When to rotate your bow arm elbow joint

Right so you know that you need to rotate your bow arm elbow to vertical but since I made the last video on this I've had a lot of questions about when exactly in the shot you should do this rotation and why. So that is exactly what I'm going to cover in today's video so let's roll the intro and then we'll get to it. So first of all you definitely need to make sure that you understand the movement before you try and integrate in your shot and work on where you're going to do it in your shot and the timing of it. So if you can't basically get the movement to start with and you can't you know separate the elbow rotation to the hand if you are not able to bring your hand up and rotate the elbow like this separate from rotating the hand if you rotate this elbow and when you do it your hand rotates as well then you need to learn the skill first properly and then you can work on integrating it within your shot. So that's the first key thing then now we'll look at where you want to do this in your shot and why. So basically you want to do the elbow rotation around the maximum height of the lift of your bow. So I'll say that again you want to do the elbow rotation around the height of the maximum lift and this is seen in the vast majority of archers all around the world in terms of the top archers and the reason for this is pretty simple. When you're coming up and you're opening and raising the bow when you're at the maximum height of your lift this is also when you do your shoulder rotation and your torso rotation to get the bulk of your alignment. It's at this point that you want to do the elbow rotation as well and the reason is there are a couple of reasons but first of all gravity is helping your shoulder keep in the correct position and keep in a neutral nice position without it coming upwards towards the face and the ear and compressing towards the spine. So when you're lifting here the weight of your drawing the bow you've basically got some tension on the string this draw weight because the bow is above you and because of the angles here this is actually encouraging the the weight of drawing the bow is keeping the shoulder down. If you then you know replicate this and you imagine doing the same thing but you're at this position and you put weight on the bow then this is actually going to push the shoulder up whereas if you're in this position the weight of the bow is pushing down on the bow shoulder and helping to keep it down. This is the same reason why the elbow rotation is done at the same time as the shoulder rotation it's the same reason the shoulder rotation is better at this maximum height because it's more efficient and you can use gravity to help keep the shoulders low and keep using the lower muscles of the scapula in the back. So this is a key point here now the exact timing of when you start the elbow rotation does differ but what you'll find is generally the most efficient place is to do the bulk of the movement at the maximum height and if you watch now if you go back and watch videos of the world's top archers you'll see this is a very common trait and the elbow rotation is done at this maximum height together with the maximum amount of shoulder movement so rather than for instance you're here rather than trying to rotate the elbow like that and then lift it's much better to lift up and then as you're rotating the body and coming to your setup position that is when you do the elbow rotation as well and that's pretty simple when i just demonstrate it here now but it takes some time to coordinate that and learn how to integrate the skill into your own shot so a great way to practice with this first is with a band and i'll show you that now so when you do this a great thing you can do is you can simply get a band like i've got this one here this is just a simple red kind of theraband type thing and what you can do is get an old grip or maybe you can take the grip off your bow if you don't use grip tape you can just unscrew it and put this in the band so that you can use the grip as you're doing this exercise and this allows you to get the correct feeling you know through your bow hand and the correct feeling through your thumb much better than if you're just you know putting your hand on the the band like this so then i can now use this grip and i can draw up and when i draw up i've got the grip in my hand and you can see that there so i've got this grip in the hand and i can practice i can come up and i can practice rotating the elbow and then keeping it with the grip as well and it's really good to do it with this grip so not this one specifically with your grip so when you do this it's great to use this and use video feedback as well to see what you're doing and see when you're rotating the elbow joint so just as a demonstration you want to this is actually a little bit long here because at brace height this is too long so ideally you'd want it a little bit shorter and then you'd come up and you can practice rotating the elbow and keeping it and you can also feel the difference when you do the elbow rotation or when you don't do the elbow rotation you can feel the difference through the grip and this is something that you might not be able to feel when you're shooting with your bow because there's lots of other things going on and you know the weight's heavier and maybe you haven't got the strength to keep it so it's really good to feel the difference you will feel when you do the elbow rotation correctly you'll feel more direction through the thumb providing you've got the correct grip position that is but you'll feel more direction through the thumb and then you'll also feel more of a straight line coming through the pressure point through the arm and then into the shoulder when you do it correctly so this is a really really good thing to do so now i'll just demonstrate this same thing with the bow just so you can see the timing along with you know raising the bow and doing the set position and everything like that so i'll just get the bow now and do that so now with the bow just watch the timing of the elbow rotation so you come up it's not rotated here and then come up and then rotate align the shoulders do the shoulder alignment and draw so i slowed that down obviously so you can see the timing of it i'll do it in real time now so you can see there the timing of that rotation then allows the rest of the shot to be much stronger and the bow shoulder is in a good position so now let's go over why you wouldn't pick other times to do this rotation why wouldn't you for instance rotate when you're at the set position here why wouldn't you just rotate the elbow here and then lift the bow or why wouldn't you lift the bow align the shoulders and then do the rotation and shoot why would you not do that so let's go over that now so first of all when it comes to rotating the elbow joint earlier in terms of at the set position the main problem with this is it encourages you to use the upper muscles of the shoulders and have a high shoulder position when you lift later on and i'll show you that now so with the band i'll show you doing the elbow rotation too early so if you're in this position at the set position and you can see the elbow joint here is not rotated if i then try and rotate this if i try and rotate it to vertical you can do this at home as well and feel how you know the sensation in your arm and hand here when you then rotate it to vertical immediately you can feel and you can also maybe see the shoulder wants to roll over because you're encouraging this slight roll of the shoulder and it's coming away from the back what you can feel is when the elbow is not rotated here it's much easier to keep the connection through the back through the muscles of the serratus and then through to the shoulder and keep this connection low down in the muscles of the back so that when you then lift the bow it's just in a neutral position the shoulder that is is in a neutral position and it's all good but if you're in this position and you rotate and then lift it's much more likely that this is going to be high and the shoulder is going to be rolled so this is where you don't want to rotate early on at the set position like that and now why do you not want to rotate later on why do you not want to come up align and then do the rotation maybe here at setup or something and very simple reason for this it's under more load so it's going to be much harder and much more prone to any injury because obviously you've drawn the bow back further so your whole body is under more stress so you really want to get in the right position earlier on and you're also missing an opportunity as i said before to use gravity to your advantage and also to use the rest of the movement of your body to your advantage as well when you're doing that shoulder rotation you may as well do the rotation of the elbow and synchronize everything together because it gives you a much better ability to come up and rotate and get everything into a good line rather than separating everything out and being unbalanced so that's why you don't want to do it later on as well now before we get finished there are two mistakes that are very common when someone has got the timing of the rotation good but they haven't got the skill down quite correct so the first mistake is coming up and when they rotate is rolling the shoulder so it might look something like this and you can see as i did that i'll demonstrate it again coming up this is this is a good way of doing it is coming up and just rotating the elbow and then drawing but a common mistake is this coming up and rotating the shoulder over the shoulder over and losing the connection to the back taking the scapula away from being flat on the rib cage so this is a really common mistake and is often done when people first learn the elbow rotation and they're trying kind of everything they can to get the elbow rotation and the loose focus on the bow shoulder so the way to learn this is to learn the skill as i said before to make sure you can separate the hand rotation from the the bow arm elbow rotation from the shoulder rotation so you don't want to be doing this like that definitely don't you want to just be able to rotate the elbow and you're not rolling the shoulder like that so that's the first mistake there so the second mistake is more common in intermediate archers who have got really quite a good understanding of the technique and it's just some of the finer points that they're missing a little bit so this problem is basically when an archer comes up does the rotation in a good timing and then they're not rolling the shoulder but when they draw the rotation comes off like that and often you'll see this happen in archers that lack enough strength to keep this rotation or they're just not focusing on that particular part of the shot enough and they're just reverting back to you know old habits or something so if this is you figure out if it's strength or if it's just muscle memory and you just need to focus on it if it's just muscle memory that's easy just really concentrate on it hard use feedback if it's strength as well then bow training is your friend doing repetitions with the band doing the elbow rotation is your friend and making sure that when you shoot you can also check if you're shooting close blank boss you can check to see if you're maintaining it through the shot and really focusing on that that is going to get the biggest gain for you and really help to learn this properly and keep it through the shot so that is how you would improve that so that has been an overview of when you should do your elbow rotation and why so i hope you found that video useful as always be sure to smash that like button and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already i'll also put the links to social media down below and thank you for watching and i'll see you next time