Archery Warm Up Exercises

Hi everyone. Today we're going to walk through a warm-up routine for archery. This of course isn't the only way you can warm up. There are lots of different exercises you can do. We'll go through a fairly easy to remember set of exercises that you can do at the beginning of the session and as a warm-down at the end of the session. Firstly, why warm-up? A lot of people will neglect this part of a training program because archery is so easy to get into, get started that I'd say most archers just don't warm up. They'll get their bow, they'll string it, they'll bring on the line and start shooting right away. And for the most part, there's very little that can happen. Archery is a very, very low risk sport. The chances of injury are incredibly low so it might not seem necessary to warm up. Now of course any coach for any sport will shake their heads and go, well that's a critical part of your training and for archery it definitely is. Most people however probably don't push themselves to the point where they will feel a consequence. So they might shoot a very short session, maybe one or two hours and go home. They might not train specifically, so they'll just be shooting casually. So you might not feel any of the negative repercussions of not warming up. But for people who are trying to squeeze in performance, you definitely want to build a warm-up routine before every session. Make it a habit so that you don't start shooting until you warm up. It's also crucial to consider that a lot of us who do archery probably aren't very active to begin with. So a lot of people might have fairly low levels of physical fitness or no experience in other sports. Many of us are stuck behind like desk jobs and quite sedentary. So because of that, your body might not be able to handle the repetitive, it's low stress, but it's repetitive low stress, low impact that can wear you down. And as you get older, it becomes even more important to remember to keep warmed up and maintain that routine every session. Otherwise you might find yourself feeling more stiff than usual, your body wears down a bit faster during the session, you feel more tired, and just things don't feel right. And even though the body doesn't move a lot in archery, there's a lot of muscles which support your body structure and if they're not warmed up properly, then again, you feel that strain, you feel tired, and you don't shoot as well. So make a habit to work some of these exercises into your routine. What you need to warm up, probably the most important thing is a stretching band. These are low resistance stretching bands you can buy from any sport shop. If you don't have one, you can still warm up without it, but quite a few obvious exercises will use a stretching band to add some light resistance so you can warm up more effectively. If you have your bow set up, you can use that as well for some of the exercises, but for the most part, you don't need anything else. Now to make this a bit easier to remember, we're going to go head to toe. Again, people do things in different orders and there's no one correct way, but just to make it easier when you're just setting up and you don't want to look up a video on how to warm up, just ideally head to toe. That includes head, shoulders, arms, hands, elbows, hips, and then knees. First, let's work on our head. So we're going to rotate our head side to side and up and down. We'll repeat that a few times. Also going to stretch our necks. We're going to use our hand to tilt our head down and then look down on the ground for about eight seconds and then up. Other side, look down on the ground for about eight seconds and then up. Okay, next we're going to go for shoulders. So my warm up here is to go and make circles of our arms. We'll start with small circles forwards and small circles backwards and then big circles forwards and then big circles backwards and repeat a few times. The important thing here is to make sure that your body does physically warm up. So I'm not going through the motions just to count off numbers, but you do want to actually work out. Not quite sweat, but you do want your body to warm up. The joints move around and again, like we said, a lot of people work desk jobs or are quite sedentary, so this level of movement might not be a natural movement for many people. So I'm going to work through quite a few reps of this to get physically warmed up and this is kind of why people don't like warming up. It's effort that could be spent shooting, but it's equally important that you prepare yourself to shoot and not just shoot. A good warm up routine will take around 15-20 minutes and you'll see in every competition, the serious archers take this seriously. Can you get away with not warming up? Yes. Do you recommend it? No. If you can, why wouldn't you? Okay, that's enough. So again, you might do like five, six, eight reps depending on how you feel, but that's for our demonstration there. Next is stretching band. We're going to rotate our arms over our head and then back around. Just testing our range of motion for a bit. Best thing of stretching band, you can stretch it out. So if it's too hard to go around, just move your hands further across behind your head like that. We're going to work on our chest and our shoulders and our arms. We're going to do a two motion exercise. The first one, we're going to stretch out like this, for our chicken wings. Back in and then back up with four hands. And then back in, chicken wings, back out with four hands again. And do quite a few reps of these as well. And you're going to work on your back muscles and shoulders as well. Now, if you like a bit of variety, I can mix in a second activity as well. So the second one is also working our shoulder joints. So we're going to go up and up more. So we're going to midpoint, down, and then up, and down, and then up. You can also go down, up, side, up, down, up, side, up. So you can do quite a few different exercises with your arms, or you can mix it up. So you can go like, you know, one, two, three, four. That's one way you can just add a bit of a variety. Some people get really bored mentally when doing warm-ups. So if you're that kind of person, just tailor your routine so you have a different variety of things, which work the same muscle groups, but you don't get so bored that you don't want to do it. So that's my variation. As long as you get that right. Okay, let's do one more. Okay, and one more. Why not? I feel like it now. All right. This part, we'll probably use a stretching band. You can do without one. We're going to start pushing forward, and again, using a stretching band will add some resistance to our arms. So we're going to put the stretching band behind our arms, like this, or neck, or you can do it from under, if you prefer that way. So we'll probably do the under version behind our back, like that, and we're going to push forward with our hands, like that. Just do more rips of this. You can see from the side. And again, if you don't have a stretching band, just do it without. You can just do bare hands. It's a good stretch of the arms out there. Again, the bands will add some resistance, so it might feel a bit more strenuous, which is good. But you do it with or without the bands. Let's do a few more. Okay, next we're going to stretch our arms. We're going to go across this way, and then we'll come across this way. Then other side, and up. We're also going to work on our fingers. So we're going to stretch out our fingers. Grab your fingers and spin them back. Hold it, and then we'll reverse it. And other hand, and we'll reverse it. And thumbs as well. So first thumb, spin it back, and then reverse it. And other thumb, and reverse it. So that's a pretty short version of that, but you find yourself a little loosened up. So it should be neck muscles, your shoulders, and your hands. You could do wrist ones too if you want to, but overall you're loosening up this upper body here. Our next step is to work on our core and our lower back muscles. So we're going to do windmills. We're going to go one, two, like that. That's it. If you can touch your toes, go for it. Otherwise, it doesn't matter too much. All you're doing is just getting those core muscles and lower back muscles warmed up. Variation, if not bending down or don't want to, you can obviously do the upper body version. Just rotate. That's fine as well. And the P favourite, where you stand on one leg and stretch out your thighs. Again, if you need to balance, just hold something. You don't have to be a ballerina. And other leg. This is important because you do a lot of standing, and a lot of walking and archery. Like I said before, you don't really move a lot, but a lot of your muscles will support your body structure. It's important to keep these loose, flexible, warmed up, so that way you always perform at your maximum. Back to stretching band, we're going to get into some drawing positions. This is where we get to the more shooting side. We're just going to pull back to our anchor point and hold and do that a few times. This is going to get used to our shooting muscles more specifically. And then we're going to do some dry fires with the stretching band, of course. In, and this is where you get used to using again that muscle group, using your hands. You don't want to go like that and pluck with your hands. That's already a bad technique. Just use the same shot process. Squeeze our back muscles and get your mind into the game as much as your body. You're already visualising the shot process and do that a few times. If your bow's set up, you can use the bow for some more warm-ups. I like doing the structure part of SBTs. To do this, we're going to move the hand on the other side, so we're gripping it on the opposite side as usual, and we're going to get the bow behind our head and we'll pull it back like that. I know a lot of people get weirded out by this, but it's actually quite a natural way to open up your chest, feel the shoulders come into good structure and alignment. Do that a few times. There we go. And of course, might as well pull the bow back and do some holding. Get used to the muscles of your actual draw weight. Really important that you don't use the bow as a warm-up when you're off the shooting line. You'll find people who want to use the bow to warm up using those exercises either behind the head or doing normal draws. They will actually walk up to the shooting line and do the warm-ups on the shooting line. Nice to visualise the target, but also it's a safety thing. If no arrows, people can't see that, so if you are warming up with the bow when you're on the equipment side, then you might be told off by the judge. So safety first, make sure people around you feel safe even though you're not using any loaded bows or arrows. If you do want to use the bow, use the shooting line, stand there, do your stretches, but don't do it behind the line. That's basically the warm-up routine. Again, there are different exercises which you can add or you can remove some of these, but I think this is the bare minimum for a quick warm-up session. More rigorous routines will have far more motions to be more comprehensive, but this is the short basic version to get into the habit and mindset of having a warm-up. It's easy to remember head to toe and you should feel looser, a bit more energised and more keen to actually shoot rather than have a cold start and your body starts stiffening up right away. Now at the end of the session, the cool down is basically the same thing, same exercises, head to feet. The one thing I'll probably add which I do like is the one-footed squat. It's the one where you put one foot over your knee and you squat down like that. You can use a chair to lean on or something to lean on, or you can balance on one foot and you feel your quads and your glutes stretching out. The reason behind this is that you are standing a lot on a shooting line and walking around quite a bit to fetch arrows, so you probably want to stretch out these muscles as well. Again, the cool down or the warm down is just as important as the warm-up. Many people just pack up and go home and you'll mostly be fine, but again, if you are doing a more rigorous training session or multiple training sessions in a week, you want to improve your recovery times. If you don't warm down, your muscles will stiffen, you might find yourself more sore than what you expect, so if you just take the time, the 10-15 minutes to go through a proper cool down routine, again, you'll recover faster, you'll feel better and that will just generally enhance how you feel about archery. Anyway, I hope you found this interesting and helpful. Thank you all for watching and hopefully we'll see you again next time.