I've been shooting a bow since I was a teenager, and I'm 51 now. I've been shooting Traditional/Primitive for about 27 years. Having said that, I'd say the past 12 to 15 years I've had bad shooting technique that led to flinching/target panic. 6'2" tall, and my draw was only around 26". I won't go into all the things I was doing wrong, but instead I'll mention some that I'm trying here in the last month or so that I think are right.
Iowabow was hitting on some of these techniques in his comments. RangerB lives near me, and comes down to the Twin Oaks club. Jimmy (RangerB) has been doing a lot of training with some of the top shooters in the nation for competitive shooting. His wife has recently started shooting a recurve, and I bought my girlfriend one to get her started. Jimmy met with us and BigA and his wife, Pappy's son Beau and his wife...basically a archery demo by Jimmy to get these ladies started off right. It was probably the best demonstration of technique I'd ever witnessed! While it is true that different style bows may require tweaking of techniques to apply to that bow, I felt like much of what Jimmy was showing us was good stuff that would work with any recurve or selfbow.
For the bow hand, he tried to get the "lifeline" of the hand solid into the handle, but don't grip the bow hard showing the whites of your knuckels...creating potential sideways torque. But make it comfortable to you! Need a balanced stance, with both your feet point 90 degrees from the target where you can have the straight back with shoulders up and inline. You need a good solid consistant anchor, but don't bend your head down to the string, bring the string to you and solid with more then one point of contact with your face if possible. Your fingers shouldn't be the "trigger" for the release, but instead have a very subtle push with the bow hand and slight rotate back of your elbow of your string arm. With that slight backward rotation of the string arm which should bring your shoulders more together in the center of your back, at that slight backward movement, relax your fingers at the same instance letting the weight of the drawn bow pull the string from your fingers. Don't mentally say "I'm on", and fling your fingers open! The release should surprise you much like squeezing the trigger of a rifle and not knowing when it's going to fire.
That is a much different style then what I was doing, but I've found that with the subtle push/pull I don't have near the right/left variation I did before. My releases are much crispper, and I'm not flinching near as much. I'm still working on this, and have a long way to go yet I feel. But I have shot enough to know the sense this makes over what I was doing! I still cant my bow some, but not was steep as before. I really like the being inline across the back and the push/pull focusing on a release that happens on its own, versus when my brain says..."let go!". My draw has increased with this style, and my girlfriend is making good progress with her shooting. I feel like she is learning good technique from the beginning, instead of developing bad technique and try to unlearn that later like what I'm doing. Thanks to RangerB!
