4 Ways to Improve Your Archery Form

Want to improve your archery form and accuracy? Pay attention to these 4 tips that will help to improve your form/accuracy.

1. Fix your Feet First

Regardless of whether you are on flat terrain or shooting on a steep slope / hill then you should always fix your feet first so that you are either doing relaxed stance or square stance. It is possible to shoot using other stances, but if you're a beginner trying to get more accuracy then you really want to improve your footing before doing anything else.

2. Brace the Bow / Center your Hand

If you're not holding the bow in your hand properly it is going to effect where the arrow is going to go, often randomly. To improve consistency (and accuracy) you want to brace the bow's handle on the meaty part of your palm closest to your wrist.

If you don't put enough meat on your handle you will often torque the bow to the side. Likewise if you put too much meat on the handle you can torque the bow in the other direction and the bowstring will hit you in the forearm between the elbow and roughly halfway down the forearm.

What you want is the "Goldilocks" amount of meat on the handle. Centered.

3. Relax your Hand

You want your bow hand to be relaxed, and positioned like you are giving a very limp handshake. Keeping your hand centered and relaxed improves your accuracy. There is no need to squeeze the bow with your hand. You aren't going to drop it. After you shoot you will immediately grip the bow so that you don't drop it. (Some archers add an archery wrist strap on their bow so they can leave their bow hand completely relaxed the whole time.)

4. Pre-Aim before Drawing

When you pre-aim at a target you align your forearm and elbow with the arrow, and thus when you pull back the bowstring the arrow and your forearm end up being better aligned.

If you skip this step and just draw the bow and then aim, your elbow will often be too high or too low, which means your forearm will be out of alignment, resulting in increased chances of plucking your release, and you will be more likely to be shaking a bit if you are straining your forearm to hold the bow steady.

Pre-aiming only takes an extra moment to do, but it makes a big difference to accuracy if it makes you steadier and reduces the chances of plucking.

Bonus Tip

Also doesn't hurt to get archery lessons. Get archery lessons in Toronto from Cardio Trek.