Archery Exercise Gets You All A Flutter
By · CommentsCreated a video in response to a comment I got from a BLOG post a week or so back.
This video shows you exactly how to do the Flutters exercise which is great for activating some of the primary shooting muscles which are dormant on many people, especially if you work at a computer for extended periods during the day!.
As always leave your feedback and comments below 
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Is Endurance Training Good For Archery?
By · CommentsBig question: Is Archery An Endurance Sport?
I see a significant number of archers train for archery by jogging… 5km, 10km and sometimes further!
You may have a gym membership and you’ll do the age old “fat-burning-zone” circuit, 20 minutes treadmill, 20 minutes cross trainer, 20 minutes exercise bike, diligently watching the calorie counter… What’s kinda interesting to note about this workout, studies have shown that it is not particularly “fat-burning” in nature (but that is for another article)
And then there is the walkers, power walking up the street during lunch time, or those nordic walkers (affectionately known in my house as “stick draggers”), tapping their way along the trail.
Question is , is any of this actually helping your archery?
I would likely say NOT.
There are better ways to train for archery!
An endurance sport in my mind, and in the mind of sport scientists is a steady state oxygen fueled workout. You hardly ever push yourself in to a red zone state, where the accumulation of lactic acid in the muscles outweighs the replenishment by your cardio vascular system.
The thing is whenever you pick up your bow to shoot, there is a finite time that you are able to maintain a static full draw position, before the burn in your muscles renders the shot pointless? Correct?
This means shooting a bow and arrow is not an endurance activity, you are using a completely different energy system in the body. In which case we should be looking at ways to make our body function in this energy system more optimally, and sadly this does not include jogging, “fat-burning-zone” workouts in the gym, or any amount of walking.
Despite the fact you are doing this action many times over the course of the day, 144 or more in the case of a FITA target round, your body is essentially performing a strength exercise 144 times with a period of recovery between repetitions and a longer recovery between sets (while you go to collect the arrows).
I have had plenty of people argue with me over this subject, claiming that getting around a field course, or even the walk to and from the target on a FITA target round requires endurance.
Once again I disagree. Even on a field course the periods of actual effort are generally quite short. You’ll climb a short hill, relax for a few minutes, shoot your bow, relax a bit, walk down the hill, score your arrows, walk to the next target, rest and so on… So once again, short bursts of effort normally no more than a minute or two long, then longer periods of rest.
From a sports science perspective this is “intervals”. To improve your ability to do intervals you are NOT going to go jogging for an hour, do aerobics, walk or do the “fat-burning-zone” workout! Once again different energy system!
So what can actually improve your shooting if jogging is out? What is going to make that last shot of the day as fresh and consistent as the first? The answer is not necessarily rocket science, and if you’ve taken in the rest of the article you’ll already know the answer.
Resistance based workouts (i.e. some bodyweight or externally weighted exercises such as rows, deadlifts, squats and lunges)
Interval based cardio workouts: This is simply short bursts of intense efforts with periods of recovery in between.
Neither type of workout need take more than 45 minutes and with the right type of training program, all the exercises can be quite safe and will have little impact on your shooting form, other than making you more consistent as you are able to hold at full draw for longer and execute solid shots all day long.
Like everything I write here, give it a try for a few weeks and see what a difference this stuff can have. Feed back with your comments below, I want to know what you think!
Shoulder Flexibility For Archers
By · CommentsThe problem most archers have with their shooting form is nothing to do with the way they are taught to shoot.
Not even the very best archery skills coach can work a perfectly repeatable form in to most archers. The problem lies with your lifestyle outside of archery. You may live and breath this sport but we all have to work at some point, and the most common career for an archer is one where you’ll spend an inordinate amount of time sat in front of a computer screen.
You can’t avoid it, even the most committed individual will struggle to maintain the ‘ideal’ posture sitting at their laptop or desktop PC for 8 or more hours a day. The longer you spend at a computer, the more your shoulders will push forward and your arms will rotate inwards.
Do a little test for me… stand in front of a full length mirror with your hands and arms left hanging naturally. Tell me how knuckles you see in each hand in the mirror. The ideal posture is with your hands by your sides and the only knuckle you’ll see is that of the thumb. Commonly you’ll see the whole of the back of your hands, showing all the knuckles of both hands, with the hands in front of the body and not at the sides.
This little test can tell us a huge amount about the relative tightness of muscles in the shoulder complex as well as weakness of others. The extremes of this postural imbalance result in injury. Commonly the injuries occur with the small rotator cuff muscles, created by an instability of the shoulder joint. Sadly the wild arm swinging you see many people doing as a warm up on the archery field is where the instability it exaggerated and usually when the injury occurs. Check out some of my other stuff to get the full low down on warming up for archery.
So how does this impact your shooting form? Without getting too much like a lecture on anatomy, the problems commonly stem from a tightness across the chest muscles (the pectorals) and a weakness or inhibition(low activity) of the muscles between the shoulder blades (the rhomboids). When you spend those 8 hours plus a day at your computer, the shoudlers rotate forwards, this shortens the length of the muscles across the chest. This also pulls the shoulder blades out and away from the middle of the back giving you that kind of hunchback or winging effect. The constant stretching and lengthening of the rhomboids causes them to switch off and become very difficult to wake up.
When you turn up to the shooting range and get ready to shoot, you probably feel like you should do some stretching of the muscles you are about to use, so you go ahead and stretch the muscles across the back of the shoulders, pulling the shoulder blades apart. You are essentially stretching the very muscles that are already stretched, and extremely inactive. The stretching then just inhibits those ESSENTIAL shooting muscles even more.
So now you have started shooting trying to execute the right shot sequence with your main shooting muscles across the back of the shoulders not working, the muscles across the chest nice and tight and probably a shoulder joint that has become even more unstable. It is no wonder that many archers worst arrows are the first of the day, for somethey never recover from a poor start to the day.
Your archery coach is probably at a loss at why you can never draw through the clicker the same every time, or why you never seem to create good balance between the front and back of your shooting form. Maybe it is just down to your shoulder flexibility.
So what can be done about it?
First of all you need to turn your preconceived ideas on how and what you should stretch and warm up before shooting. Probably the most powerful stretch you can do before shooting is a stretch for the chest muscles. Couple this with a quick and vigorous rub of the muscles between the shoulder blades and you shoulders will be ready to go from the very first shot of the day.
This ‘quick and vigorous rub’ between the shoulder blades is where you’ll need to find a friend or a tennis ball. Your friend needs to stand behind you and place the palm of his hand between the spine and the corner of the shoulder blade, then simply rub, up and down placing a reasonable amount of pressure. Obviously repeat on both sides. Avoid putting pressure on the spine for obvious reasons.
You can achieve the same with a tennis ball and a wall, placing the ball between you and the wall on your back, and rolling it up and down. It takes a little practice and you’ll look a bit funny, but not nearly as crazy as those folk doing the arm swinging!
You can also add some special exercises in to your training programs to help activate the inhibited rhomboid muscles even more, as well as concentrating your stretching efforts on the muscles that are tight.
Warm Up Strategy For Archery To Promote Consistency
By · CommentsAs far as archery warm ups go, most people just end up copying what everyone else does without really too much thought about how and why it is (or is not helping them).
I’ve prepared a short report with my own warm up, why I do it and why some of the ones you’ve done before may not be ideal for you.
Enter your name and email address below and I’ll send you the report right away.
Once you’ve read the report come back here and post your comments below.
Where Are All The Archery Training Programs?
By · CommentsGo to google and search for “Golf Fitness Training”.
Now do the same for “Archery Fitness Training”.
BIG difference in the results wouldn’t you say!
There is a distinct lack of health and fitness programs designed with the archer in mind. Yes we are a minority sport, however you would have thought there would be a few!
There are very few (read NONE that I have found) strength and conditioning coaches who have taken seriously the physical demands of archery on a person.
Most people do not appreciate how simply being fitter in general can make substantial improvements to your shooting performance. The realisation only comes when you have experienced it for yourself. I have been on both ends of the scale (quite literally) and can certainly vouch for the change in performance.
Some Archery coaches have made a stab of what exercises to prescribe, often selecting sports specific movement patterns, which, to be honest have little or no effect on your performance. The downside is these exercises create over-use injuries in areas such as the rotator cuff muscles as well as decreasing consistency rather than improving it!
Like many people, I spent years doing aerobic based routines on the treadmill or out on my bike in the mistaken belief this would help me lose fat and be fitter.Since becoming a fitness professional 5 years ago I have discovered that all this time was wasted where I could have been on the practice field instead.
Others try the bodybuilding route, whilst more effective for fat loss, the archaic methods of body part split routines and isolation of individual muscles does nothing but create a sore body, inflexibilities and ultimately injuries too.
It almost sounds like I contradict myself saying there is a lack of archery based training programs, yet saying we shouldn’t be doing exercises to target the muscles we use in archery?
The point I am trying to put across is that on one hand we must work in a general way to improve overall strength and conditioning, AND perform exercises that compliment our shooting technique rather than compromise it.
To do this we need a closer examination of the postural and physiological issues that commonly are attached to the people that do archery.
To get the most from your training time initially I suggested in my previous article “Archery A Sport? Your Kidding Me Right” an approach to exercising which includes multi-muscle group exercises, high intensity interval cardio and mobilisation sessions.
For something a little more targeted (sorry) a closer examination of the key postural faults is required and that will come in the next article.
