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Traditional Shooting Form

Starting to come into my own. Tearing up the bulls eyes at 7 yards bareshafting. Going to fine tune this week and look at 10 yards next week.
 
Inspect your arrows and nocks. I had cracked a nock once that I didn’t noticed until I shot it again. It was practically a dry fire and fractured my limb.
 
Not the custom bow ? :dizzy:

No it was my 1st bow someone gave me when I got started. Bear hunter. It still works. I got a friend that makes his own bows and he inspected it and put some smooth on on it. Said it will be fine. Never had any issues from it. But it scared me.
 
Inspect your arrows and nocks. I had cracked a nock once that I didn’t noticed until I shot it again. It was practically a dry fire and fractured my limb.
I've had 3 dry fires over the last 28 years of recurve shooting.
2 were from broken nocks and one was from a broken string loop.
Its gotta be one of the most sickening feelings.
Luckily, none of my dry fires damaged the bow.
 
My wife is studying at UAB for her Doctorate of Physical Theraphy. She is always asking to practice her palpating on me. I was shooting the bow the other day so I asked her to palpate my back muscle to confirm wether I was engaging it thorough the shot. She is online class for the remainder of this semester so she is studying from home. She sent me this this morning. I think the guy in the photo has bad form though. Looks like a tight grip as well. He has No arm guard and it looks like he is not utilizing the shelf and is instead resting the arrow in the air on the opposite side. Haha


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Anyone know what bow that is? Looks like a hybrid compound of some type but it appears he’s shooting barefinger hahaha
 
Man ole man, I was looking for someone else’s thread about form and came across this awful gem of a thread lol Even looking back at these 3 year old videos I see where my form was lacking immediately.

I recently spiraled pretty far out of control with my shooting form. While tuning arrows I found myself over extending my draw length to get better flight out of the arrows. This was obviously counterintuitive as the goal is to tune the arrow to your draw length for the best possible arrow flight. By being inconsistent with my draw I was frustrating the tuning problems further with inconsistent arrow flight. I think I let the frustrations get the best of me. I was shooting my heavier bow 55# way too many times a day, sometimes hundreds of shots on the weekend, over extending my form, drawing primarily with my shoulder, and giving myself the worse case of target panic and shoulder/collar bone aches I’ve ever experienced since picking archery.

With my shoulder pain getting worse I decided to take a step back and assess my form and draw length. I was googling archery form and shoulder pain when I came across a video done by outdoor with Tom Clum. I had heard the name plenty before and knew he was highly respected but I never watched any of his stuff. Very quickly he made it clear to me that my back tension was next to zero and I was boogering up my shoulder. It was plain as day but I had been missing it. I don’t know at what point I fell so far off the wagon but it was immediately clear what I was doing wrong.


I shot a few shots this afternoon focusing on actually engaging the back tension and the results spoke for themself, no shoulder pain. Some immediate things I noticed was I could hold the weight back significantly longer once I was ‘locked-out’ with my back muscles and I my clean release returned.

So take this as a warning and a reminder that this special thing called back tension is supremely important and without it you could not only be risking your accuracy but also your shoulder health. Don’t be stubborn like me. If something hurts stop and reassess. I was so hyper focused on arrow flight that I abandoned my form. Though unintentional, the consequences were still real. I’m addicted to shooting everyday but I really ought to give my shoulder a couple days to get right.

I’m too young for this non-sense. Happy Shooting!
 
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