How to INCREASE your BOW draw STRENGTH

Hey guys, dance L shaped Staton, today we're going to go over how to improve or

increase

your

pull

strength

, a topic I find exciting. I have been in the hunting and fitness space for over 20 years as a

strength

and conditioning coach before we get to the meat and potatoes we want to take a step back and do this the right way so There are no shortcuts in this video, we're going to show you the right way to not only develop stability on a platform and then the amazing exercises, but also have you evaluate and reevaluate, so we'll check

your

initial stability as well as any potential for injury.

When we are done with this, you should have a handful of amazing exercises that will certainly decrease the strength of your Bo jaw and also help you. your trip, so in order not to take any shortcuts, we will first do the evaluation. The first thing we'll ask you to do is sit on the floor,

draw

your bow, and make sure you're not leaning too far. It's very common and the way to do it is to make sure you can pull it back consistently without changing the length of your midline without leaning in one direction and maintain stability without drifting if you're not leaning, congratulations, that's awesome and there it is where we want it to start.

Anyway, it could be just taking your bow to your local Pro Shop or doing it yourself, lightening your you know, loosening the limb bolts. I think what I like about these Matthews is that they have different mods, these are 75lb mods and this one was also a lot without a bow vise, I could just buy 70lb mods with the same

draw

length at 27 for me, I swapped them out with two Allens and lowered it to the load most appropriate for me, where I am today below. We'll take a peg or a broomstick and do two tests to make sure you have good mobility and stability in your shoulder, doing passes or dislocations and then behind-the-neck presses with just the peg for your peg. things that you guys can literally just grab a piece of PVC pipe or you can grab your regular household broom, or it'll be okay, all we're using these tools is to assess where we are mobility-wise, okay guys.

You can see I have a peg resting on top of my traps and it's behind my neck. Now this is not not an exercise, this is purely for evaluation and I am going to do strict pressing in a controlled manner and directly above my head without any pain, okay, just do it. a handful of reps, make sure you have a full range of motion. Common faults will be to bring your elbows back and then what that will create is a little bit of rounding and bowing to get you up above your head, this is just a lack of mobility, so again every time you can't. sit up straight and press in a straight line where my wrist is above my elbow and my elbows are above my shoulder.

Any deviation from that line is a telltale sign that you are lacking some type of mobility in your shoulder capsule and you should worry more about improving your mobility or stability before worrying about improving your strength. Next, let's move on to the pin pass or dislocation, so here's our now, we'll do a pass. Let's start with a pretty wide grip which just basically determines your mobility, the narrower grip you can hold, the more mobile you will be, so I'm going to start from the end of this peg and just keep my arms extended. I'm going to go up behind me and touch my lower back. keeping my arms extended through the elbow so we are not looking for pain and we are not looking for any compromise if there is any deviation stop and understand maybe film yourself do this and see where you are so if you want to test your mobility move your hands a little bit, I'm going to move forward a couple of inches and then on the next rep I'm going to get a little bit closer and inch closer towards my end of range of motion where I don't have the mobility to get much closer than that without bending my hands. elbows, so it's either a pin step or a dislocation.

It's just a good opportunity to see if you can do it without paying with your elbows locked as there are faults of the peg shepherds it's just bending the arm so from here you can't go all the way back or if it's an arm it's when you're a too telling sign that you don't have the mobility for that, widen yourself so you're in range and maybe then you still can't do it or you're in pain, understand that there's a deficiency there, so basically we're going to want to address that before we address The improvement of bow fall strength, if you have passed the three tests, you can do it. pull the bow back sitting on a controlled midline if you can do the back press without any pain or without your elbows falling back if you have completed the pin passes, congratulations, let's move on to developing stability in the shoulder capsule, specifically on the shoulder blades guys these are great muscles a lot of them attach to the shoulder blades the shoulder blades go up rotation down rotation they lift depression protraction retraction they do a lot for stability so we have to isolate ourselves and make sure we have a good strong stability We as archers are primarily concerned with bringing the scapula closer to the spine and lowering it, so there will be a retraction depression along that lower trap, so these next exercises will be very important for you to develop stability through along your midline and across the midline. shoulder capsule once we're done with the assessment you can move on to stabilization which will actually start with your core, all movement starts and ends with your core so we need to make sure it's strong enough to build a solid platform and then We'll talk about stabilization through the shoulder capsule.

Okay guys, so what we're going to do is work on the strength component, so all you need is a couple cans of soup. In this case I am using 1 kg plates that weigh 2.2 pounds. To teach you the common faults of the T's and Y's in all of these movements is the shoulder lift or shrug. You want to avoid shrugging your shoulders. We're not going to invite your upper traps to the party. We are looking for the lower traps and rhomboids to do most of the work. so go ahead and bend at ninety degrees, make sure it's an athletic position.

From there, you will retract your scapula to ninety degrees from your midline, hold it at the top for two to three seconds, and then lower it back down. I recommend eight to twelve reps without any compromise or shrugs on the traps. When you finish, you will do a similar movement. These are the Y again. You will retract and press your muscles down and then make a Y with your arms. hold it at the top for two to three seconds and then lower under control again restart each rep, also eight to twelve reps for this move. The shoulders will feel it.

Common mistakes are teeing back here or slowly rising in the chest or shrugging your shoulders too much. a little bit, avoid that at all costs, okay, so we finish those Y's and teas, we'll show you three more really exciting band works. These are cross symmetry bands, you can use any type of band but I warn you err on the side of a light band we will use three and seven pound bands for these next moves and it's more about your technique than anything else, so check your ego at the door, these are the bands that will be placed at eye level.

Let's cross them, hence the name cross symmetry. We'll show you why: first um, eight to twelve reps, that's going to be the general rep range for all of these, always, always stop if you're in a lot of pain. Good pain is simply kind. from that slow burning tonic feeling and the intense pain is very sharp and direct, that is not good, stop immediately, so why get negatively depressed? Your common negative faults will be to shrug your shoulders when pressing overhead, make sure you don't do any extensions, make sure your midline is strong and while doing the negative do it under control every time you reset and depress, be careful with a Shrug.

So when we say establish your midline or activate your core, what we're looking for is to find a neutral relationship between the hip and the spine, so some people will, even when they fire their arches, there will be an anterior pelvic tilt, so from a side view. They'll look like this, what they're doing is their hips are moving forward and they're basically creating undue stress on the lower back. On the contrary, it is a posterior chain. Some people will have their hips rolling back, so when I see from a side view this would probably be best, it would look like this and that's not a perfect posture either, so we're looking for a neutral spine support in the hip for an impact or a punch, so to speak, in the midline and that will tighten. your entire core, yes you can take your belly button and bring it closer to your spine and up and then I will create a corset effect across your entire midline and for the geeks that will

increase

your intra-abdominal pressure and stabilize that neutral hip relationship neutral spine the bottom line is to avoid the Instagram booty stance, don't be like that when you're shooting a bow or like that, find a good neutral spine in the hip and you should do that while doing all these exercises, next up is a TYT, my favorite.

I'll show you a TYT which is a repeat. My challenge for you is to be able to perform eight to twelve reps without interruption, so 180 YT is one rep. Press, make your tea, make your why, make your tea, that's one. rep, so a tea, why tea, that's to perform that for 8 to 12 reps in a row, you'll feel a good, healthy burn. Last but not least the 90 90 cross series looks like this which you will start with just bring your shoulder blades towards the end of your spine down you will do a 90 degree turn externally rotate and hold and come back out from the stance and it will restart, press 90 90 again once I've reached my maximum external rotational range of motion, then I'm going to do a slowly eccentric lis down and back.

These three movements, combined with the soup stick exercises, will create a lot of stability for the bow drawing process and you can do this almost every day. Depending on how your shoulders feel, it could be used as a warm-up so you can again supplement your training for the day by doing your due diligence with the bow, okay guys, so we built some stability and hopefully you felt a good healthy burn in your shoulders. and you're understanding more like kinesthetic awareness or proprioception as communication from your brain to your muscles oh yeah, the shoulder blades need to get closer to the spine and lower and how that will translate into better archery, which is what we're all after now.

Let's work on how to get down to the meat and potatoes, as some good solid exercises to add to your program that will certainly improve your arch drawing strength. Alright guys, we're going to show you some amazing strength moves, actually there's only three of them, that's all of them. isometric, what does that mean? It means your muscles don't change length, how long should you hold them? I don't know 10 seconds 30 seconds per minute two minutes. Hopefully, you'll add more time each week. Let's show you the first one. In this first move, I'm going to use a five pound plate and what I'm going to do is just put it in kind of a nice solid plank position.

I'm not shrugging, I'm getting depressed and I'm just going to put this out. to the side and I'm going to hold on for 30 seconds, now what's going to happen is I'm going to get really shaky but I'm hitting my core. I'm stabilizing my bow arm and my shooting arm all at the same time and it gets really tricky to maintain good form. You may want to film yourself doing this, making sure you don't compromise and maintain a really strong position. When you're done, switch sides. Make sure you don't shrug, but you're down, come out to your side don't shrug here hold it down and stabilize along your midline this is a great move goals 30 seconds on each side or more do it and we'll show you the next one so the next one was I'm going to use a simple light dumbbell, that word is relative, it could be a 50 pound dumbbell, it could be a 25 pound Dumbo, it could be a hundred pounds, in our case we're going to film with the of 25 pounds, so I'm going to go ahead and take my step, my bow arm and I'm going to go ahead and press, get a nice wide board and from here I'm going to press down and I'm going to pull back and I'm going to hold this position fall for 30 seconds.

The goal is possibly one minute and then I'll switch sides. Our last static position will be a pull-up position. If you don't have pull-ups, don't worry, just lift yourself up over the pull-up bar and hold the position for the same amount of time. as long as possible, we will also show youthe ring row option in case they don't have a pull-up bar. Alright, guys, we'll show you the force. This is something sexy and fun. It starts with a pushup with a dumbbell, but these are not like your normal pushups, you're going to work through a neutral face, do a retract face and then do your normal pushup, this is like a rendition of scapular pushups with the pushup. complete check it out so get into a strong plank position the first thing I'm going to do is go ahead and press my scalp deeply into the spine navel drawn into a full range of motion tight push up all the On the way back you set both scaps and then you decelerate down and push up, so it's actually a slower methodical pushup where we retract those scaps on each rep, so the key here is to draw the shoulder blades toward the spine and down and then start pushing up. each rep do as many reps as you can Start with maybe 10, maybe 20, just make sure you don't compromise your midline as well, so we're getting a lot of bang for our buck on this move and then you'll go right into bending.

In the rows, in my world we call them Penley rows, but I'll show you what we're looking for. You'll have a lot of tension in your hamstrings and really focus on tightening up your lats, rhomboids, and bottom. traps so set up an athletic position so what I want to do is get to where I'm ready to be an athlete so to speak so in athletic positions here I'm just going to rotate a little bit more my dumbbells are just off the floor I will pick them up to where they barely leave the ground. I'm going to put my show blades together, follow up with my elbows, squeeze at the top and let it all the way back press and paddle, we don't shrug so Nowhere in sight is this happening, press bro, Pause again at the top for just a few seconds, shoot for double-digit reps, at least ten, and then move on to the next part, okay, we're going to do scat pull-ups, so scat.

Pull-ups are like those push-ups, we are still doing a pull-up if you have them, if you don't you will just do the first part, let me guide you from a dead position. We're just going to let it go and from here you're going to press all the way down to a strong starting position for some of you this is your workout so you're going to come back down press for a few seconds and go back if you have pull ups just do some foot pull ups, you press, you lift all the way back, you press, you lift all the way back, so what you're going to see is this is a really difficult movement, but it's promoting what we're looking for is taking those lower traps deep, pressing those gaps down and developing a lot of strength. on the back, so for me this is the fundamental movement of everything we've shown you up to this point, okay guys, so we'll use the lacrosse ball.

This is a double lacrosse ball to literally work out mobility, but you can buy a lacrosse ball at a sporting goods store for a couple of dollars and what it can do is really break up those muscle knots, those muscle adhesions where you They become rubbery and if you have never experienced that many athletes go to a masseuse and now the masseuse will quickly find all your hot spots. This is your take home massage therapist, you can literally put him up against the wall or lie on him and you can work through external rotation and find those, there's a hot spot right there and just break up that tissue, get new blood in there, promote recovery, getting some of the cellular debris and debris out of there, so this really promotes healing and prevention. gum the stitches and you don't have to have a lacrosse ball, you can use a baseball or softball, but you can do your own myofascial release.

There are many videos available that can go into greater detail, we just wanted you to be Get to know your regular massage therapist and use them almost daily if you can guys, L-shaped best practices are to make sure you assess where you are at and then create some stability not only in the midline but also in the shoulder. capsule and then improve your strength and use them as a supplement to your daily exercise after 28 days, we feel you will see noticeable improvement without taking shortcuts, it's not about shortcuts, we want it to be slow, steady, sustainable like a strong. trajectory so you can increase your pulling force over time