It is important to drill the correct feeling of hooking firmly into your memory when you first learn or adapt your set position. Your hooking has a huge affect on the overall connection within your shot.
Your hooking also has a huge affect on your release, so it can change your tuning completely. To make sure your bow is tuned properly, check out our Bow Tuning Guide – Recurve Olympic Archery.
1. Take the longrod off your bow and hook your fingers on the string. Let the bow hang from your draw fingers as you can see in the figure above.
2. Keep the hook secure, the same as you would when you shoot, but do not tense the back of the draw hand, draw wrist or forearm. Feel the connection between your hook and your draw elbow.
3. As you do this, you should notice that the draw wrist and forearm is either in a straight line or the wrist is slightly bent outwards in your natural position. This is good and demonstrates the correct feeling of hooking and the proper draw wrist position. You can see this in the figure above.
4. Your draw wrist should not be bent inwards. This would appear as the wrist being closer to the body than the forearm and elbow in the photo above. This would be a weak position.
Firstly, to read more about the hooking technique, see our dedicated section: Recurve Archery Technique – Set Position (Hook & Grip).
Wrist and finger exercises can be extremely useful to strengthen your draw hand and benefit your hook. Doing this drill is good, but your hooking feeling will be much better if your grip and finger strength is up to standard. If you are weak and struggle to hook on the string, you will just feel straining and tension; you will lack the fine control that you want.
You can see lots of different exercises to improve your wrist, finger and grip strength in our Recurve Archery Exercises section.
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