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Shoulder Flexibility Problems For Archers

By Tim Goodwin

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Published: 08Dec2009
Word count: 867
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The problem most archers have with there 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 shoulders 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 some they 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.

Tim Goodwin is a Professional Coach and business owner based in Luxembourg helping his clients become fitter and healthier for life and sport. He is also author of the Triple X Archery Conditioning program, an 8 week training system designed specifically for archers. For more information go to the BLOG at http://fitforarchery.com

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