Recurve Form Series Episode 3 | Alignment and Angular Motion with Jake Kaminski

You're watching the Jake Kaminsky YouTube channel. There's a couple of other things that definitely are crucial to shooting a bow, and most of those are having to deal with the alignment that you shoot in. So, you want to use your bone structure to hold the bow back, not your muscles to hold the bow back. And the reason that is, is you can exert a whole lot less energy if you're in the proper alignment to do movements and to hold your bow back. So if you're exerting less, you're going to shake less, especially under pressure, therefore have more control. More control means more accuracy downrange. So, the way I can explain alignment is simply, if I had two items, two things that were stacked together and pushed directly on each other, I can push a large amount of force without folding this structure, right? So, all I have to do is control just a tiny little bit of movement here to keep my structure, just a tiny little bit to control it. But if I'm off at an angle like this and I push the same amount of force, now I'm having to use a lot more muscle recruitment to keep this structure and eventually it can become weak enough and fold, right? So, same type of thing while you're shooting. You want to use your bone structure to hold the bow back. You want to almost like be inside of the bow and resist the bow from coming into you, almost like you're resisting two walls coming at you, okay? So, an easy way to illustrate that is you want the point of this wrist, this front shoulder, and this back shoulder to be in a straight line. If it's in a straight line, you will have proper alignment. So, most people who are beginners that are just starting out will be in more of a triangle function here. So, you can't really see it like this, but if I point downwards, you can see it's kind of difficult on camera, but you can see that this wrist, this shoulder, and this shoulder make a triangle. It breaks, but if I have it in a straight line in proper form, now you can see that this is all one unit and stacked together and this is hooking onto the string trying to exert the forces back and around to create alignment, all right? So, that's really, really crucial to have good bone structure while you're at full draw to do the majority of the work for you. You know, we're not shooting compound. We don't have mechanical let off. So, when we're shooting 50 pounds, we're holding 50 pounds back or whatever it may be. So, that's really important to have good alignment, which is good bone structure, and then also within that, you want to try to make it as easy as possible. Again, if you're using the correct alignment, you're using less energy, you're using the correct movements, you're not firing muscles unnecessarily, you have the correct direction and tension, tension and direction going correctly, and trying to continue and control everything as a whole. Everything will just be easy and kind of flow out rhythmically, okay? The whole idea is to try to make the shot as easy as possible. So, that way, when you need to exert more energy to keep your rhythm and timing, especially like the wind's picking up, it's raining, whatever it may be, you can do that more efficiently to make the shot happen quicker. So, again, I talked about this in another video, which I'll link, the tension or excuse me, the intensity. If you can lower your intensity by having the correct structure, it will be easier and therefore more efficient, more controllable, again, more controlled, more accuracy downrange. Other things that are very important to the shot that are going to be covered, of course, is using angular motion versus linear motion. Now, the way that I can easily describe it best to people is if you've ever tried to like pull start a lawnmower, a weed whacker, a chainsaw, or something like that, if you were to just try to pull the string out from the, you know, the recoil mechanism in a perfectly straight line and straight fashion, you're going to be using your bicep basically to pull the string. But nobody pulls, pull starts a lawnmower or a chainsaw or whatever like this and tries to pull the string straight. Because if anybody has ever had like a gummed up carb or just having issues getting fuel to the carburetor, your arm is going to fatigue and basically fall off long before you're ever going to get that thing fired. So, the correct way to do it is to just pull the bow, or excuse me, to pull the lawnmower back. So, you know, you brace against the lawnmower and as you're pulling and yanking, you're twisting and using your entire core, your big muscles within your structure to pull the pull cord, not just your bicep. You're using your whole body and it becomes a lot more efficient. You can, it's more explosive and you can eventually get that thing started before your arm falls off. So, the whole idea to shooting archery this method, this way, is to use angular motion as a mechanical advantage, a mechanical lever to make the arrow move straight. So, the best way to illustrate it is to kind of compare a linear motion with an angular driver that drives the linear motion. So, the best illustration of that, which I really like that Coach Lee used this way back, was the oil pump jet. And it's basically, if you've ever seen oil being pumped out of the ground with old school pivoting arms, basically, there's an angular motion of the pump head, where the motor is, creating a linear motion of the actual pumping mechanism that goes down into the earth. So, that's kind of what we want to do when we're shooting. We want to use an angular motion to use big, big core muscles, front and back, to pull that bow back to stabilize and make the arrow move linearly straight, right? So, it's not that we're trying to control the arrow movement, we're trying to control the bow movement via angular motion. So, a way to facilitate angular motion, it's kind of difficult on video, so I'm going to do my best to describe it. So, Coach Lee says that this back here, this spot right here, is land two. It's not really a real medical term. Apparently, there's a real medical term for this spot on the front, and this one's called land one, L-A-N one. So, Coach Lee said, okay, if this is land one, I'm going to call this land two. So, he said that if you move land two correctly, with the correct movement, not using the muscles, of course, you will get into correct alignment and use angular motion. So, the whole idea is to move land two around and behind you, and that is the driving force of pulling the bow back. Now, I have, in person, shown people by making them relax their arm, and I will grab onto their arm like this, and then I put my arm or my hand against their shoulder here to kind of stabilize it, and then I pull them this direction, and eventually, they get a stretch back here. And so, before I show them that stretch, I pretend that I'm the bow. I grab onto their fingers as if I'm the string, and I say, okay, pull me back as hard as you can, and they pull me, and they're really struggling to try to move me, or they end up moving towards me because they don't have a very stable core. But as soon as I show them this stretch, or worse comes to worse, if they're very flexible, I will tap them on this spot. It's literally just the backside of your deltoid, and you literally tap them here, and you say, pull me back here. Don't pull me back here. And once you do that, the brain is tricked into using the correct movement, and they're not focusing at all about the muscles, right? So, if I say, move me with this and pull me with this, they immediately go to an angular motion. They pull around like this. As you can see, watch it move around behind my head, whereas if I was pulling linearly, so I can pull linearly or angularly, and that's the difference between linear and angular motion. All we want to do, everything, how we get from set to setup, to loading through anchor, transfer, how we're expanding and releasing and follow through, all has to be angular motion. It's the same exact movement. It just becomes slower and slower and slower as we go on throughout the process. Thanks for watching. Be sure to subscribe and hit that notification bell so you get notified every time a new video is uploaded. For seminar and book info, head to jakominski.com or click on the link below. And yeah, I appreciate you guys watching. If you would, please share this video. It really helps get the word back out that I am back out there. Thanks again. Take care.