3 Must-Know Tips for a Consistent Hook and Better Accuracy

Ever wonder why your shot doesn't feel consistent no matter what you do? The smallest detail, your fingers on the string, could be what's holding you back. In this video, I'm gonna cover the three most overlooked details of your hook and how it can completely transform your shot. Today, we're gonna cover the three things that matter most about your hook on the string, whether you're an experienced archer or an advanced archer or you shoot recurve or barebow, these three things will absolutely make a massive difference in how you perform on the target downrange. So the first tip is to actually place your fingers consistently on the string. There's so many archers that don't even know that when you hook your fingers on the string, if you're putting them in different places on the string, you're gonna have huge variance in your impacts downrange. So for a recurve shooter that's using a tab, split finger like this, you want to make sure you're putting your fingers in the same place up and down relative to the arrow. I personally, when I hook the string, touch the bottom of the knock with the top of my leather on my middle finger, and I then hook the string gently from there. Some people will touch from the top down. Some people will split the difference in space, the knock in the middle. All of those things are acceptable as long as your fingers aren't touching the knock, of course, at least in my opinion. But the way that I do it, like I said, I prefer to just touch the bottom of the knock with the leather, just gently. Now, why it's important to make sure you put it in the same place every time is because if you don't and you're up or down each individual shot, you're gonna actually change the trajectory or the launch angle of the arrow every single shot. When I hook from the bottom and I touch the bottom, it's gonna be very different than when I hook from the top down. So what I'll do is I'm gonna show you on the target here at 70 meters where the impact points are and how they shift when I hook in different ways. So I'm gonna do it how I always do where I'm touching the bottom of the knock with the top of my leather first. So what I'm interested in is paying attention to the vertical impacts, where they are landing on the target vertically down there. Okay, so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to hook the string where I touch the top of the knock with the bottom of the leather nearest my index finger. Feels so wrong. Okay, that wasn't the greatest shot. So I'm gonna shoot another one just to make sure. It should have just gone straight right, but it went dramatically lower than the other arrows. That was a good one. That one looks like it's really close to the other shot. So you can really see that as you change where you hook on the string, it can change the impact points downrange quite dramatically. It's not a huge difference here at 70 meters. I was honestly expecting to see a little bit more, but over time, over a 36-arrow round or a 72-arrow ranking round, that can add up massively as to points missed and inconsistencies and lots of head scratching as to wondering why the groups are constantly changing downrange. In my opinion, this is one of the easiest things that you can fix, is to just consistently place your fingers on the string. Now, if you're shooting barebow and you're wondering how this applies to you, basically what you want to do is when you set your crawl, you know, you set your crawl with your thumbnail or something else, you want to make sure that you're placing the index finger, the top of your finger, relative to that crawl mark in the same place every single time. You don't necessarily have to just pay attention to the leather. What you want to pay attention to is your finger and the leather, because if you're hooking the string in different places with your fingers, obviously you're changing your crawl, therefore you're changing the trajectory downrange. Tip number two is to make sure that you put your fingers with the same spacing on the string every single time. Yes, I have a finger spacer here that kind of guides my index and middle finger spacing, but I can either squeeze my finger spacer or not, give it a little gap when I'm hooking or not. And then between my ring and middle finger, I can also have a gap or not. All those things are very, very critical. I'm gonna show you how the arrows impact differently on the target when I have different spacing, and I'm gonna show you how to hook it in a consistent way every single time. So the way that I actually hook the string consistently is to squeeze all three fingers together. I give a gentle pressure on the finger spacer itself between my index and middle finger, and then I'm actually pushing up with my ring finger gently into my middle finger. Shoot a couple of shots and demonstrate to you as it's raining here now. Okay, so two arrows that landed fairly close on the target. Now what I'm going to do is I'm gonna do my best to try to give a gap between my ring and middle finger, and see how that goes. This feels so weird. And I also have to give a little gap between my index and middle finger relative to the spacer too, because the way I squeeze my finger spacer forces my ring finger to be squeezed slightly. So this is gonna be all sorts of funky. My anchor feels different. Everything feels different. I can feel just, nothing feels right. So I think it did affect where the arrow went as well. I'm gonna try to do that the same way. Very, very difficult. I'm gonna shoot one more because that one wasn't the greatest shot. As you can see, it's really affecting how the overall shot feels to me. Overall, it's a far weaker position to actually put my fingers on the string. And I had a very hard time actually keeping them in the same place. They wanted to slip the entire time when I was at full draw. So the correct way to actually hook your fingers on the string and be consistent about the spacing is to actually squeeze them gently together. This applies for recurve and barebow. The way that I actually hook is after I have an arrow on the string, I then will squeeze my finger spacer with very minimal effort. The amount of effort it would take to hold the finger spacer without dropping it and dropping the tab if I had no straps attached to my fingers, just enough to kind of hold it. I keep that squeeze and squeeze from the ring finger up to the middle finger. And then I hook my fingers on the string. So it's first squeeze, then hook. And it really, really helps. It's gonna make your spacing between your index and middle finger much more consistent as well. And you won't have any gap between your ring and middle finger. Overall, it's gonna make a huge difference down range for you. And I can't explain to you how difficult it was to maintain my hook on the string with no squeeze. My fingers were slipping on the string and overall it was just quite terrible compared to doing it the correct way. Now, the third tip is to actually have consistent pressure of your fingers on the string. What pressure you use, what ratio of pressure you use, whether you use more index finger, more ring finger, or whatever combination you want to think of, just do it consistently. Do it the same way every single time and you'll have nice groups down range. I'll show you how I always hook and shoot so you can actually see what it looks like from this angle up this close. And I'll shoot a couple of shots again and then you'll see where they go compared to changing my finger pressure on the string. What this is affecting is it's affecting is very similar things to changing the position of my fingers on the string themselves physically in space. It's changing the launch angle of the arrow. In a nutshell, what is happening is the actual shape of the string is changing when you're at full draw. So when you let it go with more ring finger pressure versus more index finger pressure, the actual shape of the string when at full draw is different. So if it's angled funny and angled differently when I have more ring finger pressure compared to that index finger pressure, that actual change of the shape is affecting the way the arrow is bending, it's changing the launch angle of the arrow, and changing all sorts of different things. And you'll see here as I change my finger pressure how the impact shifts down range. So again, I'm gonna shoot here two arrows the way I normally do. And you'll see I have a good amount of curl on my top finger and not a huge amount of curl on my bottom finger. So what I'm actually looking at here is how much I'm actually curling my fingers, which you can translate to the pressure on the string. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna dramatically add a ton of pressure onto my ring finger and actually shoot with a lot less index finger pressure. And we'll see how it affects the arrow. Because again, something's so wrong. Very, very hard to keep my hand consistently. Again, affected the way my anchor felt. And it was a bit of a struggle to get it through the clicker. Did not feel very pleasant, didn't feel very clean, and did not feel how I liked it. So when you're shooting recurve or barebow, this can affect both categories. And it's something that's very, very important to make sure you hook your fingers on the string consistently. Otherwise, as you can see, it really affects how the arrow lands on the target downrange. And it, again, affected the way I anchored. So more consistency is more better. So remember, consistent finger placement, consistent finger spacing, and consistent finger pressure can make a huge difference in the consistency downrange. And if you like this video, please do hit that subscription button and the notification bell down below and give this video a thumbs up. And also let me know in the comments section which of these three tips made the biggest difference for you. Hey, if you like this video, consider sharing it. Genuinely, that would help this channel out. I don't operate any other social media and I rely on you to help spread the word about the channel. Also, if you wouldn't mind, please do consider supporting this channel. There's many different links in the description below. 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