Essex Guild of Archery Coaches

Coaches and archers from Essex/Suffolk and neighbouring counties gathered for a day long workshop on many aspects of compound archery, led by top UK archer Liam Grimwood.

The day kicked off with Liam presenting a short talk on his approach to shooting the compound bow and how they should be set up. He covered the importance of a natural, comfortable stance, the importance of establishing an upper body alignment, with the upper and lower bones of the bow arm in line with the shoulder. He emphasised the need for the bow handle to sit on the thumb side of the lifeline of the hand and to avoid having more than one muscle group of the hand in contact with the bow. The talk continued with Liam emphasising the importance of a subconcious release and the relative merits of back tension and trigger releases.

After a short break the workshop continued with Liam reviewing four archers technique and shooting form. For each he identified the key areas for them to work on and where necessary made some adjustments to their equipment setup. After the lunch break, Liam demonstrated correct basic setup of the launcher blade and how to tie a nock point and D-loop. This was folllowed by two further groups of archers coming under Liam's expert gaze with further advice and equipment setup changes.

Finally Liam gave a demonstration of paper tuning with one of the archers, utilising his elegantly simply paper tuning frame made from 40mm plastic waste piping.

The assembled company expressed their appreciation to Liam for a stimulating and intersting day.

The Guild would very much like to thank Liam for giving us such an interesting day with many experienced compound archers and coaches saying they had learnt something new. We would also like to thank Graham Harris at Clickers Archery for supporting the event and Havering Disabled Archery club for the use of their venue and refreshements.

John Neal