String Alignment Explained for Barebow, Recurve, and Traditional

String alignment is one of the most important parts of your shot, and it's something that most archers haven't been shown how to properly adjust. The fix is actually really simple. You don't move the bow, you don't move your hand, you change your perspective. In this video, I'm going to show you how to properly adjust your string alignment, because I believe that a lot of archers out there don't know how to properly adjust it, or don't even know why string alignment is important. String alignment is just the relationship between your string and your eye, and the simplest way to actually adjust it is to simply just adjust your head ever so slightly relative to the actual string. You do that by gently tilting your head left and right. You want to make sure you're anchoring just like you normally do, and keep your anchor nice and stable, and just gently tilt your head to the right, or to the left, or whichever way you need to actually tilt your head to bring your string alignment into the place that you actually like to keep it. It doesn't take a huge amount of movement, and I'm over-exaggerating with these movements here, but this is the actual proper way on how to adjust your string alignment. The problem is, most people don't know how to adjust the string alignment, and so they end up doing either the wrong thing, or they completely ignore it and move on to something else. But it's really, really simple, as I've already shown how to properly do it. Where people get in trouble is when they start to try to move their anchor. If they're trying to change their hand position on their actual face, that doesn't really help at all. And if you're really anchoring improperly to begin with, like, say, the string in the center of your chin, that puts you in such a difficult position to actually get into the proper string alignment, because you feel like you're adding so much tension on the side of your neck to crank it over to get your string in proper string alignment. And so the really important thing is to make sure you're anchoring consistently in the correct place with the string on the corner of your chin, and then you tilt your head gently, ever so slightly, to adjust that string alignment to put it wherever you like to put it. Basically, your eye should change relative to the string, or your perspective of where your string alignment is, but your anchor should never adjust. It should always be in the exact same place. And honestly, the best way to really tell if you're using a proper anchor, and you're using string alignment correctly, is that it should feel natural. It shouldn't feel uncomfortable. You shouldn't have to crank your neck. When done correctly, and you're anchoring relatively in the correct place, and your string alignment is basically in the correct place as well, it really shouldn't feel uncomfortable to put the string in the proper place when you're at full draw. Now, let's talk about where you should actually put your string when you're at full draw. You can do this with any type of single string bow, including recurve, barebow, or traditional. And basically, on a recurve, Olympic-style recurve, you want to take the blur of the string and put it on the inside, meaning, if you're a right-hand shooter, the right-hand side of your sight pin. And you want to either gently touch the edge of your sight pin, or potentially, you can take the string and put it on the inside edge of your riser when you're at full draw from that kind of perspective. As you can see, there's a couple of different options here on where you can put your string alignment on your Olympic-style recurve, but the most important part here is not necessarily where you put it, but that you're just putting it in the same place every single time. Now, with barebow, it's slightly different, but it's about the same as Olympic-style recurve. You can put the string on the inside edge of your riser, or potentially alongside the arrow when you're at full draw and you're actually aiming. Both of those are, again, completely acceptable. And again, just use the exact same method every single time. Now, traditional-style archery is basically the same as barebow, where you can put it on the edge of the riser, or alongside the arrow when you're at full draw. But again, the same principle applies for all single-string bows. Just put it in the same place every single time, and you're going to have far better results on the target downrange. And the reason you'll actually have tighter groups down there is because you're going to actually be consistent. The reason you're going to be consistent is because your string alignment is your rear sight. We need to actually aim with our sight, and then align the bow relative to the sight and the target with the rear sight. And the rear sight is just that. The string blur when you're at full draw. As long as you do it the same way every single time, you will have consistent groups downrange, and then you can adjust your sight on a recurve, adjust your plunger tension on a barebow or something like that, maybe even your center shot, and then maybe even adjust your cant with a traditional bow. All of those things you can adjust once you get tight groups downrange because you're using the same string alignment, or using your rear sight properly every single shot. Now to dive a little bit deeper into string alignment, it's really important to pay attention to at a high level, especially with an Olympic-style recurve, when you're trying to actually execute the shot, to make sure that your string alignment is not drifting when you're pulling through the clicker when you're actually trying to execute the shot. It's very, very common for people to have this happen when they're actually pulling or expanding to make the clicker click. That string alignment will drift ever so slightly right or to the left as they're pulling through the clicker. I've also seen it happen on barebow as well. Once you really start to aim and look past the string blur, it potentially can shift as well. And this is something that a lot of high-level archers actually pay attention to in their training process. They'll do drills when they're at blank bale and actually shoot lots and lots of arrows when they're at blank bale and pull through the clicker the same way that they normally do, but they really hyper-focus on the actual string alignment and they make sure that it's not drifting one direction as they're pulling through the clicker. It's super common to have this string as they're pulling to not come back straight relative to their face. It's actually drifting ever so slightly because they're actually changing their head position as they're pulling through the clicker. They're not sliding the anchor on the face improperly, they're doing that correctly at least, but they're not aware that the actual expansion is turning their head and that changes the eye relative to the string ever so slightly enough to actually change that rear sight alignment which makes a massive difference on the target downrange. To give you an idea, at 70 meters, the Olympic distance, to hit the target every single time you have a quarter inch of error. That's plus or minus an eighth of an inch right or left. Now to actually hit the 10 ring repeatedly at that distance, the margin for error is a fine ball in a ballpoint pen. That's how small and how precise you have to be when you're aligning your sight, not just the rear sight and the front sight, but also relative to the target itself. And so that's why the tiniest little difference back here makes a very big difference on the target downrange because your margin for error is actually really, really tiny. And so these tiny little details of, is my string staying stable and still when I'm executing the shot? If it's not, you have to figure out how to keep that string alignment the same when you pull through the clicker. The same thing actually applies to compound. If you've ever shot one of those and you have a peep sight, that round thing that sits in front of your eyeball, it's very easy to let it drift one direction as you're actually executing the shot, pulling through the actual shot, squeezing the trigger or whatever you may want to call it. And that is your rear sight, the peep sight. We don't have that here on single string archery. We just have the blur of the string. And that's why we use string alignment and put it in the same place relative to our bow, relative to our sight or relative to our arrow, depending on the style of bow you're shooting. I promise you, if you pay attention to this and if you make sure it's in the same place every single time and it's not moving when you're shooting archery, you're going to shoot tighter groups, higher scores, and you'll have a lot more fun when you're outside shooting your bow. 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