Archery Tip: How to Keep Your Arrow On The Rest When Shooting Archery

Hey archery friends, this is Tara. I hope you're having a great day today. I'm having an awesome day because I actually received a really cool present from one of my archery students, Richard. He got me this cool shirt. He custom designed it. It has my name on it on the back. Pretty cool. So anyways, I'm wearing my new shirt today, so thanks Richard. I love it. Today the video that we're gonna do is actually from one of our viewers. His name is Anthony and he asked me the question the other day, how do I keep my arrow from falling off the arrow rest? So I'm going to go through a couple reasons why the arrow might be falling off the arrow rest and I'm also going to go over ways that we can fix that. So I hope you enjoy today's video. I'm going to give you a lot of information and I hope it helps. The big question is, how do I keep my arrow from falling off the arrow rest? Before I even start into that, I want to let you know there's tons of different types of arrow rests. In my beginner classes, I use a plastic arrow rest and it actually has a hook on it, so it looks something like this. See how there's a little hook on there? I call this the arrow rest. And then there's also another type of arrow rest. A lot of Olympic archers will use something like this. You see it's really straight, so this is really important to make sure you can keep the arrow on the arrow rest because if that arrow comes off the arrow rest, that one's going to miss the target. That's not going to hit the target. And then you can actually even, you can actually even just shoot off the shelf. A lot of people shoot off the shelf, so they have a piece of felt here and then they're they're shooting right here off there. They have no arrow rest on there. So just to start off, there's all kinds of arrow rests. So what I'm going to show you today is, because Anthony told me that he has just a basic beginner bow and it was just the standard arrow rest that came with it. A lot of times, from what I've noticed, the standard arrow rest is the cartel arrow rest. It's just a little plastic rest. It's similar to this one. Hoyt hunters, I've always just been partial. I just love this one, so I've always used this one, but it's a similar concept. Okay, so since I think this is something similar to what Anthony has, I'm going to use that today to show you the three reasons why your arrows could be falling off the arrow rest and how to fix that problem. So let's start with number one. Number one is probably the most common. I'm going to guess this will fix a majority of people who have arrows coming off the arrow rest. The first thing would be pinching your fingers on the string. All right, so let me show you what I mean. You're going to go ahead and load the arrow. A lot of archers, when they first start out, just because they don't know better, whether you go split finger, three under, this is like same thing. I know a lot of viewers have written in, made comments that they really like the split finger, and it's totally fine. It's personal preference. I just teach three under for certain reasons, but if you like the split finger, let me show you what could happen. If you place your fingers on the string and you get too close to the string, so I'm pinching it, what could happen is when you go to pull back, oh it's already even happening, my arrow comes off the arrow rest because there's too much contact with your fingers on the arrow, and that contact, that squeezing is just pinching it right off there. So that's going to be an issue. Even if you go three fingers under, it's the same issue because the index finger comes right under the arrow, and if you're butting your finger up against the arrow, same thing, watch. Arrow comes right off the arrow rest. All right, so this is a really common one, and this is something I notice in my classes a lot, and I am constantly going over it with my students. You know, you just always have to keep a little bit of space. Whether you go split finger or three fingers under, always just keep a little bit of space from the arrow. All right, let me tell you this. What I do notice is when people do have an issue pinching their fingers off the string, a lot of times I will notice to correct it, instead of fixing this problem back here, they will end up holding their finger up on the arrow to try to keep it on there. I would advise not to, one, do this because the arrow is going to come right through, and then two, if you're just touching it, what could happen is, especially if your nock's just a little bit loose, when you go to shoot, you could pull the arrow down. Both are dangerous, and both will not make you shoot well. So make sure you keep your fingers off the string. Try to find other solutions other than that as your solution, okay? So we talked about the first thing, that was pinching your fingers on the arrow too much. Second thing, if you have too much tension, maybe your knuckles are out, or you have a really deep hook here, like you're way back here, if you have too much tension, all right, you see, what's happening is your fingers are coming in, your hands in there nice and tight, and the arrows are coming right off the arrow rest. So what I would say to you is you want to make sure you have a little tension in your hand because you're going to use bigger muscle groups, okay? We don't want to use all of our energy here in our fingers, so all you're going to do is use that first joint line, okay? You're going to place your fingers on the string, just like I've showed you in a couple other videos, and you always want to make sure this hand stays flat. The wrist is flat and the hands are flat. If you do that, you have a lot, a lot better of a chance that this arrow is going to stay on the arrow rest. I used to think almost like my hands are rolling outward. Not necessarily that it's actually doing that, but that's the visual I had in my head, is as I pulled back, I thought about my hands kind of rolling out, and what that did is it just made my hand nice and flat, and it made my wrist really nice and straight. Everything was flush. See, it looks just like this, and I think just the thought of that kept everything on the arrow rest really good. The third thing is called canting. What is canting? Canting is when you have your bow tilted to one side or the other. So in archery, when you shoot, you want to make sure that you keep your bow straight up and down. All right, if you're canting, it could look like this, okay, or it could look like this, okay. If it looks like that, so the way the arrow is coming off, okay, if you're canting, it's going to come off the arrow this way. Sometimes people don't even realize it. They're just canting a little bit, but depending on how your arrow rest is, if you have a really straight arrow rest, there's not a lot of forgiveness there. This one has a lot more forgiveness because there's a hook, but if you don't have that hook, there's not gonna be any forgiveness, and it's gonna come right off. So make sure that you are, you can even video yourself when you go out to the archery and just make sure you're not canting, but always make sure that bow is straight up and down, and that should keep the arrow up on the arrow rest really well. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull out the Olympic recurve bow that has that little tiny arrow rest, and I'm going to kind of show you everything that we just did with that, so that way you can see how it all works on the straight arrow rest. So now I pulled out the Olympic recurve bow. It's not fully set up right now, but that's okay. You got the idea. I just wanted to show you this arrow rest that's right here. See how it's really straight? Can you see it in that picture? Okay, so with this one, not very forgiving. There is no hook on there to keep the arrow on there. If you do a little wrong, it's going to definitely show up when you go to shoot. So let's make sure we've fixed all of our problems. So on the first one, let's go over what did I say for number one, pinching the string. So if I go split finger, the Olympic recurve, I shoot split finger, so let's just go split finger here. If I were to pinch the string, oh right off the bat, arrow's already coming off, okay? Too much pinching. I'll even go three fingers under for you. If I'm pinching up against that arrow, same thing. It's already come off the arrow rest. So make sure you leave a little bit of space. Set up. Okay, so you're all good. Same thing is three fingers under. Okay, all good. So let's go to number two. What did we talk about for number two? Too much tension in the hand. So I'm going to get a, show you a deep grip right here, and I'm going to have my knuckle sticking out really, really tense on the hand. Let's see what happens. Okay, all ready. It's coming off the string. Let me show you what I taught you today. I'm just going to use that first joint line. Keep my hand nice and relaxed. Set up. All right, and it stays on. We're good. Last thing I showed you, let's do a little canting. I'm going to show you this way just so you can see the cant of the bow. Might be a little harder to see the arrow come off, but you'll at least see the cant. If I set up and I can't my bow just a little bit, arrow's already come off the arrow rest. Okay, so I have to really make sure that I'm keeping my bow straight up and down when I shoot my shot, so that way the arrow stays on the arrow rest. So those are the main three things that I think are going to be the causes to why the arrows are coming off the arrow rest. Next time you go to the archery range, try those things out. See if it helps. Shoot me a comment back. Let me know if it helped you out. If you have any other questions, I love doing videos on questions from all my archery friends, so feel free to ask me whatever you want and hopefully I can help you out. Have a great day and happy shooting!