Basic Compound Archery Form

Archery form fundamentals are the building blocks of good shooting. They're the skills that you'll use from the first day you pick up a bow all the way throughout your entire archery career. And when you're in big pressure situations, these are the fundamentals that you'll fall back on. You hear people say, go back to the basics. These are those basics. So today we're going to go over everything you need to know to shoot a compound bow. Let's get started. Now the first part of shooting a compound bow is going to be safety. So first and foremost, don't pull a bow back unless it has an arrow knocked. And by arrow knocked, I mean an arrow on the string just like that. Also, don't draw it back unless you're pointing it at a target. When you're doing this type of form practice and you're working on things, it's a really good idea to just shoot really close to a target. Don't even worry about where the arrows are landing. Just focus on getting a feel for all the different aspects we'll be talking about today. The first component of archery form that we're going to talk about is your stance. That's how you're going to address the target every time you shoot. Now you can go with your feet shoulder width apart. So you have good balance. You can go a little bit wider if that's more comfortable for you. Now you can go with your toes even, which would be a closed stance. And this is a very natural way to point your shoulders right at the target. You can also go with an open stance, which is a little bit more stable. But there's a trick to this. You still have to point your shoulders towards the target. So what we're going to do is you're going to press down with this front leg here and then coil around your core to get your shoulders to turn toward the target. And then that's how you would shoot. So you're going to leave your stance open and you're going to coil around your core to get your shoulders pointing the target. That's the basics of stance. Let's talk about your grip. Now your grip is really important because if you grip the bow wrong, you'll influence the bow left or right and up and down inconsistently. And we want consistency in all things archery. So with the grip, what we're going to do is you have a line here called your lifeline and then there's your thumb pad. We want the bow to rest right in between those two. And so we're going to set our hand all the way up in the grip. We're going to bring it all the way up to where that arrow shelf is. And you'll notice in that position, your knuckles make a 45 degree angle to the bow. That's exactly what we want. Now it might be tempting to grip the bow like this, but this type of grip makes it really easy to influence that bow left and right. With this grip, it's much harder to move the bow left and right. Now to stack the odds in our favor a little bit further, we're going to take a very light grip of the bow. The bow really is just going to rest in our hand. So your fingers, just place them gently over. You can tuck these three fingers right in here. They don't even have to touch the bow. And then you can just take your index finger like that and then point your thumb toward the target. And that's a great grip. So you have your stance, you have your grip ready to shoot. You want to maintain a good posture as you're shooting, as you're drawing the bow back, when you have it all the way back, and as you're shooting. So you're going to stand up nice and straight. And at full draw, you want your body to look like a T. Again, good posture. You want your head very straight. Looking to the target, you don't want your head up or down like that. You just want a very neutral position. And for this arm, which is called the bow arm, for right-handed archer, it's going to be your left arm. You want your shoulder to be nice and low. You also want the arm itself to be straight out. Not locked, but also not bent. Just straight out. What this does is it provides a bone-on-bone connection, which means you don't have to use as much muscle to support the weight of the bow. So again, good posture, nice natural stance. Looking to the target, your head isn't up or down, very neutral. Your arm is going to be straight out. Your arm is going to be straight out, but not locked. Your left shoulder for right-handed archer, or your bow arm shoulder, it's going to be nice and low. A high shoulder would look something like this. You don't want that. You want it nice and low, okay? Now that you know all of that, you're ready to pull the bow back and start shooting. Now, when you draw the bow, you don't want to raise it up really high and pull down. That's called the sky drop. It's an unsafe situation. In case you have a misfire, that arrow is going outside of your range. So you want to bring the bow right about to eye level and then draw. You're going to draw the bow back nice and steady. And once you have the bow back, now we're going to look at what's called an anchor point. An anchor point is a consistent place on your face where you'll bring the string back every time. For most archers, that's going to be, you're going to bring the string to the tip of your nose and you'll be looking through your peep sight. Now, when you look through the peep sight, you should be able to see your pins, which you'll use to aim with. And it'll look like two concentric circles. You want to line up the circle, which is your peep sight, with the circle of your scope housing, and that'll give you a nice consistent anchor point every time. So we have the bow back. We're looking through our peep. The sights are on the target. Now, you can take your finger and place it onto the trigger. Another important thing to point out is that when you're pulling back the bow, never place your finger in front of the trigger. That's a safety thing. You don't want to accidentally set the bow off as you're pulling it back. So we're going to put our index finger right on that trigger. And I want you to imagine like there was a string tied to your elbow that's pulling your elbow back and around your head. And while that's happening, you're applying nice steady pressure to that trigger. And what we're looking for is a surprise release. The shot should happen as if by surprise. So you're applying steady pressure. The shot will just break on its own. And when that happens, you want to maintain your good form. So keep your bow arm straight out in front of you. Your eyes are locked on the target. You watch the arrow impact. And then that's a perfect compound archery shot. The best way to learn how to shoot a bow is to go to a local archery shop and have an instructor teach you in person. You can find a full list of archery shops by clicking the link below. And we'll see you in the next video.