Stop Holding Low! (TToTW #105)

Hey everybody, Robert with RC Archery. You're watching Tuesday's tip of the week number 105. In this week's episode, we're going to go over some tips to help you keep from either holding low on target, kind of getting locked in on that low below the center hold, or bobbing up and down and creating some problems there. There's a couple different areas that we're going to look at. We'll get into those very soon. If you're watching this when it comes out, happy Thanksgiving. This will be a few days before Thanksgiving, but hopefully everybody has a good holiday and enjoys it. If you're watching it after, hope you had a good holiday. If you are a member of this channel and you are in the package that allows you to be able to get some coaching services from me, new thing that I'm starting on the channel, I'm going to be doing some live feeds. I found out that I can actually bring people in on those live feeds, so I can do a live in-person coaching. It can be kind of fun to do these and have you not tell me what's going on ahead of time and just join these together. Whoever it is that week or whatever's going on, bring you in and just do a live session so we can brainstorm. You can see kind of my process, things that I'm talking about, what I like to look at, so it'll help everybody. If you're not a member of the channel and you would like to be, there is some information below in the description of this video that will give you the different packages that I offer, what you get for each one, and how they work to help support this channel. Also, if you just want some coaching, there's a lot of packages that I have, just simply looking at your form, giving you an evaluation, all the way into a full-blown doing everything, going through my entire process. I like to build off of natural points of aim, and I have a systematic approach to what I'm doing where each step kind of builds on the other, and it also points out what needs to be fixed in that individual from one step to the next. With all that being said, let's get right into the video today. All right, first thing that I want to talk through today is something that I see pretty common in a lot of archers, and it's simply the way that we're anchoring with what we're using on our hand against our face. A lot of people don't think about this, but the way that they're doing this, you could be creating a problem for yourself. If you're using these base knuckles in this slot in between these two knuckles as your point of contact on your jawbone, it's actually going to be causing two problems on most people. One of them is just usually to do this, your loop link has to be really short and it causes you to create an imbalance for leverage and some problems there. What we're going to be going over today though is the angle at which it puts your hand in a pulling force. As you can see here, if I'm using these base knuckles on my palm or on the back of my hand here, and I'm trying to get anchored in, it's actually bending my wrist and causing me to be pulling upwards on my release. By doing that, I'm actually pulling the back of the bow directly up. That's going to cause you to lock yourself low on target, or it could cause you some bobs if you're trying to fix and work with that back and forth. Now, the solution to this is pretty simple. What we're going to want to do is actually use this row of knuckles to be able to anchor on our face. This does a couple things for us. One, it allows us generally to get the length of loop that most people are going to need in order to get our rear shoulder to relax and settle into place at full draw. It will also give us the ability to be able to get a straight line through this wrist area and not have our elbow and wrist being in a weird position so that we're then pulling up on the release. You can see here, the other thing too is just the force that I'm using through my release. If I have my hand flat, it's pulling a straight line through this release in my wrist, but then if I go to use the back of my hand and put it on my face, you can see then it bends my wrist. Now, as I'm pulling in a straight line backwards, it's creating the problems. What we want to do is be able to hold our hand like this and allow us to get these two knuckles on our jaw and be able to pull through our shot that way. Now, this one tip generally helps most everybody right away. It makes it a lot simpler for you to be able to shoot. It makes it a lot better for your float. You'll actually be a lot steadier on target because you're taking a bend out of a joint, but it also may cause you to need to redo some stabilizer weightings, some different things like that. Keep that in mind after you do this adjustment. You're probably going to have to adjust a little bit on the bow and make it refit you, but in the long run, this will help you a ton. All right, the second thing we're going to talk about is actually how we're loading our back and what we're doing with our release arm's elbow when we get into full draw and anchor. I don't see this as common, but I do see this with some archers and there's some different reasons this is happening. Your elbow on your release arm can be too high generally if you have too short of a loop length, but another reason it can be too high is people thinking that they need to reach and wrench their elbow back behind them and really load their back and really try to do this. You can see that if I'm here and I go to pull my arm back and get my shoulder to try to relax and drop into place and get everything loaded, if I'm too short on my loop length and I start doing this, my arm really has nowhere to go except to try to take over and bring the elbow up. If I'm bringing that rear elbow too high, it's actually creating that same problem that we looked at before with the bend in our release wrist, on our release hand rather, because that pulling point is then being pulled vertically. So when we're getting into full draw, we actually don't want to be waiting until anchor to try to load the back muscles. This is a common problem that I do see with people because they've heard they need to hold with their back, they need to use back tension to shoot, they need to do all these things, but they're actually drawing the bow incorrectly and that's what's leading to the problem most times. The other set is having a short loop length, which even if you do draw the bow correctly, if your loop length is too short, when you get to anchor, you're not going to be able to get the shoulder and the scapula moved around far enough and you're going to have to start trying to manipulate the body and that's when I see people start raising their elbow up, creating some problems. So you can see here with a good draw, what you want to see and feel is that the back is engaged as you start to pull the bow back. You don't want to wait and pull everything back with your arm, your shoulder, bicep, all of that and then try to load the back at full draw. You want to be able to start the draw with the back and what you do there is having the elbow and the release hand high enough up to actually start using and utilizing those muscles. If you see an archer that wants to draw their bow back and they're over bow and the draw weight is too heavy, they have bad form, maybe they just don't know what they're doing because they haven't ever been taught, a lot of people will start with their bow up here and their release and they'll start wrenching it down and pulling it down here and then they want to get everything into full draw and then they feel like they have to load their back and do everything. Well, you're not loading your back at that point to utilize the larger muscles, you're impinging your shoulder joint and you're just shoving everything into it and it's just creating a system of problems there. So, if you're not able to draw the bow back in a good solid motion here and you feel like you have to really wrench down and use your bicep and get into it and do all that, change your draw weight. It's okay, build the muscles up, build the draw weight up with the muscles. I'll do a complete other video in the future on how I can draw the bow back as smoothly as I do and make it look as easy as I do whether I'm drawing a 56 pound target bow or 70 pound hunting bow. I do the same thing and it's literally just allowing my body as a fulcrum and a mechanism to work for me along with the weight of the bow and the way that I'm drawing it back. So, we'll get into that in the future. Alright everybody, thank you for watching this video. Hopefully, these two tips help you out with maybe some issues you're having with your hold on target and get you a direction to go to be able to work through it. If you're interested in contacting me for coaching, joining the channel, having questions, wanting to support any of this, my information is down below. I'll be glad to talk to you and help you out as much as I can. Hope you have a good day. I'll see you soon.