Places! Roll tape! Action!!! What does video and improving your shooting have to do with each other? Quite a bit actually. By being able to see yourself and take a critical eye to you form, it’s much easier to see flaws that cannot be detected by oneself while shooting.
A perfect example happened recently with my son. As he has been growing and increasing his draw weight, his form has been changing as well. Somewhere along the line he developed the habit of what I call “hipping.” This is when the hips are thrust towards the target as the bow is pulled back. For several shooting sessions I tried to talk him through correcting the issue, even going so far as to stand behind him and hold his hips in place. Nothing seemed to work and he subconsciously kept falling back into this flawed form. Then along came the camera…
I have been using the video camera as a tool for myself for quite a while and have seen a lot of benefits while picking apart my form. Because it has been successful for me, I decided to give it a try with him. My hope was that by him being able see exactly what he was doing, and not hear me tell him what was happening, he’d better be able to understand the issue.
The first part of the video shows the before and the second part, with me doing nothing other than showing him the video and pointing out the unwanted hip movement, shows the improvement:
What was amazing to me is that I had spent all sorts of effort trying to correct the problem verbally and with my instruction to no avail. After watching the video of himself a couple of times, he turned around and immediately corrected 95% of the problem! All it took was him being able to see himself and he was much better able to understand what was going on and to correct the problem himself.
Now that the main issue has been rectified, we can move on to other improvements such as the draw length and relaxing the bow hand a bit more. But one step at a time…
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I have really enjoyed following the articles, tips, and tidbits of advice offered on your site.
Film is truly a great method to use for coaching, it allows the shooter to see exactly the behavior or form issue in question…truly a picture is worth a thousand words. The vast majority of the time form issues have a root cause, the root cause should be addressed prior to the associated issues. Your son’s draw legnth is too long which is the # 1 cause of an archer leaning back on draw, # 2 is too heavy a draw weight. Difficult to see in the video, but more than likely the release and/or loop could be shortened providing some help, if that is not enough try shotening the draw legnth 1/2″.
A seperate issue is the tendancy he has to grab the release, he needs to let the strap hold the release, and only touch the trigger with his finger.
Just one shooters observations. You two shoot well and continue to educate us all with your Archery Reports and insights!
Chris >>>———–> Student-Archer
Chris,
Thank you for your comments. This last year has brought a lot of changes to my son’s form and before this shooting session I made a lot of changes to his setup, thus the too long of draw. Even when shooting with too short of a draw, he tended to do the “hipping”; just something that he would fall into, and something many people, especially youth, do. It was definitely accentuated by the longer draw and was only corrected when he finally was able to see himself doing it. Video is a very powerful tool and I’ll continue to use it myself and I encourage others to use as well!
send me information archery tuning bow plz
I’d love to help if you could please be a little more specific on what you are looking for.