Recurve Form Series Episode 2 | Key points for success with Jake Kaminski

You're watching the Jay Kaminsky YouTube channel. Hey, I'm Jay Kaminsky, here today to talk to you about the second installment of the form videos that I will be doing. This one is basically just going to be a quick overview, or not necessarily quick, but an overview of the very important principles that often get overlooked or kind of misstated. And yeah, these things definitely, no matter what style of shooting you use, are still going to apply to how to properly shoot a bow. This definitely, some of it will transpose over to compound as well. You know, there's a few really important principles to really just take note of. And that's what this video is going to go over. A lot of the topics that I will be talking about in this video will absolutely be referenced many, many times in all the subsequent videos after this one. And so I may make some references and say, hey, you know, go back and check this video to kind of see the description of a particular thing, just so that way everything kind of runs smoothly moving forward. So anyway, a few of the things that are extremely important that often get overlooked is rhythm and timing, tension and direction, and then muscles versus movement. Okay, so those three pairs of things are very, very important and get overlooked. So there's many different ways to describe a couple of those. So I'm going to do my best for you here. All right, so rhythm and timing. What is rhythm and timing? There's a couple of different ways to describe it. There's not just the rhythm and timing of each individual shot, but also the end as the whole. So for me, within each shot, rhythm is the rhythm that you pull the bow back to get to full draw. Okay, so specific to Coach Lee's method, the NTS, the best method, whichever way you want to call it. Rhythm within the shot is speaking to load, anchor and transfer. Now, not the act of loading, but when you hit the step of load. So when you achieve full load, then anchor is the point of anchor and transfer is when transfer finishes. Okay, so the rhythm of the shot from loading to anchor to transfer is one, two, three. So there's a distinct pause after anchor before transfer finishes. And the reason that that happens is that transfer takes a while. Okay, you need to make sure not only physically that you are achieving holding, that means you're using as much of your back instead of your arms or your hand muscles as possible. So more in the back, less in the hands. And it's also a mental step. We'll talk about all that stuff a lot more once we actually talk about transfer and achieving holding. But again, the rhythm and timing is one, two, three. So it's not one, two, three. It's and it's not this it's not doesn't mean that you load fast. It just once you get to loading position. So one, two, three. You can pull back slow, fast, whatever you like. I prefer a little bit quicker. But definitely it's one, two, three, not one, two, three. It's important to note why that is is because you don't want to lose the momentum that you've built up as you're pulling the bow back. So once you achieve full load position, go right to anchor and then really try to fully engage with your back and take that mental step to commit to the shot. That's the whole point of rhythm within the shot. Timing within the shot is the point from when transfer is finished until you release the arrow. And that should happen very quickly within two to three seconds. Okay, now why is that timing consistency important and also the time window important? Well, we're not exactly the smartest creatures on earth and the human brain can really only focus on one thing for about two to three seconds at a given time without distracting thoughts coming into your brain. So what that means is during that window of you committed to the shot after transfer is ended and you need to get the arrow off within two to three seconds before your brain starts thinking about something else. During that window, you're supposed to be focusing on one specific thing and that's up to each individual person. For me, it was how I was moving, feeling the balance of power in my body and the tension and direction as we'll talk about here shortly. So once you exceed that time window and your timing starts to go too long, you can start having different thoughts coming into your head like, oh, the shot's not going off quick enough. Maybe I need to expand faster and you know lots of things can come in. Maybe the wind's blowing more, your eyes are starting to tear up because the wind's blowing hard and it's dusty out or whatever. Like you'll have different thoughts that can pop into your head but if you can keep your window within two three seconds, optimally two seconds or less, you're going to have the less chance for distracting thought to come into your head during the most important crucial part of the shot which is execution or expansion. Each end as a whole, there's also a rhythm or timing. For me, it was basically how each arrow felt. So I pulled an arrow out, I loaded it in the bow, I got ready, I shot my shot, I pull an arrow out, I load it in my bow, I get ready, I shot my shot, I pull an arrow out, I load it in my bow and etc. You just have to try to control as much as possible the end in its entirety as well. I found that to be very important later on once I got a lot of the nitty-gritty small details under control and then you know at that point it started to become second nature of subconscious doing all the small details so I can only focus on the major things and really be successful by just focusing on the major details and trying to control the end as a whole as like a dance almost like a rhythmic dance of where you're just loading the arrow in and getting ready and everything is very methodical and continuous and very it flows together much like a dance would at least the way I would imagine it would so I believe that if you can control the end as a whole and within that end you can control each arrow as a whole and try to be consistent and make the whole thing consistent each end consistent you're going to be consistent throughout an entire day not just each end. Tension and direction. So it's a very simple concept and a lot of people look it over because it's just one of those small things which aren't really small in my opinion it's the huge part of the shot to me probably one of the most important parts absolutely so tension and direction what does that mean so if you look at it as a simple equation if you had a 50 pound bow you'd pull 25 pounds back you have to exert 25 pound forward to equal 50 pounds and be equally divided if your equation was in balance and you were pulling more than you were pulling your bow arm would collapse or if you were to release you'd see this type of motion or and the opposite is true if you're pushing too much you would want to you know kick forward on release so tension and direction is just a simple description of what is going on in the internal forces within your body that you're exerting onto the bow to propel the arrow okay so a lot of people like have a confusion of they shoot the arrow incorrect you shoot the bow the bow shoots the arrow because you have two contact points on the bow basically your hand on the grip and your fingers on the string yeah there's face contact maybe some chest contact things like that but the two basic things are grabbing the bow and hooking the string so what you're doing on this side has to be equal on this side and they have to be balanced and controlled together at once throughout the entire shot now if you watch all the top shooters shoot they typically are very balanced they don't rock back and kick and have large disturbances on release release is kind of a tell of how the shot is going and kind of really highlights the tension and the direction of the tension internally as they're executing the shot so it ends up showing up dramatically on release but you as a shooter individually need to exert the forces on your bow equally front and back so for me the tension is the tension that i'm pushing forward resisting the bow coming at me you have to be pushing forward even though coach lee's method is angular and it has nothing to do with what they've called push pull or linear you still are exerting a pressure forward against the bow to keep the bow from coming at you so that's the tension forward and the tension back is coming around angularly behind you to be more efficient we'll talk more about angular motion here shortly um and why that's important but anyway the forces you exert forward has to equal the forces you exert backwards now that's tension what about direction so the direction of the tension is also equally important the backside has to be coming back and around your head so not you're not pulling straight and expanding straight it's rotating angularly on this backside around you in a hinge fashion as if there was a pull through the top of your head through your spine to the ground you want to be hinging around backwards with the back half but the front half extremely important and this is something that i really learned the last few years that i was shooting and it really culminated and came into fruition fully at the rio olympic games um so i'm going to describe to you how i exert forces on the bow on and arguably it is the most important factor in consistent shots so as the bow wants to come back towards me i'm exerting forces directly towards the target if i ask people what direction do you push your bow arm they generally say towards the target and i say okay towards the target so if this is the if this is the shooting line and the target's that way they're telling me they exert a force towards the target that means just somewhere that direction there's no no consistency if it's just towards the target that's not consistent you have to drive it where you want the arrow to go so not only do you want to try to push that arrow in the 10 ring when you're aiming off aiming on but if you're outside and you're aiming off you're trying to push and drive that arrow or drive the bow more importantly towards the spot you're aiming at not towards the 10 ring you have to your new 10 ring has to be where you're aiming off okay so for me that really really highlighted a lot of flaws that i was having when i didn't have the consistent tension and direction the direction being consistent okay i was just pushing towards the target resisting the bow somewhere that direction instead of right in the 10 ring okay now when i started doing that i realized a huge fault that i had in my past so i'd be pulling to clicker click and i'd pluck right i'd collapse whatever you want to call it and typically say at 70 meters if i had a weak shot like that i'd hit seven six line high right that's where they would go for me i'm a right-handed shooter and that's where they would land once i started controlling my bow arm and really trying to drive that towards the target i realized that as i was collapsing on this side and having a weak shot on this side i was also weak on the front half and my bow arm was collapsing at the same time my draw hand was collapsing and once i realized that if i kept my bow arm strong even if i really made a huge mistake back here i'd no longer have it a seven or a six high right i'd have a nine or an eight high right so it was a huge huge improvement to start focusing on controlling that bow arm direction and the biggest thing that i can explain it is when i'm working with a new shooter or somebody who's not necessarily familiar with trying to control the bow arm you'll watch their bow just kind of jump in different directions it's not consistently driving and popping out of their hand towards the target it might jump downward once it might kick one direction or the other different shots and generally you ask them about it and some of them can't even tell that the bow is reacting differently until you tell them to resist that tension in the direction of the ten ring where they want the arrow to go even if it's at blank bail where you're pushing your sight pin towards doesn't it's all the same and then all of a sudden they consistently see the bow just go bang and jump straight out of their hands pow pow really really consistent and i find that to make a massive difference and it gets lost a lot in the details so that's something extremely extremely important is to control your attention and direction so i've got one more thing to say about tension and direction but before i do real quick i just want to remind you that this is going to be a series so if you want to follow along this entire series or the tuning one that i'm doing as well as you can see from all this equipment here just like and subscribe the channel hit that notification bell and you'll get notified every time a new video is updated i'm going to try to weekly updates as often as i possibly can and continue moving forward so anyway now rhythm and excuse me tension and direction something that is kind of gonna push the boundaries of what is or isn't correct um i kind of side with coach lee on this one so it only really works for a certain set of people and luckily i find it to be fairly common that a lot of people do it this way or are shooting with this you know kind of manner so anyway if you have somebody that is very much so right-handed and is also shooting right-handed so like i write with my right hand i throw with my right hand i shoot with my right hand a gun i kick with my right foot uh i'm very much so right hand dominant um so and i'm also shooting right-handed so it happens to work into my favor to where i uh the tension and direction it has to be balanced both sides equally uh balanced right i said that if there's a disturbance you'll have some sort of issue front to back right so if i'm right-handed if i'm trying to create 50 percent of pressure here 50 percent of pressure here i'm right-handed i'm going to want to do more on this side automatically so there's going to be an imbalance but once i get the mechanics down of how to expand how to execute how to move with this right side then i can focus a hundred percent on this front side and only focus on the tension and direction on this side and let this automatically happen i did that very recently or within the last basically two to two and a half years uh of me shooting on the circuit and once i did that i already talked to you about what i found in my fault when i was collapsing on the right side i was also doing it on my left side i would have never figured that out if i had not had a hundred percent focus on the left side because when i was collapsing on this side my right-handedness just took over and only focused on this and didn't even realize that i was collapsing on this side so the whole idea is because i'm naturally 100 right hand dominant and i'm shooting right-handed even if i'm focusing on a ton of pressure on this side and only really focus on controlling it on this side then my body will just automatically balance both sides equally um i saw success with that i've seen success with that with people that are also all right-handed shoot right-handed and have basic mechanics down on the right side once you really start talking about driving that arrow through the bow or driving the arrow via the bow um i saw massive improvements in group and consistency for sure um now don't confuse which direction to push this as towards the target on the horizon what does that mean uh well so i shot field archery as well as uh fita archery and i found that i really after i started learning this and really pushing with the left side and letting the right side take over that um i went to a field tournament and i had my best unmarked round ever i felt great i felt like i was making amazing shots but my arrows just weren't impacting on the target i maybe made like two mistakes the entire day it was like just the best day of shooting i ever had but my results on the target weren't showing it and it took me halfway through the second day which is the mark day to realize that i was pushing my pressure to the horizon on the target so meaning because field archery we aim down we aim up so instead of pushing my pressure at the target where i was aiming i was like pushing my pressure the direction of the target towards the horizon so my bow would pop down when i was aiming up or if i was aiming downhill the bow would pop upwards and my impact points were reflecting that it was just really frustrating i couldn't figure out why my impact points were so far off why my sight marks are so far off because i'm usually pretty good at getting good sight marks and that's never been an issue but for whatever reason this was an issue and again it took me halfway through the marked round to realize i was not pushing towards the 10 ring or where in this case the 6 ring because that's what the highest scoring ring is on a field face um but it took me a lot of time to realize that i wasn't trying to control my bow arm and as soon as i started doing that the consistency consistency went through the roof now we'll talk about muscles versus movements so a lot of people will say you're supposed to use your back muscles not your bicep not your forearm uh and smaller muscles to pull the bow back yes that is correct however something that coach lee has always talked about which i definitely fully believe is don't talk about the muscles or don't think about the muscles as the shooter eventually once you become more and more advanced and you know what you're doing you can reference what you feel within the muscles as importance but if you you're not moving correctly you won't be using the correct muscles or at least you won't be using them in the correct manner so what i see a lot is people say oh yeah i'm using my back muscles right and they're pulling and pulling and pulling and they can't move they can't expand they're pulling so hard and they just can't move efficiently because they're not using the correct movement they're trying to use the correct muscle and so what i find that that happens is instead of like if i were to just say take my hand and raise it towards my face okay that's easy very easy right but if i say fire my bicep to raise my hand i can just fire my bicep to raise my hand but a lot of people will say or hear fire bicep so they'll fire bicep and tricep the opposing muscle to try to feel bicep more if i just move my hand i don't feel my bicep very much even though that's doing basically all the work so if i want to feel it more i can fire both and now it's really hard i can make it really hard to move my hand upwards so that's what i find happens a whole lot when people say use your back they point and they touch you know they hit the lower scap area and say use your lower trap and then people start flexing their back and the front to feel the back more and then they're just binding and they're not going anywhere so if you focus on the correct movement not the muscles you will use the correct muscle so i don't know if that makes any sense but if i am trying to just like i said move my hand up the correct muscle will fire with the least amount of effort and it just works but if you say focus on this muscle then you start having issues come into the shot sequence thanks for watching be sure to subscribe and hit that notification bell so you get notified every time a new video is uploaded for seminar and book info head to jakeminski.com or click on the link below and uh yeah i appreciate you guys watching if you would please share this video it really helps get the word back out that i am back out there thank you again take care