Focus on GRIP position FIRST! | How to grip a bow PROPERLY | Shoot a bow like a pro!

Hi, I'm Nate with Average Jack Archie Pro Shopping Range here in Phillipsburg, PA. And today I want to talk about bow grip position because yours might not be what it's supposed to be. So being a full Pro Shopping Range, one of the questions, phone calls I get like daily, Hey, do you tune bows? Do you paper tune? Do all that sort of stuff. And I'm like, absolutely. Of course we do that. Check your bows in time. Make sure everything's set up, the draw length's right, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera for you. And then like, okay, let's go put it through paper. And then what I usually do is I usually take the bow regardless of draw length and poundage. And I usually shoot it through paper just to kind of see where the bow sits because I trust my grip and knowing how much I've worked on bows for gosh, 16 years now. Uh, and you know, how many people are helping the shop? And then I hand the bow to them. And usually I would say eight times out of 10, it is not the same tear. And for a right-handed archer, it's usually a knock left tear. And I want to talk about all those different things and reason why I know that's coming down the pipe when it comes to your grip position. Let's get something out of the way first. I'm a right-handed archer. I use my left hand. Yes, I have psoriasis in my nails and skin all over my left hand. It really sucks. I don't get to feel a lot. My skin peels all the time. My nails are weird colors. I get it. You can leave a comment down below if you want to about it, but it doesn't affect me at all. Uh, let's talk about grip position as it pertains to the three different types of things in particular, uh, three different types of things that I often see in the shop. One of them is I shoot with an open hand. Uh, one of them is they choke it to death. And one of them is because of these, one of these two things, their draw length is the wrong length or often to the wrist is in a wrong position in relationship to their hand. So let's start with the one that I see the most common, which is I shoot with an open hand. So the width and open hand thing has been passed down for generations. And most of the time it's because older bows, not like this lead ethos, right? This is a 2024 and realistically anything about 2015 and newer is going to be built a little bit more like this. The grip is definitely thinner a lot of times it's machined right off the riser, even though Matthew's using engaged grip, it's still very thin, still one profile, right? It's rounded on the back, but the same premise here, right? Because of the old wooden style grips we had in the old Matthews and the Martins and the Dartons and everything, a lot of people were able to get away with shooting with an open hand, meaning that because they could just do this, the grip was so chunky. There wasn't a whole lot of way to add extra torque to it. But when you have a thin grip like this, it's very unnatural to open your hand. And actually, quite frankly, it's very unnatural to open your hand. Anyway, when you take your hand and you just hold it out in front of you, stretch it out, right? Do it right now. You're sitting on the toilet, probably watching this or at your computer at home, go open your hand up like this and just let it relax, right? Your hand at no point actually sits like this. You put your hand down on the table. It's just going to relax. Put your hand like this. It's just going to relax. It's not actually ever at any point going to sit like this. The moment you start adding anything to your bow hand or even to your release hand for that matter, that's a whole different discussion. And you start adding to this, that is not sending the bow that direction. You are pointing your hand in that direction. I'm not talking to your fingers. I'm talking to your hand. Okay. The palm, the actual part that makes contact with the bow. Soon as you start doing that, you're actually adding different tension in your forearm, particularly on the outside of your forearm. As soon as you start adding the parts on the outside of your forearm, you're going to start having weird left, right misses, and definitely some weird tuning issues, right? This is super simple, right? Your hand's nice and relaxed. Everything's relaxed in here. As soon as you open up, right, you can see all these muscles on the outside of your forearm. This muscle right here, significantly stronger. Okay. To allow you to torque up into things than these muscles right here. Okay. So these guys right here are fine motor muscles. This is what you do. You're tapping on your keyboard. This is what you do. You're tapping on your phone and everything else, right? This is how we do the simple dexterity things. This guy is meant for gross motor. All right. And anytime that I can make a bow shooting habit, a bow shooting skill into a gross motor skill, instead of a fine motor skill, it makes the accuracy and the tuning down range a heck of a lot easier. Now we're not talking specifically about releases today, but the exact same thing plays here. As soon as you turn a release into one digit, right? Just that one tendon on the back of the forearm. Now it's a fine motor skill. Archery is not a fine motor skill sport. It's a gross motor. All these muscles here in the shoulder and the back, all of them that they come into the arm. It's not just one individual. So as soon as you get into that punch mode, right, you've got your thumb, you get your thumb. Okay. Now it becomes a target panic situation and now it becomes something that's a fine motor skill. So with a handheld style release or even an index style release, I try to work with people that you get yourself deep on the trigger for your thumb. That's way down in here, not out of the tip. It's way down in here or somewhere in between that first groove of your thumb back into the meat there. And then it's like you're squeezing the lemon, right? The whole hand's going to squeeze together. So I'll do it a little bit on the exaggerated side, but I'm going to start squeezing and squeezing the whole hand, squeezing together. And that makes the whole hand into a gross motor skill. Okay. It's something more than just one individual digit doing something. Same thing's true of an index style release. I say the big Raven claw, right? The Raven's going to come over and that notice that does to your wrist. Now it's become a gross motor skill. Instead of just dealing with these individual fingers, these fingers, again, just like your bow hand should not be like this. This is tension. All of this is extra tension. You do not need, right? You should never be shooting a bow like this. Never should be shooting a bow like this. It should just be nice and relaxed. And then the whole hand's going to squeeze together on that index style release. When you start doing that, you can then focus on your pin float and working through that instead of focusing on pin on target, bam, got to punch that thing and get it to where I want it to hit. All right, release away. Let's talk about grip again. So when it comes to that open hand problem, I see so many guys, so many guys come into my shop and they've been taught to shoot with an open hand, whether that's in pass down generationally, or that's just what they've always, always done. As soon as you add that open hand. So here I am with my normal grip. Okay. As soon as you go with the open hand. Okay. Most of the time it's like this. What you've now done is you've actually brought this bottom pad and I'll even bring it over a little more exaggerated. You brought the bottom pad of your bow hand onto the grip. Okay. I call it pad peeking. Okay. That part of the pad peeks onto the grip. As soon as you start adding pressure onto the near side of the grip lefty or righty, it doesn't matter. As soon as you start adding pressure onto this side of the grip, extra pressure, you're torquing the bow this way. Okay. String still stays the same though because it's connected to your face. So as soon as you start doing things like this, the string is going to oscillate around and it's going to throw a knock left hair a hundred times out of a hundred. I see it every single day, every single day. They come to full draw or even they've even got it. They've got it kind of choked a little bit. They've got that extra pad on there and then they're like, bam, I'm going to open my hand. It didn't matter because you've already started with that pad on because you were gripping the bow to start. Okay. Pad peeking. Don't do this. This is bad. So I really have to focus on getting people to push this pad off. Right. And it goes in between. I'll grip the bow real hard here. So you can see exactly what I'm talking about. And I let go. See that white line that's in between my palms right there. It's in between. Now it's not totally on the thumb. That's totally on the thumb right there. Okay. It's not totally on the thumb. It's in between the pads, but that pad is not peeking over onto the grip. As soon as you do that open hand, I'm going to shoot with an open hand. You've had to grip the bow first cause you can't grip it with an open hand like this. No one draws a bow like this. And if they do, it's a little bit strange. Most of the time they're doing something to contain it. Don't do that. Take that pad off and just push the bow. Right. I don't have to grip the bow at all. I can just push into my, into my wrist, make it again, make it a gross motor skill. Okay. I'm pushing that right in between the two pads. It's going right into my wrist bones, right into my elbow, right into my shoulder and so on and so forth. Big muscles doing big things here instead of little muscles, trying to hold on to dear life to go along with it on these modern style bows. Sure I'm shooting with an open hand, but I got all that pad pressure. My wrist is very close to the cables and even more so. My forearm is way close, way too close to the string for comfort. Okay. Sure. In a t-shirt or a light shirt, you're probably missing it, but you're going to have to wear an arm guard. If you've got a heavy coat or you're going to whack your string off your sleeve, it's going to happen. Okay. So really focus on that pad peaking. That open hand is complete nonsense. Let's say they're not pad peaking. Let's say they're getting that thumb over there. Okay. And everything's doing all right. You can still have your pad off, but still grip the bow incorrectly. Okay. Your fingers at no point need to be here now. Sure. I'm sure somebody in the comments is going to denote some sort of highly established archer. Tony Taz would be one. For example, he gets a lot of finger around the riser. Tony Taz has been shooting a bow longer than I've been alive and has won more medals than probably I have years on this planet. When it comes to shooting archery professionally, none of us are at his level. Okay. If you're watching this video, it's a very good chance you're at my level, right? You're in the amateur world. Okay. So we have to do everything we can to give ourselves the most success as possible. This mosquito, the little guy has an absolute death wish, but at any rate, let's talk about gripping the bow a little bit wrong. So now instead of the extra pad pressure, now it comes to you. All right, so here we go. We got the thumb, but now the fingers have come way around. Again, look what I'm doing to the bow. As soon as I grip, where does it go? It cocks in, it brings that string away and it brings the arrow tip towards me. This is again going to throw a knock left tear for a right-handed archer, the opposite for a lefty. I see this every single day and it's minuscule. I mean, we're talking just the absolute smallest amounts of movement and it's not repeatable. Okay. This is the biggest deal. Guys like Tony and other people that have that kind of grip on their bow have figured out a way to make it repeatable and have done it for 30 years. Okay. The vast majority of bow hunters, myself included, do not have the ability to add the exact same amount of pressure in every single situation. It's great when you're out here shooting the backyard, you can do it great. Now it's 20 degrees outside. The snow is blowing sideways. He's standing there a nice eight point at 20 yards and you grip your bow wrong and you send it into his guts. You thought your pin was right behind, but now you're shaking. Now you're stiff. Everything's wrong. You have to have something that doesn't have grip to it. Any actual squeezing pressure because you're not going to be able to repeat it. And the last piece of the puzzle is wrist position. I will link that video somewhere down around here and in the description below on terms of if your wrist is high, meaning your wrist is more in line with the webbing of your thumb. If it's kind of a mid wrist or if it's a low risk grip, if you come from an older bow that had the big swelled out grip or the wooden grips like on the old Matthews, this might seem a little bit weird, might seem a little bit foreign, but I see it all the time. Guys are gripping bows like this. There's almost no pad pressure by the thumb whatsoever. Then they get a little bit down and then there's way down, which is where I like to shoot with a low risk grip. Now, unlike grip pressure, wrist position is very repeatable. However, if you're going to shoot a modern bow again, 2015 and newer, they're mostly set up for a low or a very low mid wristing grip. Very few bows today have a very high risk to grip outside of like your recurve and traditional bows. And you can see that if you watch the Olympic recurve archers, the wrist is very in line with the webbing of their thumb was compound archers. It's much, much lower. And I think of this across the board. This isn't just professional archers. This is most people are going to be shooting with a mid or low risk grip. So I'll kind of try to demonstrate that as best I can. A lot of the grip risk positions come from usually a drawing that was too long or too short. So if you do this, notice it extends the drawing out. So if you came from a bow that was too long for you, you might've done this to compensate, slow down the risk risks all the way down, right? It's a, it's an incremental change, but if I keep my elbow at the same distance, notice how much that changes the drawing. Okay? So if you came from a bow that was handy down, right? And it was too long, you might've gotten used to doing something like that. Or if the bow was too short, you had a really low risk grip and you were really scrunched up to get there. Any of them is acceptable. I would strongly recommend not having a high risk grip. And the reason being is once you get into that high risk grip, now you have little to no actual control on the bow because now your fingers over here are way off. And if you shoot, you will drop it. Okay? That's a lot of the case. You'll end up dropping it. And most guys I see that use a high risk grip like that are using a wrist sling because if they do draw the bow or they have dropped the bow in the past, they want that wrist sling there to catch it. Uh, very rarely am I dropping my bow are most people dropping their bow. If they shoot a mid or low risk grip, because their fingers are actually able to have contact up here, not gripping, but contact. So what I do in the shop when someone's working with right at the end of the bench, I have a target there. People can try out bows and I work with people at like six feet of distance. They can't miss the target. I work with them on their grip. For me, I tell them it's not like gripping a baseball bat, golf club, tennis rack, we're all used to doing that. We stack our hands on top of each other and our knuckles are parallel to the shaft of the band, the golf club or whatever it may be. Right. But a bow is different. A bow is like giving a high five. No one gives a high five like this, right? We all give a high five like this. And if you give a high five like this, then you close your hand. Notice the angle of the knuckles. Okay? So here's that baseball bat grip, tennis racket, grip, et cetera. Here's the high five. And we close the hand. The knuckles are now at an angle towards the riser or on the thumb pad. We're just in between the pads here on the leading edge, the inside edge of the grip closest to the archer. And then there's actually air. There's tons of air in here. And that keeps us from gripping the bow and adding that pressure on the outside keeps us from getting that pad on there and causing that pressure again to the outside. It causes all kinds of issues if you don't have some sort of relaxing pressure in here. Remember your hand sits relaxed, let it sit relaxed. Now, sure. It can touch a little bit. It can squeeze a little bit, but you're not doing this. You're just having a little bit of pressure there so that when the bow shoots, your hand can grab it naturally. If your hand's way out here, and you shoot the bow, now you've got to have this big jolting catch and you will train your brain. I am shooting now catch the bow. That's target panic. 1000% of the time I'm here, catch the bow. That is target panic. You are triggering your brain to set the release off and grab the bow. So it doesn't fall. So you don't hit the wrist strap or whatever else it may be. We don't want that. We don't want anything that involves us doing anything. But as soon as that shot breaks, the bow goes forward in some way, shape or fashion. Our hand flies back. It's like we were pulling a giant rubber band and it snapped right in the middle and the ends fly in both directions. Now a tertiary issue when it comes to this in terms of how you grip the bow is also how people are taught to draw the boat. So the grip of the bow is your only point of contact. So if it's not right and it's not consistent and it's not clean and repeatable and just becomes autonomous to you, that's something you have to think about. Then everything else falls into place. So for example, when it comes to drawing the bow, let's say I have all that extra pad pressure, right? I'm peaking. Okay. And I know when I get the full draw, I'm going to open my hand. Now I'm gripping the bow hard. Okay. Now instead of focusing on all my muscles back here, I'm focusing on the bow not falling out of my hand. When I do that, in particular, the higher poundage bow, a lot of times you're adding force away from you, which means you're trying to pull towards you with a string and the bow is trying to be forced away from you and you will derail the bow. I see it all the time. I see it all the time. I see people when they hit full let off and they shoot, they're torquing the bow so hard that the string actually doesn't catch in the cam group and it rolls off and wraps around the module and the axle. See it all the time. Okay. Uh, it's just, it's just one of those things where having the proper grip is not just about actually shooting. It's just as much about the whole shot process from beginning to end. That's all for this on grip pressure and tuning. If I was in the shop, I'd show you a couple shots through paper and how it really affects that. I strongly recommend you do that yourself. Instead of being like, I'm going to take another arrow and put 3000 grains up front and shoot it through paper to see if that's what the bow needs to shoot. My gosh, you'd be very surprised how like 99% of tuning in particular with a bell curve style arrow. This is an arrow I should be shooting. I follow gold tip spine chart, 125 grain point, 70 pounds, 31 inch draw. I should be shooting a 300 spine all day long and it tunes out beautifully. I get great groups and I get great flight. Strongly recommend you try something like that. 90% of people's problems can be resolved with the human first. It's not the arrow. It's not the bow. 90% of problems start with the human first and that last 10% is usually the bow. The arrow, unless you are massively over spined or under spine is usually the last thing you need to worry about. So I'm done flopping my gums on the topic. But if I left you with questions, you feel like I need to follow up video or anything else on grip pressure and how I use it to tune and make sure that I am shooting exactly the way I need to be. Please do leave a comment down below. You can find me in the description on Facebook and Instagram. Average Jack Archery, send me an email, averagejackarchery at gmail.com. Or if you want, you're in the central Pennsylvania area and you need a new bow shop home. You can always find us Average Jack Archery at 21 North front street in Phillipsburg, PA. Hope you get outside and enjoy archery, archery hunting. If you so choose, definitely enjoy God's absolutely beautiful creation and stay safe this season and we'll get to see you next time.