How To Aim A Recurve Bow Properly

so how to aim your recurve bow before we get started i want to say that aiming is not as important as you think for recurve the priority is on movement and doing the correct shot instead of aiming too much so too many people focus on getting the best aim they can keeping the site on the middle and while they're keeping the site on the middle just doing kind of the shot as well as they can within that that's the wrong way around to do it what you need to do is do your best shot with your best movement and your best overall shot process and within that get whatever best aim you can within this good shot that's the correct way around to do it it will mean that your site is more wobbly maybe you don't feel like you fixed on the gold as much it doesn't feel as stable and secure where you're aiming but that's the best way to shoot recurve so now i've got that out of the way let's start with the aiming so when it comes to aiming first things first both eyes open stare at the target and not at the site so this is a common mistake people will look at the site and make the site focused and the target blurry but you want the opposite you want to stare at the target and make that focused and the sight will be blurry and that's what you want both eyes open as you can see here from these pictures of international archers 99 of archers shoot with both eyes open it's the way to go so if you can't because of eye dominance then maybe you can close one of your eyes but as much as you can try and shoot with both eyes open now the second thing is now that you know how to aim and look at the target imagine you're looking at the gold you're focused on there and the site is blurry how stable should your aim be it doesn't matter if it's floating around a little bit and this is what we call your aiming float or sight float whatever it doesn't matter and it's good if your site is moving around so what you don't want to do is try and fix your site perfectly on the middle and this is probably the most common mistake with recurve archers myself included back in the day i try and fixate far too much on the aim so allow the sight to loosely move it's much better to have a relaxed loose moving sight maybe within the red then a super stable aggressive really fixed sight on the gold but when you release you're going to jump one way so allow your sight to float now the next point when it comes to aiming is string picture this is what we call the slight blurry image of the string against your vision so it doesn't matter where you place this you can have a number of options some people place the string picture and you can think of this as like a rear sight in a gun this string picture affects your left and right grouping of your arrows so you can place this some people place it just to the right of the sight pin like this some people place it slightly on the left edge of the riser some people place it on the middle of the riser some people might even place it on the right edge of the riser the position doesn't matter what's extremely important is that on every single shot the position is the same that's key so personally for me i put the string on the middle of the riser and then keep it there on every shot because if you don't then you're going to have big left and right variations on this point when you're expanding through the clicker when you're pulling through and about to release the string picture must maintain stable and not go left or right and move one way or the other because obviously that will give you the left and right arrows as well now on to the raising the bow and when to actually aim don't aim until at least set up position it's very common someone will come up try and aim here and then draw the bow and that way they've compromised how they're going to draw the bow and tried to get the aim early but what's going to happen when they draw the bow is the aim is going to move anyway so don't try and aim until you've come up aligned your shoulders and got to set up there so aiming at the very earliest occurs at setup and at setup you want the sight slightly high and right so you can see that here maybe high and right blue maybe one o'clock or two o'clock blue maybe even black it depends on the archer but what that means is just as you come from setup in here as you then lower into anchor you can just slightly lower the site onto your aiming point on the gold so at setup that's you just get a very very rough aim you're not deliberately fixing it anywhere you're just aware of where it is slightly high right and then lower onto the gold as you come into anchor in terms of the string picture it doesn't need to be set at the start the same as the aiming if you try and get your string picture say for example in line with the riser in my example if you try and get that right from the start then you're going to end up drawing like this so actually at the start the string picture is quite right and that's okay and then as you lift and draw then the string picture will come in slightly and that's what you want to do now a word on the release and aiming through the release what you want to do is make sure you're directing the sight into your aiming spot until well beyond your release and until the arrow has hit the target so this will ensure that your direction is good and effectively the sight is not jumping one way or the other as you release the shot so when you're shooting you just make sure that you're still directing the bow into the target almost pushing the sight pin into the gold on the release it doesn't why you don't want to do this during your expansion you don't want to be like super pushing during your expansion for this it's more of during the follow through continuing that direction into the target that's really really key to maintain your aim and maintain that movement that i said is so important for recurve archery now a word on ifocus similar to what i mentioned about the aiming and directing the sight into the gold you must maintain your eye focus on your aiming spot until the arrow has definitely landed on the target so you don't want to divert your eye focus at all that's a really key point there as well now two other things i want to cover the float of the site that i mentioned before what is an acceptable float so basically an acceptable float is whatever you can get with your movement still happening the right way so if you're moving through the shot and you're drawing and you're expanding and you do the right shot but your movement is very wobbly that's fine your body over time will learn how to stabilize that because naturally you can see the sight you can see the target your brain does want to aim it it will learn how to do that so just focus on the movement and if you're wanting like a specific example if you shoot for example 30 meters and your site is floating around the red but you do good shots pretty much all of them will be in the gold maybe even in the 10. if you fix the aim completely on the 10 but your shots are very static and tense because you're aiming too much the arrow is going to be everywhere so the float is less important some nice float is good get comfortable with the movement and this is something compound archers do as well get comfortable with that movement focus on your movement in the shot and that's what you want to do there so a word on sight pins try as many as you can and if you feel like you're over aiming a little bit try an open ring it's really really helpful and because you won't have the dot it can help you focus less on the aiming focus more on your movement so definitely worth giving that a try so finally one thing that's really good to do is to learn the sight path as you're drawing the bow and do this with a light bow so practice raising your bow coming up over the slight right edge of the target as you can see in this diagram and then coming down to the top right set up position i mentioned before and then slightly lowering as you come down to anchor practice doing that path with a light bow and then it means when you shoot with your main bow you don't have to worry so much about the path because you've learned the movement and then you can focus more on the movement that you're doing with your draw side and all that kind of stuff so really really important to do that and a great way to learn the path without getting too stuck on where the site is and worrying about that so thank you for watching if you haven't already be sure to tap that like button down below and also subscribe to the channel i post here pretty much every week in terms of new videos so make sure to keep up to date with that and thank you for watching and i'll see you next time you

Channel: Online Archery Academy

Views: 211,421

Keywords: archery, recurve archery, target archery, olympic archery, archery technique, recurve archery technique, how to shoot a bow, recurve archery tips, archery lessons, archery course, learn archery, korean archery, arhcery

Id: _ShP27UO5KE

Length: 9min 1sec (541 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 30 2021