4 Form Fixes from 30 Days of Relearning Archery

Ask yourself this question, are you over aiming or are you executing? Because if you are trying to hold steady, especially when you're trying to shoot a really good shot in a tournament or whatever else, if you're trying to aim harder, chances are you're not executing as smoothly, you're probably holding worse. 30 shooting sessions ago, I picked up a bow with my left hand for the first time in my life. I've been shooting right-handed for over 20 years and I did not want to switch. I had to. I have a neurological condition called task specific dystonia. It causes my head to shake uncontrollably at full draw and it's getting worse. The only way to keep hunting, to keep doing the thing I've built my life around, was to start completely over. This is day 30 and what I've been able to learn over these last 30 days of shooting, I couldn't have learned any other way. I'm completely in a weird spot where I know what to do, but getting that same feeling and having the physical ability to do it, are two completely different things. The first one that I wanted to share is bow grip. Not grip as it relates to not torquing the bow, but actually your position that your hand is in the grip to maximize your stability with your aim. I feel like one of my concerns when I first switched to left-handed is I was thinking about like being worried hitting my arm, like not having my shoulders and stuff in quite the right position yet. I was worried that if I have my hand too far in, I could worry about hitting my arm here. And so what I was doing is I was putting it really far out on the fat part of my thumb, which is okay. And a lot of archers do shoot really good that way. But what I realized was because it was further out on my hand, it created more tension, if you will, in the muscles of my forearm and in my arm, which just created some instability with my aim and with my shot. So what I did was I experimented with just setting my hand a little bit deeper in the grip and not crazy deep in the grip, still on the lifeline of my hand or by the lifeline of my hand, but just so more of my hand was actually in the grip and it came down more on the base of my hand like that. And doing that gave me more bone-to-bone contact. And the second I switched over to that and tried it, it instantly took my pin movement that seemed to be going all over the place and kind of brought it in so much closer to the target. The next thing that I feel like was making a big difference for me is I just kind of drew straight back and just pulled straight into anchor and tried to settle in. And I noticed that that was hard to repeat. It was hard to get the same settings with my draw shoulder and with my bow shoulder here. It seemed like I'd been in a different position or I'd get a different feeling every time I drew back. And it quite literally wasn't until day 17 of shooting that I realized what was I doing different shooting right-handed that I'm not doing left-handed. And I shot my right-handed bow and I realized, oh, I am not setting my shoulders with my draw. And this is something that, again, I just kind of took for granted because I've done it for so long shooting right-handed. What I mean by setting shoulders, when I would shoot right-handed, I'd just raise my bow up, draw back, settle into my anchor like this. If you noticed that versus shooting left-handed, I would just draw back, pull right to my anchor. And so my shoulders are in a weird position. So instead, I almost started to over-exaggerate it just to get the feeling down. But it's raising the bow and your release hand up above your shoulders or above your line of sight where you're aiming. Your shoulders kind of shrug up. You draw back. Your release hand is above where you're going to anchor. And you almost set your shoulders into position as you come into anchor. And when you do that, it sets your shoulders at the right level and it can help stabilize your pin so much. I remember the first time I did this, it was super windy. I was shooting back out on the back deck of the house. And I drew back, set my shoulders, aim, and it went the pin from moving slowly kind of all over the target to just like right over the bullseye. And I'm like, oh my gosh, like I've got this master. Now I've got it figured out. Like I know what it feels like. And I was able to know what it feels like because I carried it over from how I knew how to do it from shooting right-handed. So that's something that you guys shooting, if you're not drawing back and setting your shoulders, that doesn't mean you have to sky draw. It just means having your bow slightly above the target, your hand slightly above the line of where you're going to shoot, draw back to that position, set your shoulders in position like that instead of just drawing straight back and trying to strong hold it in there. That can make a significant difference with your overall hold. The pin dipping low was a big problem and it's still something I faced just from a strength standpoint. But what fixed that for me and what kept that pin from wanting to dip down was not only pressure on the back end here, but having a strong front arm of pushing that bow forward. And I'm not talking like pushing extremely hard forward. It's just a solid constant push forward instead of letting that arm kind of like slide back or just being too relaxed. Like that's where that pin wants to leak pressure and that pin wants to dip out of the target or even just dip off of the target in general. So having a stiff front arm definitely seemed to help me with that. When I shot right-handed, I never thought when I was shooting that I was pushing and pulling. I just felt like I was solid and I was just pulling against it. But shooting left-handed, it really made it bring me to my attention because I really brought it to my attention because I could feel like, oh, this is what's happening. My right hand or my right shoulder is creeping back. My arm is wanting to settle back because that strength's not there. So thinking instead like, okay, now I'm expanding. I'm tearing that bow apart. I'm pushing the bow straight towards the target. I'm pulling it straight apart here. That made a big difference for stability. Perhaps the biggest lesson that I learned shooting over the last 30 days shooting left-handed was I was trying to force myself to hold steady. And maybe this is something I didn't face shooting right-handed because even with the shake, the pin overall was relatively steady on what I was aiming at. But shooting left-handed, I mean, when I first started, my pin was probably moving six to eight inches at 20 yards. That was probably the float pattern of my pin just because I was very unstable shooting. I hadn't shot left-handed ever before. And so with that, it made me as an archer want to try to force that pin to hold steady over the bullseye. And it seemed like the more I shot, the steadier I was getting, but the harder I tried to force that pin over the bullseye, the worse the hold would be. Now I'm trying to force that pin over what I want to hit and it's making it move more. So again, I got back to kind of what it felt like shooting right-handed. And I've really focused on this a lot, especially towards the last 10 days or so of shooting left-handed, but focusing more on the execution was actually key for me. It was forget about what was happening with the pin, forget about trying to push it onto the middle, keep a stiff front arm and a smooth executing arm. And as long as I'm just building pressure smoothly and slowly, it took that pin from moving like this to all of a sudden sitting very still over the bullseye. And it's not sitting on the X, but it's sitting in a three to four inch circle at 20 yards, which is a significant improvement for me over the last 30 days of shooting. That affects absolutely every archer that shoots. Ask yourself this question, are you over aiming or are you executing? Because if you are trying to hold steady, especially when you're trying to shoot a really good shot in a tournament or whatever else, if you're trying to aim harder, chances are you're not executing as smoothly, you're probably holding worse. So if you reverse that and just know what you want to hit, look at what you want to hit, and then you focus on smooth executing, that can be a huge advantage for you. The only other thing that I want to share with you, this is kind of a struggle and a learning experience for me. I am very strong right eye dominant, extremely strong right eye dominant. So shooting right-handed was very beneficial. I could shoot both eyes open, low light scenarios and seeing what I wanted to hit was no problem whatsoever. Shooting left-handed, I have to close my right eye. Thankfully I can close my right eye without straining my face, but it's cutting off half of my vision and I have a hard time seeing what it is what I want to shoot at and what I want to hit. And as an archer, we can only really shoot as good as we can see. So it's crazy that I've only shot for 30 days and I feel like I've picked up all this knowledge and all these different things I've relearned because I've learned this well over 10 years ago when I was first starting shooting, but now it's just like brought back to light through shooting left-handed. So I think now what we should do is I just want to show you guys where I'm at shooting-wise. We'll start at 20 yards, we'll shoot three arrows and we'll go 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 and I'll show you the groups that I'm shooting. Some days it's good, some days it's not so good. I have not shot yet today so I have no fatigue so we'll see how they look. All right, first up 20 yards. Feels a bit weird still to use a rangefinder left-handed and then use my left my right eye because I can see so much better right eye dominant. All right, this will be my 20 yard group. See if we can get them all on this paper plate here. All right, let's go take a look. It's my three-arrow 20 yard group. We'll back her up to 30 and try it again. All right, let's check them out. Shoot, that group's better than my 20 I think. That's the thing is it seems like some days and sometimes I'm shooting really, really, really good and then other days it's kind of like man, I feel like I've never shot a left-handed bow before, but I suppose that comes with only shooting for 30 days. Okay, 40 yards. Give her a rip. Two for two. All right, 40 yards. Got them all on the plate. That was surprising. Usually don't shoot quite that good. I usually shoot five or six arrows at a time so if I shot three ends in a row like that I would already be getting tired and I've already shot only, what, nine arrows and I can already feel myself starting to get a little bit fatigued. So it helps to just break out the shooting sessions and, you know, make sure you're practicing only good shots. That's when you start practicing bad shots. That's when you're practicing your weaknesses. We don't want that. We only want to get better. Spot on. Oops, forgot. What's that? Forgot I'm left-handed. Cat's having playtime over there. Get him. Shoot her three shots at 50. Got him. Definitely feel myself getting a little fatigued. I think every one hit the plate. I would say I definitely have not been always shooting this good. This is, what I would say, pretty exceptional for me shooting left-handed. Some days the groups look like this at 50 yards and other days they might look more like this big. So this is building my confidence up for sure though. Definitely on the right path. Do one final go here at 60. Do I look weird ranging left-handed with my right eye? You do. That feels weird. 60 yards right there. All right. You know I haven't really been practicing far much at all. I've tried to practice my shots close because with the increased pin movement I don't want to practice any bad habits. I'd rather practice having my pin float over more of the middle and execute rather than step back too far aiming at a small target and seeing that movement and struggling to to fire and practicing bad shots. But we'll give it a go here just to see what this looks like 60 yards. Well I don't think that hit the plate but the shot felt good. There we go. Got that one. There we go. We got her. That was my 60 yard group. You know honestly when I first picked this up 30 days ago I'd have a really hard time even putting one arrow into this target at 60 yards let alone getting a couple of them that looks like it hit the plate here. This is nowhere near where I want to be yet. Not even close to where I want to get to but it's definitely better than yesterday. It's better than where it was when I first started 30 days ago and that's a pretty good 60 yard group for shooting for 30 days. So there's a lot of things that have transferred over from shooting right-handed to left-handed just the knowledge and what it should feel like. So I'm coming in not entirely blind but it gives me a very unique scenario here. So hopefully you guys following along with this can maybe pick up on some of the things that I've been struggling with apply it to your own shooting. Just know that if you're struggling with anything if it's this dystonia like I'm facing if it's target panic if it's just anxiety in your shot holding steady execution whatever it might be I'm determined to work through this to figure it out because I want to help you. If you have any questions or just anything at all about this entire process just please comment it below. Just know that I'm listening and I'd love to hear what you have to say.