The Bow Shoulder

settling the shoulder blade it is essential for shooting military weight bows as well as for comfortably shooting bows of lighter draw weights if you hunt your shoulder blade then that's gonna direct the force of the bow up away from the body and that's gonna cause a lot of stress on the rotator cuff muscles here yeah you might be able to get away with hit in the short term but in a long term it's gonna mess you up now the advice I'm gonna give for excelling the shoulder blade is something I've gleaned from studying Goggins Ming Dynasty military manual examining the forms of other military heavy draw weight cultures traditional cultures that is from studying the anatomy of archery you know what are the joint articulations involved in settling the shoulder blade as well as just from direct experience shooting really heavy bows now I'll explain the steps the first step now let's imagine the target is in this direction is going to be depressing the both side shoulder blade depressing is lowering it to its lowest possible point what you can look for is that you know at the end of your collarbone there's this little nub here try to keep that in the same place and then just lift your arm into position preferably with a slight upward slope because what'll happen is that as the bow exerts its force on your arm that's gonna press that shoulder blade down it's gonna reinforce that position the second step is pretty important which is retracting and revolving that shoulder blade down and towards your spine so that again retracting and revolving down towards your spine some people think that you have to reach out to the target in order to settle it but that creates instability because that's going to disconnect the shoulder blade from the rest of the body now technically the shoulder blades only attach to the rest of the body through you know a bunch of muscles connecting it but you know you want the shoulder blade to be closer to your ribs rather than farther away so if you're trying to reach out like this that creates an instability and with heavier draw weights that's going to create the tendency for a hundred to happen once you have a lot of force coming in so reaching out is a mistake let me show you again from this angle here I'm reaching out I'm actually protracting or spreading out the shoulder blade away from the body and so the force of the bow is going to be going to the midline of the body that's pretty unstable instead you want to reach racked the shoulder blade so technically you see that that's always going towards the rear of my body here and not only that it creates a little bit of a slight you know triangular space naturally that'll give you a little space between the bowstring and the armor okay so that's step two again step one depressing the shoulder blade step two retracting and revolving it toward your spine now the last step is rotating the elbow medially inward technically this is a glenohumeral or a shoulder humerus articulation but the end effect is that you'll see it moving your elbow this is medial rotation of the elbow here see that that brings the point of the elbow pointing to the side as opposed to lateral rotation which is bringing that point to be able pointing down this is actually a weaker position here because the muscles involved in rotating this here do not help with the scapular depression retraction and down rotation now some people think that if you will meet medially rotate the elbow that's going to cause you to hunt your shoulder like this and that's a red herring what happens is those people are confusing the motions of hunching and medial rotation of the elbow like look into this way this is medial rotation of the elbow right this is medial rotation of the elbow this is also medial rotation of the elbow yeah I didn't have to move this thing at all here right didn't have to go like hey you know imagine someone doing this oh I'm rotating my elbow like that that's just awkward and it's it's you know super stiffness language I would get a massage here get someone to loosen that up but you can move these independently right settling the shoulder depressing the scapula or attracted towards the spine and then immediately rotating the elbow so that's a third step medially rotating the elbow to lock it in why is step why are steps one two and three important well I mean obviously steps wanted to get these shoulder in a position to receive the force so that when you receive a force it goes straight into the ribcage and step three medially rotating in the elbow kind of locks things in reinforcing the motion here see that and the reason is because those three articulations use compatible muscles right depressing the scapula involves the lats a little bit of pecks as well retracting and revolving the scapula towards the spine involves the lats a little of the pecs and the rhomboids right and you're gonna do this anyway because when you're pulling a bow you're using back tension which is basically squeezing the shoulder blades together towards the spine if you're not doing that in archery then you know something's wrong and then finally the medial rotation of the elbow actually involves guess what the lats and a little bit of the pecs as well so all those three articulations we had force each other now I'm going to apply this advice to shooting a 118-pound bow as you prepare for this you can do it step-by-step just so you can feel you know what are the three articulations involved for example you can either depress the shoulder blade retracted and then immediately rotate the elbow to lock things in or you can do it in a different order where are you immediately rotate the elbow first and then you depress the scapula and then you retract it down towards your spine on this side here rotor containing the elbow medially depressing the shoulder blade we're tracking it towards the spine see that last part wrote email immediately depressing the shoulder blade retracting it towards the spine and that's how you make shooting heavy bows feasible and moderate and lighter bow is comfortable I'll demonstrate the technique with left-handed shooting so you can see what set on the shoulder looks like from the other side this bow is 107 pounds I'm Lyde rolling so from here immediately rotating the elbow depressing the shoulder blade we're tracking it in towards my spine you you

Channel: The Way of Archery

Views: 35,250

Keywords:

Id: JSsnNrHz9ts

Length: 8min 49sec (529 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2019