Bow Arm Control | How to Stop Hitting Your Arm With Proper Elbow Rotation | Archery Form Tips

In today's video, I'm gonna talk about bow arm rotation issues. If you're having issues with your bow arm rotating like this and hitting your arm with the string, this video is for you. For those of you that are new here, my name's Jake Kaminsky. I'm a two-time Olympic silver medalist in the sport of archery, and we're gonna make this channel a great resource to all types of archery. So if you haven't yet, hit that subscription button and the notification bell. That way you're notified every time a new video is uploaded. I'd appreciate it. So really quick, before I get into dealing with your bow arm elbow, I wanted to say something really quick about the book order, or specifically tuning for performance or training for archery if you have ordered those recently, especially international orders. There were delays specifically due to COVID, especially with international shipping. There are some countries that we can't even ship to yet, still, even this long after it's been going on. 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So thank you for your patience and we apologize for any delay that has happened. We see many people dealing with elbow rotation issues, especially once they start pulling a bow back. And what happens is instead of being in this optimal condition, this optimal position here, where if you were to bend your elbow at full draw, your upper, your forearm will be parallel to the ground. So this is an ideal position to be in, right? But many people, instead of being in the ideal position, will have this go on, where their elbow is rotated upwards. And then due to that, they have much less clearance for the bow string. And oftentimes people will hit their arm in this area, really low and down in the bottom side of their forearm, or in some extreme cases, they'll hit their elbow. In my experience and in my opinion, not just as an archer, but also as a coach, as I've been coaching people locally and throughout the years, I've seen that this is mostly a motor control issue or a strength issue. Fortunately and unfortunately, it's really easy to fix the situation and really just doing a couple of simple drills often will really just make this go away. So what I can suggest to start with on how to help control this is to work on your motor skills. And it's pretty simple. All you gotta do is just do a simple exercise relatively often. And once you get comfortable with that, we'll move on to the next stage, and then it should translate just fine into your bow. So the first thing that you need to do is you need to grab onto something. I'm gonna grab onto this fancy Gelo box over here. And basically I'm gonna put my hand on the box as if it's in my bow. Obviously my fingers are gonna be in this position because it's essentially a wall. If you have a pole, you can grab onto a pole, potentially one at your shooting range, holding up your tent or something like that. Essentially you want to grab onto it, and then you want to maintain your hand in that position without rotating your hand back and forth. And try to rotate your elbow from this position down to this position, where it should be when you were to bend your elbow like this so the crook of your elbow is vertical with the ground. And I can do it this way too. My hand is in the proper position, and you can see how my elbow is rotated up. Now if I go from rotating my elbow up, and if I can't do this with my control, you can take your hand and actually physically try to rotate your arm. And when you rotate your arm, you can start to feel which muscles are engaging to make this rotation happen. So the first stage is to simply just keep your hand on the wall as if your knuckles are at a 45 degree angle like is recommended on how to hold your bow grip. And then go from this position to this position. And just practice this motion, and feel what it feels like. The next progression would be to add some pressure onto it, lean against the wall, because sometimes as pressure is added, people's elbows flare up like this. Now that makes it more challenging, so you gotta learn how to rotate and keep it down while adding pressure. And it's just simply motor control issues. Some of it has to do with some rotator cuff stuff, brachioradialis and triceps. And so we'll talk a little bit about that in a moment. But the first progression, again, very simple, lean against a stationary object, learn how to control the elbow position. If you can't do it, manually rotate your elbow and help it along the way, and slowly you'll be able to progress. Now how often should you do this? As often as needed. If you really have no control, do it all the time. If you're bored, lean against the wall, you're waiting for the bus, lean against that bus stop and practice rotating your elbow. Anywhere you can, anytime, you might as well be practicing it. You got five minutes here or there, try it out, get more comfortable with that motor control and learning how to rotate your elbow. Now the next progression after leaning on an object would be to do it in space without holding onto anything. Now some people will do this, and you can see I'm rotating my elbow and my hand together. Okay? That is one way to control it, but our bows don't cant when we rotate our elbows correctly. We still hold our bows vertical. So you'll eventually be able to go from this position with my knuckles at a 45 degree angle to this position without changing my hand. See how my hand doesn't move relative to my elbow. My hand's still elbows up, elbows flat, up, flat, up, flat. So eventually you can get really good at it and you can control and keep your hand in the optimal position and be able to control your elbow separate of your hand. Now, this is gonna take a lot of practice. I've shot hundreds and hundreds of thousands of arrows, making sure that my elbows flat and rotated. So I have a lot of really good motor control in this relationship here. So really dedicating some time on the wall, trying to move to this, it's gonna be struggle, it's gonna be difficult. So then kind of work back and forth until you can do this, where your hand doesn't change and doesn't move, but your elbow you have full control over. When would I suggest you to set your elbow flat? I would do it in the set position or the set up position. If you haven't seen my form series yet, I'll put a link in the description below, plus a card at the top here, where I take you through Coach Lee's method, the NTS system, the best method, anything like that, from start to finish, top to bottom, and basically explain to you how I shoot arrows. So if you haven't seen that yet, I would highly recommend checking it out. And if you're interested more in Coach Lee's method, you can check this book out here. It's called Total Archery, Inside the Archery, written by my coach, Coach Lee, as well as an old teammate of mine, Tyler Benner. If you're interested in this book, it has a lot of stuff to do with archery and form and shooting Coach Lee's method. It's a great resource in addition to my form series. Some people learn by reading, some people learn by watching and hearing. So this'll help everybody out there. If you're interested in a copy, I'll have a link in the description below at my website, where you can find that, it's at jakekominski.com, or I'll have Amazon links as well, and those are Amazon affiliate links. So thanks to everybody who has been supporting me and my channel through the various ways of helping me out. You know, it allows me to produce all of this content for free, and I genuinely appreciate each and every one of you who is allowing me to produce this content for so many people out there in the world. I did mention that I think it's a motor control issue and a strength issue. So if I was having issues dealing with my elbow rotation, the type of exercises that I would do would be tricep strengthening exercises. Things like dips on a bench, dips in the air, pushups, things like that, get some strength into my tricep, because I find that a weak tricep, or a weak bow arm in general, is in this position. Most people have their elbow rotated up. Along with the elbow rotated up, they usually have a high bow shoulder or improper alignment, and a lot of things that will help correct all three of those issues is a strong bow arm, a strong tricep. So those are things that I would do if I was having issues with elbow rotation. And then you'll gain your strength of your rotator cuff when you break your radialis and all that stuff, doing the drills on the wall, doing the drills in the air. Hey, thanks for watching. If you like this video, consider hitting the like button, the subscription button, and the notification bell. And if you're interested in supporting my channel, head to my website, jkominski.com, where you can find information on Patreon, apparel, books, and digital coaching as well.