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Hi All,
Welcome to this weeks 3 quick tips email. As always, please forward this message to any of your archery friends who might find it helpful.
You might have heard that it’s important for the draw scapula to squeeze towards the spine during your expansion and release.
But why is this important? And what happens if you don’t do this?
This comes down to two things: creating a clean release and reducing injury risk.
If you do not keep squeezing towards the spine with your draw scapula through expansion and release, you will have to use more forearm, bicep and shoulder tension to keep a tight release and keep your draw hand closer to your neck.
This is one way to shoot, and it is still possible to get a clean release like this. But it’s much harder.
The more important issue though is that shooting in this way puts much more stress on your shoulder joint. And it’s much more likely to cause impingement issues or injuries if you shoot like this over a long period of time.
So what should you do about this? Read this weeks training tip below for a great exercise to do 😜
One of the most frequent questions I get asked is ‘what makes a forgiving tune?’. So this week I wanted to talk about this.
Essentially, what makes a forgiving tune is matching the arrow to your bow so that the arrow is bending correctly. This is a result of making sure your poundage, arrow spine and arrow length are correct.
The result of this will be an arrow that bends correctly, clears the bow nicely, and flies well.
If you have an arrow which is not matched to your bow and doesn’t bend correctly, you MIGHT be able to get it to tune, if you manage to find the perfect settings for everything.
But this tune will be on a knife edge, and it will be VERY critical because you don’t have a wide range of settings that work for your tune.
As a result, any mistake that you make will be amplified and your grouping will be erratic. Some days your grouping might be ok if you’re shooting very well, and other days it might be very wide.
If you want to delve deeper, I cover this fully in detail in a recent video I posted to my OAA Members Telegram group here.
A great way you can work on the draw scapula squeezing to the spine that I mentioned above is by using delayed video feedback.
Simply set up your phone with a video delay app behind you (BAM Video Delay is my favourite), so that it’s pointing at your shoulder blades. Then set the delay to around 10 seconds. Ideally you would shoot without a t-shirt so you can see your back muscles clearly.
Go through your normal shot process and look closely at your draw shoulder blade. As you expand through your shot you should see your draw scapula slightly squeezing towards your spine.
However, you might actually see it moving AWAY from your spine. This is quite common but definitely something that needs improving, and using this video feedback really helps when working on this.
That’s it for today, have a wonderful weekend!
Happy shooting,
Ashe