episode 2 | the front end

HD version of this episode
transcript of this episode
french subtitled video
french translation of transcript


Again (as in the first episode), this area of technique is so misunderstood that it is actually often ignored. When people do look at the front end, they talk in terms of controlling the front shoulder, and as we will see this can not (and need not) be done.
The front end is the linkage between the bow / hand interface and all the moving parts of the shot. It is vital but nowhere near as compicated as people make out...

Transcript:

I hope you’ve already seen the clip about front hand position. I am just going to take a second to really talk about what we’re going to refer to as the 'front end'. The front end with either a compound or a recurve, we are talking from here forward. It is something that novices, intermediates, even higher, have a real problem with.

Let’s make some things fairly clear to start with. There is no push ever from the front end. Everything is a reaction to drawing the bow, - recurve or compound - holding the bow at full draw. There can be no push. If there is a push, you are going to be moving this area and that is going to cause problems. You are going to be putting pressure on this wrist which we’ve talked about before and it is going to cause problems.

So you are looking for a concept in bone on bone on bone, not muscle. You are looking for an idea of this fitting together as a solid unit with no need for a push at any point during the draw. I will just show you with this a couple of things that are both right and wrong. What you are looking for is no movement on this. What you see a lot of is a push. You see and people work out (and coaches tell them) to locate this front shoulder. There is no location of the front shoulder. [The] front shoulder wants to sit in a comfortable position bone, bone, bone. To put it in any other position, it is going to require you to move this joint and you have got a lot of muscle here and a lot of novices and lot of intermediate have a massive imbalance in their musculature because of this push. They literally move the ball of this bone here out of the socket and they have to hold it out of position using a lot of muscle. And it generally looks something like this, push - and now what are we going to do. You can see to start with, this is where issues of clearance and alignment come in. Absolutely nothing - the front end does nothing. It does not matter whether you want to shoot with it in line with the shoulder or you want to shoot out the way and we will talk about that a little later - but there is nothing on the front end.

And so you would see with the bow that this pocket where the bow sits, bow everything back this way bone, bone, bone - no muscle used - nothing on the front end. No shake because we’ve lent on this, no moving this out of line, never even a concept that you can hit your arm. The grip goes to the wrist and absolutely nothing. Everything from here forwards is a reaction to the weight that is here, that allows you to move the other part. Once you start push from here, it will cause very big problems