Jenna Wickersheim, March – When I first started archery, I would hit my arm every once in a while, but I mostly ignored it. During my fourth grade season, my team qualified for nationals, so I started taking archery more seriously. I started hitting my arm while I was shooting so much to the point that my parents bought me a green sleeve that matched the green bow I had at the time. I continued to wear this at practices for some time, but I grew to despise it as it felt like it was suffocating my arm, and it would slide down at inconvenient times.
I decided to stop wearing the sleeve and just endure the pain. But a part of me knew that this wasn’t right. Archery shouldn’t have been painful for anyone. During our practice for nationals, I voiced my annoyance towards the bow string hitting my arm constantly. One of my coaches was there to help, and she did a quick Google search on how to not hit your arm while shooting archery. It turned out, all I had to do was slightly tweak the way I was holding my bow with my bow hand.
I was told to hold my bow with my fingertips more rather than wrapping my whole hand around it. This is a tactic that truly changed my career in archery for the better. Instead of tightly holding the bow, I now had a relaxed grip. This new grip would decrease the possibility of my arm twisting the bow, causing my forearm to be too close to the string. It is important to remember that your bow hand isn’t there to hold your bow up, it is just there to support the force that your draw hand is creating.
I think that a key thing to remember, especially for beginning archers, is that archery should never cause you pain. If you’re repeatedly hurting your arm with your bow string, you should start somewhere by asking your coach for help. They should be able to watch you shoot and find what is causing your bow string to hit your arm. Most of the time, it is going to be how you’re gripping your bow, but it could be something else like your stance. It might take a little while to get used to your new technique that will help you, but in the end, it will be worth it.
I also find it insanely important to catch this problem and fix it as soon as you possibly can. In your first couple years of archery, the way you start shooting will most likely be how you will carry on shooting for the rest of your career. Catching this problem quickly will make it easier to adapt to the techniques, and keep them. I say this because I’ve seen archers even in the high school category hitting their arm, and once you hit a certain point in your archery career, it is harder to just change the way you shoot.
