Mongolian thumb release off the "Wrong" side?

Hi Daniel. I have seen some mongolians shooting in Wtaf 2014 in Korea and all of them were shooting like you describe. It is because they are something like olympic archers in traditional way and when I asked them why they shoot like that the answer was our ancestors told us this way.

To shoot mongolian target that is approx. 20cm hight and 75m far away you have to aim with incredible precision. They use arrows as a guide, they also have marks on the arrows for checking drawlenght. When you shoot thumbring normally you can not use arrow as a guide because it is hidden behind the grip of the bow.

I spoke to Professor Seded Batkhuyag about this once after a lecture on the changing style in modern Mongolian archery. The term "ancestors" may have been used rather loosely. He said the style started in the mid 1960s. I have confirmed this by going through some old movies of Mongolians shooting and all the early ones were shooting on the thumb side of the bow.

You can see in some of the new videos that some archers were experimenting with home-made copies of western sights. There is a wide variety of techniques used in modern Mongolian archery. A Korean archery coach told me this year that he would not let his Olympic style archers learn traditional Korean archery because it ruined them for western archery. What he meant is that shooting on one side of the bow or the other trains the brain to correct for the arrow's tendency to go off in that direction. When you switch sides, you are really messing with your mind and most of the problems with aiming are ones of interpretation rather than physical difficulties.

If you want to try using a thumb ring without learning a new method of aiming, you can use this alternate tradition of Mongolian archery. The principle idea is that the drawing hand is completely below the arrow, not touching it at all. The nock has to stay on the string by itself and a nocking point above it helps. The point you draw to affects aiming too. If you draw to the same place you use for three finger shooting, aiming is identical.

Strangely, you can use this idea in reverse. I have been shooting with a thumb ring in the original style for forty years, so swapping over to the other side of the bow when using three fingers always resulted in arrows flying for to the left. However, if I shot on the thumb side, I had no trouble in hitting the target. There was no more tendency for the arrow to fall off the hand than shooting regular three finger style.

What I took away from this experience is that, while the thumb or the fingers can contribute to the archer's paradox, the direction the string moved off the hand was not as critical to the flight of the arrow as its stiffness is.

While I think that using the modern Mongolian variation is a good way to give people an experience of shooting with the thumb ring, it has problems for long term use. The arrow is unsupported so it is unsuitable for hunting or horse archery. The bowstring is pulled from a different place to where the string pushes the arrow. This is less of a problem with a heavy Mongol arrow and bows with massive ears, but can be difficult with flexible working recurves and lighter arrows.

Depending on where you draw your arrow to on the face or behind the head, you can either aim on the left or the right of the bow (i.e. off the edge of the bow or along the arrow). This can also be affected by the stiffness of the arrow and the distances you are shooting.

For a right handed archer shooting on the thumb side of the bow, a soft arrow will drift to the left. A stiffer arrow is easy to aim by looking down the shaft if your stance is appropriate and the draw brings the arrow into the right place on the face. Since we are all different shapes, you sometimes have to work out the best stance and draw length for your body.

Shooting with cutaway windows in the risers like modern Olympic bows can be very difficult. There is as much tuning needs as with shooting standard style.

Thank you both! Just the information I have needed, questions answered very clearly & comprehensively. I am eager to forward this discussion to my finger shooting colleagues who are scratching their heads trying to wrestle with the whole thumb release business.

I have been practicing archery for about 26 years total (started when I was already 40 years old) and thumb release techniques for only the last 7 - 8, but it is now my preferred style. I can still shoot Mediterranean release left-handed very easily & fluently even though I no longer "practice" it, and RH with some awkwardness; but enough to teach beginners.

I am RH, but with cross-dominant master left eye. Learning to shoot thumb ring RH was the most difficult task I have ever attempted, but am now almost as fluent & often more accurate than with my easy, natural default LH shooting.

I have gotten so used to the sight picture shooting normal thumb release that I can adjust within 1 or 2 shots switching from fingers to thumb (or vice versa) LH. Both RH & LH my best accuracy is either shooting what Adam Swoboda refers to as "internal" aim, or aiming- as he describes, with both eyes at the same time- as my teacher said, "We look through the bow as if it was made of glass". Swoboda's "external" aim was the only way I could shoot starting out RH, and this off-side triangulation worked fairly well but never felt secure. I am finding- for RH thumb release- that learning to "feel/see" the secure internal has been the most difficult but rewarding part of the whole puzzle.

One thing about shooting against your dominant side to favor the dominant eye; your dominant hand is now the one holding the bow, and is very, very strong & secure- much like Bruce Lee learning to box "Southpaw"/lefty stance to give himself a stronger jab. One physical form weakness I still suffer from shooting RH is an occasional tendency for my non-dominant left bow hand to collapse; I can pull more raw poundage RH but can shoot up to 10 lbs. more draw weight left-handed with perfect control.

Not sure how much time I want to spend shooting off the wrong/wrong side of the bow thumb release, that unsupported arrow does not feel right to me. Just needed some answers, & maybe a little experimenting.

Thank you all!

Hi Daniel. I have seen some mongolians shooting in Wtaf 2014 in Korea and all of them were shooting like you describe. It is because they are something like olympic archers in traditional way and when I asked them why they shoot like that the answer was our ancestors told us this way.

To shoot mongolian target that is approx. 20cm hight and 75m far away you have to aim with incredible precision. They use arrows as a guide, they also have marks on the arrows for checking drawlenght. When you shoot thumbring normally you can not use arrow as a guide because it is hidden behind the grip of the bow.

Mongol targets are also much wider than they are tall so getting the elevation of your shot right is crucial (though you are allowed to bounce arrows off the ground in front of the target)

Because of this they might prefer being able to use the arrow to gap for vertical aim and sacrificing some lateral accuracy from opposing paradox and release

I have a student who switched from Mediterranean to Mongolian draw and corrected his aim in an hour. This I think is unusual. Most people have more problems with this kind of transition.

Shooting at sur targets is a real skill. You might think that because the target area is wide, that only elevation is a problem, but there are generally different coloured surs in the centre of the line to aim at. My experience of shooting at these targets (as opposed to hitting them) is that the misses are often in a straight line either before or beyond the target. This suggests the idea that the old Mongolians thought that getting the correct range was more difficult than controlling the horizontal spread. A line of surs is very similar to a line of soldiers at a greater range so the original concept might have been for military training.

Adam Swoboda is quoting old manuals. For instance, Taybugha referred to external and internal aiming in the fourteenth century. There is an old aiming instruction that has been repeated through various manuals for at least 800 years. It concerns point blank range and aiming over the appropriate knuckles beyond this distance. In some books it is aiming over the proximal knuckles and that is external aiming because the bases of the fingers are on the outside (left) of the bow. In Kani's book, the fingers are temporarily extended for aiming gauges. This is internal aiming (between the string and the belly of the bow).

It could be argued that Kani was just repeating an old piece of archery wisdom without actually using it in practice because temporarily opening the fingers of the bow hand would violate the integrity of the grasp of the bow. This is a real problem with the very heavy bows the Turks preferred. However, aiming over the distal knuckles of the bow hand is practical without opening them.

The old books relate aiming methods to stance and the traditions of the great teachers. When you think about it, this is a sound approach. The angle of the head to the target combined with where the nock of the arrow ends up controls how close the line of the arrow is to the line between the eye or eyes to the target. Minor variations in position can explain the popularity of the different aiming systems. Of course each archer should only have one position for accurate shooting. Some of the so-called anchor points are at the corner of the mouth, at the angle of the jaw, at the lobe of the ear and behind the head. The arrow is also aligned with the lips, or just the upper lip. There other variations, but they are not as effective in general shooting. All require you to keep the head at a constant angle to the target and usually have the neck straight.

There are obviously more complications than just these, but it is too easy to get lost in the details. Most people who take up an oblique stance (left shoulder to the target) will find that external aiming works with a longer draw. If you are standing squarer to the target (body facing the target) and it is close, internal aiming is often a more instinctive option. Exceptions exist like in Korean archery, where the feet are in a square position, but the waist is turned so that the shoulders are in an oblique position.

When you make adjustments for the dominant eye, extra complications set in. That could be a topic in itself.

Bede-

Thanks for the continuing discussion, I am virtually alone here in my neighborhood in California, and continue to study and practice without ever having had personal, hands-on coaching. Sometimes I get to shoot with Justin Ma (Ming Dynasty era specialist, & US agent for bowyer Gui Shunxing)

Just a couple clarifications & comments:

"A Korean archery coach told me this year that he would let his Olympic style archers learn traditional Korean archery because it ruined them for western archery."

Obviously you meant NOT "let his Olympic style archers learn traditional Korean archery because it ruined them for western archery."? That really does make a whole lot of sense, as it is the destruction of one's carefully cultivated sight window sense & bow-arrow orientation that scares the hell out my older new students who have spent years shooting 3-finger off opposite side. And for archers with Olympic aspirations (for whom the training is a most time-consuming, serious business) form cannot be compromised with any distraction.

Certainly traditional Asian archery stylists over the millennia could not have been distance-challenged until the introduction of Western aiming & arrow nocking methods! I was in Bhutan one year when traditional Korean archers, shooting in their traditional fashion, beat the 3-finger Mediterranean Release Bhutanese on their own field. (Amazing that the Bhutanese have no memory or knowledge of thumb release- right there in the Himalayas! They are amazing archers in their own right, and I am honored to number some of them as my friends. But I was disappointed when I first met them to discover that they could not teach me thumb release! javascript:emoticon(':x')

Shooting at the standard Bhutanese target- a little less than 30 x 100 cm.- from 140 meters is a hell of a challenge, regardless of method. I hit it once- entirely by accident, but they all gave me their little victory dance!

My thumb release beginners- (including archers of all ages who have a year or even two under their belt) have very little trouble making the switch. Some find it easier, in fact. Virtually all end up simply adding a new skill-set without losing the old ones. I have about a 1/2 dozen youngsters from 11 to college age who typically shoot until their thumbs get tired, and switch right over to fingers with out a second thought, just sometimes taking a shot or two to reorient themselves.

One interesting way of adding the new style without compromising one's old one- one of my older adult life-time 3-finger archers wanted to try shooting left-handed, but was in no position to purchase a LH Western recurve. I got him to try lefty thumb release using his old RH Pearson recurve- he was shooting rather competently & comfortably almost immediately.

Daniel,
I'll correct that typo. You are right: he said not.

Bhutan and south east Tibet both have traditions of three finger release and bamboo self bows of great efficiency. There are pockets of the Mediterranean draw all around the southern fringe of the Himalayas even among groups not influenced by the Tibetans. The so-called Red Kaffirs of Pakistan and Afghanistan are another.

Old film from Lhasa shows some people shooting with the thumb release and others using their fingers. Both were using composite bows and the finger shooters had Manchu bows and were shooting at a Manchu style target. The horse archers were using the thumb draw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMjITnrB1AA

Slow motion study of thumb draw on the "wrong" side.

"Strangely, you can use this idea in reverse. I have been shooting with a thumb ring in the original style for forty years, so swapping over to the other side of the bow when using three fingers always resulted in arrows flying for to the left. However, if I shot on the thumb side, I had no trouble in hitting the target. There was no more tendency for the arrow to fall off the hand than shooting regular three finger style.

What I took away from this experience is that, while the thumb or the fingers can contribute to the archer's paradox, the direction the string moved off the hand was not as critical to the flight of the arrow as its stiffness is. "

There are many wrong or at least misleading things in this statement.

The direction of deflection is critical. It is EVERYTHING. The alpha and the omega. Without the proper deflection direction, the paradox (the arrow flying to its full draw direction via a two flex bending phenomenon) will not occur. Refer to my above slow motion video. You can clearly see the ANTI paradox: when shot thumb draw on the left, the arrow goes through the same position it was in at brace height. This is corroborated even further by the knowledge that the Mongols are aiming using their knuckles, not the tip of the arrow as one can do when shooting with fingers. They are aiming to the right to compensate for the arrow flying off to the left.

Furthermore, shooting thumb on left is not terribly affected by spine. You have to get very very weak before anything happens. With a 50# bow, I have gotten 800 to 400 spine arrows UNFLETCHED to group together at 30 yards. So Bede's statement should actually run in reverse: "the arrow's stiffness is not as critical as the direction the string moves off the hand".

If one has to aim to the left when shooting with thumb draw, this sounds like an example of poor technique (e.g. bad khatra or grip) or poor arrow tuning.

"What he meant is that shooting on one side of the bow or the other trains the brain to correct for the arrow's tendency to go off in that direction. "

Such an innate tendency may indeed exist for thumb ring shooting, where stiff spine reactions are common (thumb release is too clean for its own good).

But for shooting fingers on left, it most certainly does NOT exist. Such a tendency is implicitly denied by the longstanding awareness of the archer's paradox, the overwhelming tendency for it to fly STRAIGHT to where it points at full draw, when logic would seem to dictate that it would fly left, in the direction it points at brace.

It doesnt take much to make it this happen. An appropriately long arrow with even a small amount of fletching will fly true to where it points at full draw, even if the spine is not perfectly matched. That forgiving, straight flight is the entire reason why med draw (or tertiary/secondary draw) with the arrow on the left side of the bow is so widespread all across the "primitive" and modern world. It is almost undoubtedly the most ancient and original form of shooting. It WORKS, and is downright idiot proof.

This shouldn't be misinterpreted as a diatribe against thumb draw on left or right. I love the asian ways of shooting, I just would like to point out that every release method serves a specific purpose.

Meddraw/left: reliable consistent easy accuracy, with a broad range of equipment, against every imaginable kind of target.

Thumb on right: POWER coming from the enhanced draw length. stability and control on horseback.

Thumb on left: target shooting at traditional mongol events. Some mongols can be seen having switched over to med draw, though. it's the best unorthodox combination in terms of arrow flight. clean nature of thumb release is what makes this so viable.

med on right: best used for making money on the internet :)...inherently terrible flight, difficult accuracy compared to all other methods. reduced power compared to thumb draw. it combines the worst qualities of the conventional methods, but it is undoubtedly very fast to reload, though not necessarily the quickest for each individual. All depends on how you train yourself...

med on right with the palm of draw hand facing out should be fine, but feels rather awkward. I saw a video of someone speed shooting like that, which I guess would be the only practicality of that. I prefer thumb draw though.
I do not understand why or exactly how you get better arrow flight with the arrow on the left than on the right. Maybe you're underspined on the right but just fine on the left. Maybe it's the specifics of your release. I would think that shooting on the opposite side would make it easier for the arrow's tail to hit the bow, but maybe, while on the string and before reaching brace height, it sort of "bounces" to the left after being driven right by the thumb on release. Maybe it's the specifics of the release. I dunno lol. I want to be good with an orthodox thumb release ... ...

I don't understand how shooting with a thumb release is necessarily soo clean if using something like a guarded or Vermil victory ring, which seems to put the pressure on the thumb pad, though it feels like I draw with the whole thumb. I guess it would be cleaner than mediterranean, but significantly less clean than pinch grip release or a mechanical release. Unless maybe with Turkish thumb rings? Or there is something that I don't understand.

Disclaimer: all of what I write below is based on the current state of my research. It's still a work in progress, but at present I think it is far more complete and accurate than previous understandings, like Bede's comments above. I have a lot of respect for Bede, but he's just as capable of being wrong as anybody.

Onwards...

Shooting thumb on the left is a completely different arrow behavior paradigm than shooting thumb on the right, so you need to abandon your otherwise correct preconceptions about spine and paradox, and start over.

Think carefully about what causes paradox. Flexing, right? But what causes the flexing? And HOW? The common assertion is that it's the inertia of the point, but this is only half true...

In conventional paradox behavior, there are TWO distinct flexing events. The first is due to a combination of inertia of the shaft AND pressure. The nock end of the arrow is flung sideways off of the thumb or fingers, away from the handle and as a result the point end wants to go in the opposite direction (rotational movement with the center of the arrow as the axis), which is TOWARDS the handle.

But the point end is then resisted by the handle of the bow! And this countertorque situation causes a certain degree of bending, depending on the spine of the arrow. If you watch videos of people shooting way underspined arrows, you will clearly see the initial bending being exaggerated as a result of there being less resistance.

The second flex then occurs and it is in the opposite direction of the first. If the arrow is well spined, the first flex and the second flex are equal and opposite and essentially cancel each other out, leading to conservation of direction, and hence, the paradox.

Byron explains all of this very well at around 2:42.

http://youtu.be/O7zewtuUM_0

Same thing with kyudo, inversed. Pause it frame by frame to see the two distinct initial flexes. First flex with thumb draw is far more subtle than med draw due to how clean the release is.

http://youtu.be/sV93GUmiSsI

When you switch sides (thumb on left or med on right), ALL of this goes out the window. There's no countertorque from the handle because relative to the handle, the string is being cast off the thumb/fingers in the opposite direction as it was previously. The point end is rotated AWAY from the handle, instead of being pressed against it. So the only flexing that occurs is due to inertia of the point end, and it happens all at once, immediately upon release, and then the arrow snaps back to being straight.

For various reasons that aren't entirely clear yet, this solitary flex (let's call it "solo flex" to keep our terms distinct) is smaller than the purely inertia-driven second flex described above.

That reduced amplitude is part of why you don't get arrow slap shooting thumb on left. Another possible reason is that thumb on right's first flex delays the onset of second flex, and the second flex (with the nock end flexing towards the handle) is where slap occurs. With thumb on left, the solo flex is in the same direction (towards the handle) but it occurs sooner, so the shaft has a chance to straighten out before the slap occurs.

If you go incredibly, unreasonable weak on spine with thumb on left (or pluck the string) that is where you can start to get some slap. The arrow's amplitude of flex is much larger so it doesn't have time to straighten out. But that's a hard problem to get. Thumb on left is otherwise largely indifferent to spine. It's not irrelevant, but it's far less relevant.

(An Inverse example of the potential slap issue is one of Lars' clips, where he shoots med on right, and plucks the string so unbelievably badly that the entire back third of the arrow slaps the bow. )

So that's why thumb on left is so clean. reduced amplitude of flex, no slap, and no back and forth oscillation from first flex and second flex, because you only have a solo flex.

The underlying reason why the thumb release is so clean (regardless of ring material) is that the string is coming off of a shorter digit, and because the index finger interferes with the string sliding off of the digit. So first flex is reduced for thumb on right. That's both blessing and a curse, though. For thumb on left, reduced solo flex is a large part of why the technique is so viable. If you shoot mechanical release with a traditional bow (non center cut) you will see very similar behavior to thumb on left. Clean, non-paradoxical.

So mechanical off the left is somehow cleaner than mechanical off the right? Very interesting though, thanks

No, sorry should have been clearer. Mechanical on right is mirror image of mechanical on left and thumb on left. Clean and straight but it flies to the side. If you have ever shot a compound with a grossly misadjusted rest, it's the same principle.

So if one has a reaally clean thumb release, then it should work just as well on the right as on the left?

At least in terms of really clean arrow flight, yes. I would think that in either case a really stiff arrow should help.

I tried shooting with thumb draw on the left with an olympic bow a few days ago. The arrow goes wayy to the left. What should I do to avoid this from happening? Do you have to compensate?

I think shooting off the left side with thumb draw will help me get a clean release ultimately.

Most Olympic setups are not actually "center shot", despite being commonly described as such. Look at the position of the rest/plunger. At brace, the usual practice is to have it 1/8" left of center, to compensate for the deflection of the fingers.

So that in of itself certainly doesn't help when trying to shoot "straight" with thumb draw. I'd move the rest to a true center, or even past center.

Even then you'll likely still have some leftward flight. The Mongols appear to just be compensating by aiming to the right. I'd do the same. But yes, I do see this as possibly a good exercise for cleaning up one's release technique. I've only ever done it with a "63" or a pillion release, I wonder if a cylindrical ring would improve things.

Obviously there's a reason why unorthodox combinations were probably rare, if not downright non existent, for most of human history. The orthodox combos are very robust.

Can you describe the 63 and pillion releases? Are they just locks, maybe as described in Swoboda's book, or special thumb rings? I think I'll stick with a square lock..

See attached.