How to raise your bow... WITHOUT messing up your shoulder position!

So coming kind of close guys around Will, I just want to talk front shoulders for a bit. So one of the things that I noticed across the weekend, obviously we're shooting the tournament over the weekend, was that a lot of the mistakes were coming from weak front shoulders. So what I want to do now is run you through the process on how to set properly the front shoulder in the most stable and consistent position. Now the first thing you need to understand about shoulders is that shoulders are actually the most articulate joint in the body and not only that does it move in all planes of motion, there's actually two points of articulation in your shoulder. So if you think about it for a second and put your arm out, the shoulder can move this way, this way, this way, this way and it can also rotate like this but that's the movement within the glenohumeral joint. But you also have a second point of articulation here which is the shoulder girdle and that's this movement range, isn't it? So because it has a lot of mobility, through archery we're actually trying to achieve mobility, we're trying to achieve stability. So the position of the front shoulder is very, very important. Does that make sense? So when we're setting the front shoulder there's a couple of important things. First of all, there's a principle called tension bias. Does anyone understand this? Know what it is? Sort of? Heard it before? That's all right. So tension bias is the principle where once a muscle is under tension, it's impossible to relax it whilst it's still under load. Now that makes sense if you think about if you're doing a bicep curl, right? Then once you've engaged the bicep, as long as there's load you can't then relax the muscle and it's the same principle throughout the shot process. For example, if throughout drawing the bow you engage the bicep, you know, you can't pull back the full draw and now relax it, right? It's already ruined your release and that sort of thing. Same principle with the front shoulder. If you over engage the deltoids and the trapezius and the muscles in the shoulder, then while you're raising the bow, then you can no longer relax and set the front shoulder to its optimal position, can you? So what we have to do is we have to raise and set the shoulder in a way which doesn't over engage the muscles on the front side shoulder. So how do we do this? Okay, there's a bit of a trick and we use magic. It's not really magic, it's physics. Basically, we do three things. First of all, you set your stance, you set your posture, you've done your setup position, hooks on the string, pressure points into the grip and you've set your head position looking at the target. From here in the setup position, we already have a little bit of tension on the string, don't we? Now this is actually a critical part of the shot process. If you have no tension on the string, you have to, it's all just, it's basically like a lateral raise. All you're doing is lifting the bow with your deltoids. Am I right? Of course I'm right. So the next thing, you need tension on the string. That tension helps you raise the bow as well. Okay, now it's very important we're not actually pulling in the bow from down here because if you have too much tension, the line of force as you draw the bow is actually pushing the shoulder up and then again, it encourages this sort of distortion of the posture and the front shoulder and you'll never get it right again. So you're applying a little bit of tension to the string, just one or two inches, enough to set the hook onto the string and take a little bit of weight from the bow but we're not drawing the bow from down here, okay? So tension on the string. Next, the action we do to raise the bow without actually engaging the muscles is to, the first action is to pull the shoulder down, okay? This is using primarily the serratus anterior and subscapularis, okay? Pulling the shoulder down and the second motion is we're not, don't think about lifting the bow up with your hand, think about extending the pressure point towards the target, that direction. So shoulder down, bow moving forward towards the target whilst maintaining tension on the string and you'll be amazed the bow just kind of will levitate by itself. Very little energy required in the front shoulder. Make sense? We also raise to the point where we raise above the target up to about where both hands are at eye level and this is also very important because when we draw from this position, when we've raised the shoulder above, about horizontal, as we draw the bow the line of force is actually assisting us by pushing that front shoulder down. It's the opposite effect. So when you draw from down here it's pushing the front shoulder up, when you draw from up here it's assisting you to set that front shoulder down. With me so far? Now there's another clue with the front shoulder and that is the hard work's not done yet, it's not a set and forget, it's set and maintain. So let's run through those steps again. Stance, posture, set up, tension on the string, set the head position looking at the target, we're pulling the shoulder down maintaining tension on the string and pushing the pressure point towards the target, the bow will raise up to about eye level, we're pulling the shoulder down, this is where we internally rotate and we come from there into our pre-draw position but through the rest of the shot process, through the loading, anchor, expansion, release and follow through, you need to maintain that tension of pulling the shoulder down. If you start to relax that as you go through the shot process, the shoulder will lose position and you'll start to fatigue through the shot and get a lot of forearm collapsing in like this and you'll start to get your arrows trailing down to the low right hand side of the target. Okay, any questions? Let's give it a go.