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                                          Image courtesy: www.learnarchery.com

No matter what’s your level of expertise, there’s always a good reason for you to go back to the basics; this applies to every field of learning, including archery.

You see the grey-haired bowhunters and Olympic archery contest winners spend hours practicing, and wonder why they need so much of it, right? They need it because they know how easy it is to unlearn and how difficult it is to relearn.

Through practice, they remind themselves of the basics and never unlearn the lessons that they learned earlier.

Three such lessons that I’m going to discuss here in this article are:

 •Draw and load

 •Anchor

•Transfer and hold

Let’s begin this discussion with 

Draw and load

The lesson helps to find draw arm elbow and shoulder location along with accurately draw the bow and align the draw arm. It starts with perfecting the grip position. A perfect grip position doesn’t require any readjustment during the setup.

An improper shoulder location makes the collarbone suffer, which invariably leads to muscle pain. It also prevents you from accurately aligning your body. A proper shoulder location means the shoulder muscles are not on top of the shoulder.

You achieve perfection in draw and load when you intuitively push your shoulder down at the time of hoisting your bow-arm to the target and keep your chest at a 90° angle to the target and parallel to the shaft. If your body is skewed, the shaft would be too. It’s easier said than done. But you can pull this, if you separate draw and load.

•When you draw: Keep drawing the string back until it reaches the side of the face. When you are done drawing, the draw hand should be above your nose level and the index finger should be near the side of your mouth. Hand position is very important in archery, so don’t ignore it.

•When you load: It’s all about positioning your shoulder and chest. When you position them accurately, you pass the draw weight on to your back muscles. All you need to do is rotate the shoulder back, and move it down as low as you can. Also make sure your elbow is positioned a little higher than the arrow. 

Anchoring 

The anchor point is the area on your face that the pulled drawstring touches. Learning how to anchor is one of the easiest archery steps.

As you draw the bowstring back, your index finger reaches one side of the face. It should reach the corner of the mouth. Beside the index finger, your palm, little finger and thumb all play key roles when you anchor.

Your thumb needs to swaddle your palm and your little finger needs to gently fit in your palm. You press your hand around your face only after you position your little finger and thumb the way I’ve just described.

Remember, the contact between the hand that’s pulling the bowstring and the corner of your face should be firm. Or else, the anchor would be weak.

Transfer and hold 

You are learning transfer and hold means you are already through with draw and load, and anchoring. There are three things related to body and arm alignment that you need to learn; the first is keeping your shoulders down, the second is not having to reposition your grip, and the third is putting your body weight evenly on both of your feet.

Now slowly transfer the draw weight to your back. The bow arm and shoulder should be linear to the draw arm and shoulder. To achieve this alignment, rotate the upper part of your torso a little. 

Use back muscles to retain this position, place the elbow of your drawing arm behind the arrow and most importantly, relax your forearm and the back of the draw hand. One mistake that many archers commit is transferring and holding separately. They should do these simultaneously.

For that, they need to use the back muscle to hold the majority of the draw weight. A very small amount of the weight should be held by the arm and hand.

Customize them

The lessons that you’ve learned don’t suit everyone as different people have different body structures. So customize them according to your physique. You can bring little modifications too if that suits you, but before doing that, consult with a pro.

Emily Smith, a freelance writer, an expert in writing high-quality content related to unique sports lessons for popular online publications. Archery interests her most. She receives professional training  @ Archery on Fire - Archery The Woodlands Texas (Tx), Conroe, Houston Area - Practice, Tournaments from archeryrangetexas.com.