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Hi All,

Welcome to this week’s quick tips email. As always, please forward this message to any of your archery friends who might find it helpful.

🛠️ Equipment tip

Last week I covered the 2nd major mistake many archers make when moving their sight, and today I’ll cover the 3rd.

Mistake 3 – Thinking you moved your sight too much

Imagine you’ve just shot 3 arrows out of 6 in a competition and looked through your scope to see a left 8, and two left 9’s.

Hopefully, following on from my previous emails you would definitely move your sight in this situation!

But let’s say you move your sight, and then immediately shoot a right 8. Now what do you do?!

This is a really important scenario to understand. Just because you have now shot a right 8 (or even if you shot a right 7) this doesn’t mean you adjusted your sight too much.

Too many archers panic at this point and move their sight back. But even a 670 level shooter will shoot right 8’s within their normal grouping when their sight is perfectly centred.

In this example, I would welcome a right 8, because at least you didn’t move your sight too little.

So don’t panic and remove all the adjustment you did. Shoot 1 or 2 more arrows and then judge where your new group is before adjusting back.

🏹 Technique tip

One problem area a lot of archers struggle with is The Set Position, and today I want to talk about a key thing to get right here which will help your whole shot when done correctly: creating a straight line from your draw fingers to your draw elbow.

In the overhead picture below you can see a great example of this with the red line. You can see how this shows a clear straight line connecting the draw hand fingers, the draw hand wrist joint, and the draw elbow.

But why is this so important? This straight line allows you to create what I call the ‘draw side connection’. This is the link between your hooking fingers on the string and your scapula and back muscles.

If you can create a straight line at this point and feel like you’re pulling the bow with your draw elbowand scapula (not just with your hand), you will make it much easier to draw your bow efficiently and get good alignment.

This is because you are relying less on finger/hand/arm tension to draw your bow, and more on using the larger muscles of the back.

💪 Training tip

Following on from the technique tip above, how would you train this?

Firstly, if you can use an overhead angle like I showed in the picture, this is by far the best feedback you can get.

However, if you can’t get an overhead angle, you can aim directly into a mirror and check your draw side connection doing draw ups. I’d recommend doing this without an arrow.

To start with, get your normal bow and check your set position to see your starting point.

Then, play around with your set position and try to get the straight line as pictured above. You will probably find you need to angle your longrod slightly left of the target to do this (for a RH archer). This angle is ok and is actually something we want.

Once you’ve repeated this a few times then try and draw your bow whilst keeping this straight line through your draw side. This is the hard part and you probably won’t be able to keep it through the shot.

Next, use a combination of light bow draw ups to build up the strength required to do this with your normal bow, and shot trainer draw ups to train you to lead your draw from the elbow.

I’ll be talking through this in full detail tomorrow in an exclusive video in my OAA Members Group. I’ll go into much more detail and explain what you should feel when you do this, how you can progress from the drills in the mirror to your normal shot, how to know if you’re doing the right thing, and also show examples of top archers who do this and some top archers who don’t (and why this is ok).

You should join with the link above and I’ll see you tomorrow 😜

That’s it for today, see you soon!

Happy shooting,

Ashe