Grip - Torque Consistency

[Jules]

I hate to be a stick in the mud, but I'm a little lost as to why I shoot better with a loose bow hand. As far as I understand, anchoring the bow by gripping hard would encourage rotation about the grip moreso than rotation about the Centre of Mass of the bow/arrow/deformable hand combination. I'm not able to even guess the centre of pressure of my 'natural' strangle grip on the handle but it couldn't be more than 20mm closer to the target than the CM of the bow by itself........ point being that I don't understand why it makes such a large difference. I feel great with minimal (but arbitrary) contact with the bow at the moment. Why aren't adjustable/shapeable handle rests offered? Do I need to take up whittling? I've been looking for an excuse ;)

[clever_guy]

"point being that I don't understand why it makes such a large difference."

Put simply, you want to avoid as much tension in the bowarm and bowhand as possible. If you have a "death grip" on the bow - you have considerable tension in your bowhand and bowarm. The tight grip itself is inconsistant, leads to varying amounts of torque - as well as a tendency to attempt to "over-control" the "float" of the bow during aiming. Shooting at a higher level you can notice the differences even in tension in the different bow fingers (grip) leading to errant arrows.

A considerable amount of higher level archers use custom grips, either modifing stock grips or buying custom grips (like Loesch - http://www.bowgrips.com/). If you are just starting out a better plan is to work on relaxing the tension in your grip as much as possible first, and using vasoline to look at tension issues between the grip and pressure points. Then get a second stock grip and modify it, or try different grips (higher/lower/thicker/narrower). Commercial custom grips are quite expensive and if you don't know what you are looking for you could spend a considerable amount of money going around in circles.

-CG

[TJ Mason]

point being that I don't understand why it makes such a large difference
A small difference at the bowhand turns into a big difference at 100 metres.

Having said that, I've seen excellent archers who have almost a white-knuckle grip on the bow. It's all about reproducibility from shot to shot, and most archers find it easier to reproduce the same relaxed grip each time than to reproduce a tight grip.

If you want to have a go at making your own grip, Win & Win supply a "grip maker" kit. This consists of two large sachets of stuff that make a kind of putty when mixed, and allow you to mould a grip to your own hand.