6 WAYS TO MAKE YOUR BOW HOLD STEADIER (It’s Not You)

If your bow won't hold steady, it's not you, it's your setup. Before we dive into talking about stabilizers, the first thing we're going to talk about is draw length. Draw length can actually have a huge impact on your overall holding and how steady you can hold with your aim. If your draw length is too long, your pin movement is never going to really settle. It's always going to sway and move. It's going to move very slow, but it's not going to spend a lot of time on the middle. On the flip side of that, if our draw length is too short, what we have is a really fast, jerky, choppy motion. What we want to do is we want to find the perfect draw length where our pin spends the most time on the middle with our best ability to execute a clean shot. So the best way to do this is, honestly, you want to take off your stabilizers off of your bow, and then we want to just get rid of all the factors that we can that are going to influence our hold outside of draw length. And what we'll do is draw back, shoot, and just look at your pin movement. If your pin movement is very slow, never really stopping, draw length is likely too long. If it's very fast, very short, moving extremely fast and quick, that's a good sign that your draw length could be a little bit short. What we really want is we want that sight spending the most time on the middle that we possibly can. What perfect draw length looks like is when we come to a full draw position, we want our arrow that is in our rest going through to the knocking point here, we want that straight in line with our forearm of our hand right here. If you see your elbow down like this and your forearm is pointing up into the air, it's a good indication draw length is long. If you see it the opposite where your elbow is high, that's a good indication that it's short. Now another way to look at it is if you have somebody film behind you. When you come to full draw, what you want to do is you want to have the string line up in line with your arrow, and the tip of your elbow, as you see behind you, if that is forward, that's a good indication, or to the right for a right-handed shooter, that's a good indication your draw length is a little bit short. If it is past or to the left for a right-handed shooter, it's a good indication it's just a little bit long and you're almost over rotating through that draw length. Now lastly, none of that would matter without having the correct shoulder positions. You want your left and right shoulder, as you're at full draw, you want your shoulder positions to be perfectly level in a straight line with your target. That's if you're shooting level ground or downhill or uphill, we always want our shoulders to remain in a straight line to the target. So perfect draw length feels like it's not too long and slow of pin motion as you're aiming, but it's also not too fast and jittery with your shot. When your draw length is perfect, or when it feels perfect, you'll notice that your shot execution is way more consistent, it's much cleaner, it's much easier to get your shot to break and to go off. It'll feel like you're using less muscle and less effort to actually hold your bow up as you aim, because you're actually using those back muscles with your with your draw length aligned perfectly. You're using the muscles in your back to basically maintain that weight of that bow up, so it feels like that bow is more floating and stable over the middle, rather than your shoulder or your arm or your muscles in general trying to hold that bow steady. Now if you're new to archery and you're trying to determine what your draw length range should even be, a very easy way to do this is just measure your wingspan fingertip to fingertip, not overly stretched out but not overly relaxed. Take that measurement, divide it by two and a half, that will get you close to what your draw length should be, at least within an inch pretty much either direction. Past that, if you're an archer that's been shooting for a long time, don't just write this off because you've been shooting the same draw length and that's what you're used to. What you're used to doesn't mean that it's optimal. Professional archers or just very high level archers are tinkering and testing their draw length. They'll go as far as just twisting their string, putting twists into their string to shorten the draw length or taking twists out of the cables to shorten their draw length. They'll that far to do just 1 16th of an inch of draw length adjustment or 1 8th of an inch of draw length adjustment and when you get to that level it can be hard to see the impact it has on your hold. But what they'll do is they'll shoot over weeks and even months with that slight adjustment and just compare their scores on paper. If it's getting better, there's good odds that that draw length is more optimal for them. If it's getting worse, they go the other direction. There's no reason that you can't apply this exact same thing to your shooting so that you can become a better shot and execute cleaner. Now just because our draw length is perfect, that doesn't automatically mean that we're going to hold steady. There's more factors that go into it and the next thing I want to touch on is actually de-loop length. Changing your de-loop length longer or shorter, it does not change your draw length but it does change the position of your hand and your elbow position and release arm position at full draw. Generally speaking, most people are going to want a de-loop length of 5 8ths of an inch to 3 quarters of an inch. If you get much longer than that, you start to have issues where your hand is too far back or you're struggling to get in on the string to touch your nose to the string to get proper peep alignment. If you get it too short, less than 5 8ths of an inch or less than half of an inch, especially if you're shooting a handheld release, you're going to have issues when you're drawing and you're twisting your hand to come to anchor. It's actually going to torque the bow string and so that can provide inconsistencies in your shot, especially if you're twisting your hand slightly different shot to shot. With handheld releases and wrist strap releases, the length of the head between where your fingers sit and where it attaches to the de-loop can be a factor as well. On releases like the original ultra view button, that release has a longer neck, a longer head, so your hand is sitting further back as you come into anchor even though your draw length on your bow has not changed. The same could be said for a wrist strap release with the neck adjustment where it could be set really short or really long. If your de-loop is too short, release is too short, head of your handheld is too short, you could be very crunched up here at full draw and you might have too much facial pressure on your string. The string might be digging into your cheek, into your face because in order for you to get it to that right position, there's a lot of pressure on the string. In archery at the end of the day, there is no one right way to do everything. You can do it so many different ways but the number one rule of archery is that you have to be consistent and there are certain things that you can do to be more consistent than others. Now note if you have to adjust your de-loop length to get what feels like the optimal draw length, you're not going to hold as steady as possible. You need to adjust your draw length first and then have your de-loop match so that your hand in your release position is correct on your face for the optimal hold. The next thing that is commonly overlooked with all this is peep sight height. Ironically enough, peep sight height could be one of the biggest factors for just aligning your shot, being consistent, and holding steady. Let me just give you an example. If you're shooting at a further distance, say 100 yards, how many of you roll your sight down, you're shooting a far distance, and all of a sudden you feel looser on your anchor point? Your hand's maybe not quite as firm on your face, maybe the string isn't touching the tip of your nose quite as well, maybe that pin movement dances a little bit more or that peep sight doesn't stay centered on the sight housing quite as good as it once did. That's a symptom or that's basically what's happening when your peep sight is not set in the optimal position. Most commonly I see peep sights being set too high and not way too high, just slightly too high. They're set slightly too high mostly because I think people want to get extra distances out of their sight, especially shooting tacks or just long range shooting in general. Your peep height is in direct correlation with how much distance you can get out of your sight. If you set your peep sight higher, you can get more distance, but it doesn't automatically make it so that you can hold your bow steadier. If your peep sight is too high, that's exactly what you see. You're too loose on your face. The peep sight doesn't stay as centered, doesn't stay as consistent. Because of that, your geometry of your whole draw length, release length, deloop length, peep sight is off. Therefore, you're compensating trying to align so that you can look through that peep sight, look to your sight, and hold steady, but it's loose, it's inconsistent, it's harder to repeat. Now on the flip side of that, if your peep sight is too low, you're likely way too crunched into your face, the string is pushed hard against your nose, it's hard against your cheek, and you can just get inconsistencies from that, from having too much facial pressure. Again, like draw length, don't just assume your peep sight height is perfect because you draw back with your eyes closed and open and boom, it's there. Try just moving your peep sight down just an eighth of an inch. Move adjust your sight and practice for a week and just see. Does your hold get better? Do your groups improve? It could make a big difference. For guys that are shooting like a multi-pin slider sight or just a slider sight in general like this, where do you set your peep sight position? Because this is honestly where most of these issues come from. If you're running just a fixed housing where this here doesn't move and you've got just fixed pins like these five fixed pins and you're just shooting 20 to 60, it's not as big of a deal because the sight housing isn't moving. However, with this, if I'm shooting 20 to 60, my peep sight is set, but if I roll down to 120, my sight housing moves down quite a bit. When my sight housing moves down, the peep sight doesn't move in the string, but the way that I change the angle I look through the peep sight moves, so I have to lower my release hand down to be able to look through that peep sight to line up the sight. So, we want to have our peep sight set somewhere in the middle. We don't want to be too crunched when our sight is at base and up in the top position, say 20 yards or the 20 to 60 range on this five-pin sight. We don't want to be too crunched there, but we also don't want to be too loose when we go down to 120 and we're trying to center the peep sight and our hand is off of our face or the pressure isn't quite as stiff on our face. That can have a big impact on your overall hold, and what we want is we want to still feel firm. We want to still feel solid, even when our sight is rolled down to that furthest distance possible, because that is what will help us achieve the best hold with our geometry between our draw length, our de-loop length, our release length, and our peep sight height. Now, stabilizers is what most people think of when it comes to holding steady with their bow, but really stabilizers are just a small part of the overall equation of what it takes to actually hold steady. If you don't have what we just talked about all set properly, stabilizers can actually make your aim and your hold worse, but if you have them set properly, it can actually make your hold better. Now, I want to give you just like a quick visual example of how stabilizers work. Okay, the goal of stabilizers is to slow the pin movement and slow the rotational torque of the bow so that we can be more consistent with our shooting. I'm going to show you how to do that with this shovel. Okay, so say this is our stabilizer bar. Obviously, this is the weight on the end. Now, imagine if the weight on this end was on the bow, and this was the end of our stabilizer bar right here. Now, if I try to move this around really fast, it's really easy for me to do that, right? That's harder for me to be consistent because there's less force basically resisting that torque or that twist. Now, if I take the stabilizer and I have this long skinny lightweight rod with a bunch of weight on the end, I have a hard time moving that fast, right? Because this weight, this mass on the end is resisting the torque. It's resisting that twist. So, the goal with any stabilizer setup is you want a lightweight rod with weight on the end. Now, of course, we want the longest rod possible with the least amount of weight possible because that will give us the optimal amount of stability without the overall weight to make us tired. Of course, we don't want to be running 30-inch stabilizer bars when we're out hunting. 12 or 15 might be the longest that you can go comfortably, or it might be 10 if you're hunting out of a blind or a tree stand. Effectively, your front bar does the bulk of the stabilizer. What that's doing is it is basically countering twist and torque of your bow like this. Because this weight is out front, it's just like the shovel, long lightweight skinny rod out front, the weight in the front, it slows or it stops this torque like this. Without any stabilizers, if we came to full draw with no weights on the end of this, you're going to see your pin just going like this, just shaking left and right a little bit. That's just a little vibration from us being at full draw and having that tension being against our back wall. We want to add at least enough weight to that front stabilizer to completely eliminate that left to right vibration. When it comes to the back bar, there's a lot of, I don't know if I'd call it controversy, but maybe just confusion over this. There's a lot of different reasons that you run a back bar, but it's not mainly to offset the weight of the front bar. It's not mainly to offset the weight of accessories. I mean, with inline accessories, you don't really have a bunch of weight on the side anyway. The main purpose of the back bar is actually to give you a direction, a forced direction for how this bow sits in your hand, in your grip. Now, if we just ran a back bar perfectly straight back, the weight was perfectly straight back, this bow, call it balanced. If the bow is balanced, when we draw back, since there's no direction with our grip, if we have any slight little consistency, that bow could turn this way, that bow could turn this way. We could be basically making our inconsistencies worse by not having our stabilizers set appropriately. Now, how do we determine the angle that our rear bar should be? A very simple, general rule of thumb is if you're shooting, say 40 yards or beyond, and you get an occasional left miss for a right-handed shooter or a right miss for a left-handed shooter. If you get an occasional left miss, just take your V-bar bracket and bump this side bar out just one notch. Go back, shoot again. You're going to feel a difference in your grip, but see if it takes those left flyers and moves them into the middle. Keep adjusting that out until you basically eliminate those left flyers. Now, why does that work? What is happening? As you adjust that stabilizer out, you're basically putting more bias, more direction into your grip, into your hand, which is making your grip more consistent. What's happening when you're missing to the left or missing to the right is that bow is twisting in your hand because of just pressure differences. Your hand might be in the same spot. It doesn't mean your grip is wrong. It just means you don't have the stabilizer system working with you. You have it working against you. That's just a quick tip to move that out to the side. Now, a few other just general things with stabilizers here. If you have your stabilizers angled down, what that's doing from a positive side is you're lowering your, call it center of gravity of the bow. The mass of the bow is lower in the system. What does that do? It makes it less wind resistant when the wind is blowing because the bottom has the mass and the weight. It's keeping it more solid. As the wind is blowing the platform, the sight is going to return to the target faster. And that's what we want. The goal of stabilizers isn't to make the pin sit dead still. We just want it over the middle or returning to the middle as fast as it can, as much as it can, so that our pin is spending as most time as possible over the middle. Now, every time we lower our stabilizer, if we have it at a down angle front or back, we're basically reducing the leverage of that stabilizer system. So if we ran it straight back with the same amount of weight, it would have more leverage than it does when it's angled down. There's a lot more that goes into stabilizers overall, and it's very individualistic to the archer, to how they shoot, to their grip, to their holding weight, everything else that goes into that. So if you guys want me to do a deep dive into stabilizers, explain it further, just comment below, let me know about that. Now, when it comes to the whole system side of things with holding weight and overall bow weight, it plays directly into stabilizers and your hold. So let's start with holding weight. A lot of people with stabilizers, they think that your front bar and your rear bar need to have the exact same amount of leverage or weight so that the bow is balanced perfectly. That's not necessarily the case. We want the bow to give us a direction because really when we're at full draw here, all the weight is in our front left arm. We're not trying to balance that bow front and back with our left hand. What are we doing? We're taking our draw arm, our right arm, and that is what is pulling against that bow. So the amount we're pulling against the bow, as in holding weight, if we have a higher holding weight, we can shoot more weight on our stabilizers. If you notice on my bow, I have quite a bit of weight. I run 9 ounces on the back of a 10 inch bar and I've got, I think, 7 ounces on the front of this 12 inch bar. I can get away with that because I shoot 80% let off, meaning I have a higher holding weight. I'm pulling harder against the back wall. I'm firmer against the back wall. Because of that, that is covering the weight of the bow as it's lifted. So that bow doesn't feel heavy when I shoot. With that said, if I shot 85% let off, now I'm not pulling as hard against the back wall. All this weight on my stabilizers, that bow is going to be dipping. That pin is going to be dropping down. I think a lot of people assume when your pin is dropping down, oh I need to add weight to my back bar so that it lifts the bow. That's not exactly how it works. When you add weight to the bow, that's just making it heavier. You're not tilting the bow back. In order to keep that pin from dropping out the bottom, you need to have more holding weight, more resistance on your draw arm side. Holding weight plays into this system just as much as the stabilizers do, just as much as the overall bow weight does. You basically want to run a heavy enough system where it's going to restrict movement so that pin moves slow but spends the most amount of time over the middle. If our holding weight is too high and our stabilizer weight is too high, now we might be able to hold super solid for five to ten seconds, but we're going to wear out extremely fast. You've got to be able to work with this whole system of your stabilizers, your holding weight, and your overall bow weight so you can find what works best for you to have the best hold possible, the best execution possible, and not get tired. If you're a hunter, you might want to be able to hold that full draw for 30 seconds to a minute before you start shaking or before your pin starts getting really heavy and dipping down. If you're a target archer shooting 60 to 90 to 120 arrows, depending on what matches you're shooting, you have to be able to have your bow set up to be able to do that so you don't get tired 40 shots in. This brings me to my final point to help you aim and hold as steady as possible. Are you forcing that pin to try to hold steady on your target as you aim? If you answered yes to that, that is likely causing your aim to not actually hold as steady as you want. When we are forcing our pin and trying to hold it still on the target, we are tightening muscles. We're using different muscles that are being inconsistent with our hold. It's causing jitters. It's causing movement. It's causing frustration in us because we know we cannot hold the pin dead still. This last point is not about adjusting the bow. It's not about peep side height, draw length, yada yada yada, stabilizers. It is about thinking that we cannot control our pin float. We just have to accept it. Accept your pin float. Know that it's going to move. Focus your vision on what you want to hit. Look past your pin and let that pin move. If you do everything else that we talked about in this system and you focus on the target, that pin is going to hold as tightly over the middle and spend as much time as possible over the middle that you can get out of your setup. Don't force your aim. Accept the float. Hope you guys found this helpful. As always, I appreciate you following along and if this helps you out, let me know. If you want me to go in-depth more on anything, let me know. I'm happy to make a video about any individual one of these topics so that you guys can have more information to increase your shooting and overall be a better archer. Thank you guys.