translate exactly into full-fledged archery that is outside of the NASP program. That would be one of my goals for this actual video series or this little mini-series that I'm going to do. And like I said, if you have any burning questions or something like that that you're interested in knowing more about, especially if you're a NASP archer or NASP coach, please comment below. Let me know. And if you are new here, if you wouldn't mind, please do subscribe and hit that notification bell. That way you'll get notified when I upload those videos. It genuinely helps this channel out and I can't thank those that support this channel enough by clicking all the links down in the description below. That genuinely makes a huge difference and allows me to continue to produce this content. So thank you for your support.