How to Improve Your Shoulder Alignment - Recurve Archery Technique

So, rotating your upper body into line to get your alignment. This is something I've been meaning to make a video on for a long time and a really key part of getting into good shoulder alignment. To start with, here's an overhead video of good shoulder alignment and you can clearly see from the set position here, you can clearly see the shoulders being open to the target and then as I then raise and come into line at setup, you can see the shoulders rotating. From overhead, it just looks like the shoulders are moving but in reality, what's happening is the upper body is rotating which brings the shoulders into line. This is what I want to talk about today because often there's a lot of things here that maybe people can't quite coordinate or they can't get which means that they either can't get into line or if they do get into line, they compromise something else. So, let's start with what we want. Ideally, what we want, if I show you with the band, is we want to come up, we want to raise up and we want to rotate into line. We want to bring the right, if you're a right-handed archer, the right-hand side, the draw side around and then that will also bring the bow shoulder, you can see here, the bow shoulder side closer in line to the string and when we watch from overhead, what ideally we want by the end is a straight line between the bow hand pressure point, bow shoulder and draw shoulder as you can see on this line here. So, in order to do that, what we want is we want you to raise up and then rotate from the stomach and the upper thoracic, rotate around to get that line but this is where it's really difficult for most people and if you're watching this, it's probably something that you want to improve on as well. So, the key thing here is to first learn the difference between rotating and twisting that into line versus arching the back and raising the chest up. This is the first common mistake. So, this is exacerbated, this is made worse by having a heavy bow or a heavy draw weight. So, what's really common to see is someone will come up, especially in a beginner, someone will come up and they'll try and get into line but they'll end up arching the back and raising the chest. So, with a band aiming into maybe a mirror or a delay camera, you can work on this by practicing coming up and twisting. So, twisting here without excessively raising. A great drill for this that I want to show you now is simply to stand like this, hands out to the side. So, both my hands are facing the camera, hands out to the side like this and then simply reach with your draw hand, keep your arm straight, reach to your other hand like this. And what I've done, you can't see but my hips are still in line here. So, I've just reached here and in order to reach like that, as you can see, I've really twisted my upper body. So, I've reached here and then now from this position, if I then just pretend to draw and twist the upper body, I don't know if you saw that but if I go from this position again where my stomach is twisted quite a lot and then I draw here, you can see that kind of rotation. This is the kind of rotation we want to go from there to rotate. Now, if I meld that in to the drawing and the raising, it would be coming up and then the same movement again, rotate and draw in and you can see there as the rotation is happening, crucially, there's not excessive raising up of the chest. So, this is really, really important. I want to show you from this angle now as well. Coming up, rotating around and then drawing through. That's the key bit there. So, it's really important when you're doing that to prevent the chest arching. The key thing there is to feel like you're just about to be punched in the stomach slightly. So, a slight tension in your stomach and feel like you're twisting from the stomach. The issue a lot of people have with not being able to get into line is they might do something like this. So, they might be in this position here. They'll come up and now they'll try and get the shoulders into line by just pushing the shoulders. But what they're just doing is they're trying to force the shoulder into line without rotating any of the upper body and any of the stomach effectively in the thoracic. So, they're just trying to keep the upper body in the same position and just push the shoulder into line and this is something that's not going to work from overhead. You might see a little bit of improved alignment but when we then turn around to the back you'll just see that rolling coming over which is not what we want. So, you want to practice that drill that I mentioned when you do this and also you want to practice with a band like I'm doing now in order to learn the difference between that rotating here and the arching of the back. If you find yourself arching your back too much still it's really important to just make sure that you check your back is flat here and just work without a bow, without a band at all first to check that you're not doing that because if you're not able to do it without a bow, without a band and you're trying to do it with your full weight bow it's not going to be possible. So, it's really, really key to do that. A brief interlude. If you're finding this video helpful you'll love my Patreon content and my online video courses. Every week I make a new video but the fourth video every time is exclusive to only my patrons. You can get access to these videos and loads more exclusive content on patreon.com forward slash online archery academy. As for the courses these are perfect if you want to take your archery to the next level with fully guided step-by-step video lessons. I made one course for beginners specifically and one for advanced archers specifically. They cover everything you need to know to finally master your technique properly. Go to courses.onlinearcheryacademy.com to learn more and use code YouTube for 10% off at checkout. Now when it comes to getting this line as well a common mistake I've seen a lot is someone will try, they'll come up and try and get this rotation and try and get better line but they do it just by trying to push the bow shoulder into line and you might have heard this before you know, oh you need to get your bow shoulder in line. So the result from that is that and they're just pushing their bow shoulder into line but the reality is even if I do exactly the right thing and I know the muscle memory for me how to get this alignment that I want I know that muscle memory if I only do that on this side on the bow shoulder side now so if I come up and I just do it on the bow shoulder side there I've got limited alignment. I'm not fully coming around with this side which actually is obviously half of the alignment so it's really key just because you're doing this rotation and just because you're doing the bow shoulder side and trying to get that early in the shot it doesn't mean that it's all from here because your bow shoulder line if we carefully watch this overhead video again here I'll play it back in like half speed but if you watch here the line of your bow shoulder is obviously just relative to where your draw shoulder is so by bringing the draw shoulder around and rotating your chest around your spine that will bring your draw shoulder around and then by default it will make your bow shoulder more into line without you feeling that you have to push it into line and then roll over like I mentioned before so that's a really key thing so if I do that in slow motion now you're coming up and then when you rotate I'm feeling like I'm opening the chest pivoting around here this is the pivot point I'm pivoting around here by twisting the body like this there and that is then bringing this right hand side if I just keep this here that's bringing this right hand side round it's bringing the bow shoulder closer to the string and crucially it's doing that whilst not arching the back so that's really key and that leads us on to the final point that I wanted to discuss today which is when you're doing this it's really important to remember that the pivot point is around here not just around the center of the spine so it can be really easy to feel like the pivot point when you're coming up is around the center of the spine and you're trying to like move the right hand side around this side of the spine obviously and then the left hand side feeling like you're bringing that in that's okay for some people it works to feel like the pivot point of that is the center of the spine but for most people it tends to be better to think of the pivot point as here because that's the point that you want to bring closer to the string so it feels like you're hinging around this shoulder joint coming up and hinging around here rather than hinging around the spine a very subtle difference there but it can make a really big impact in when you come up and rotate into line now before I wrap up I want to show you briefly from the back what it would look like if I am to arch my back when I'm doing that alignment so I'll turn around now and show you what you can see is when I come up in this position I can come up and rotate around come in here position is good if I then arch my back when I'm doing this so if I come up and arch my back I don't know if you can see there but what's effectively happened is I've lost the connection of my shoulder blades onto the back of the rib cage and I've lost any kind of power in the core I've lost any control of where the shoulders are I've just gone like that obviously with my back and that means that if I come up and arch the back now it's very hard for me to twist and rotate in this arched position so it's twofold not only by arching have you lost a little bit of ability to rotate around you've then made it even harder to do any of it so this is why it's really important to keep that straight keeping that core tension and making sure that you keep that as you raise that's crucial and then by doing that it allows you to rotate around and gives you that range of motion so that's really really important and I definitely encourage you to try and mirror with that as well so that's been kind of a brief overview I wanted to make this quick video about that rotation I hope you found that useful as always thank you for watching and I'll see you next time