Ben Greenfield breaks down four ways to improve bowhunting: thoracic mobility through self-massage and rolling, grip strength via kettlebell walks, eye health with lutein and zeaxanthin from leafy greens and eggs, and shooting accurately when fatigued by practicing burpees and heart-rate control.
Hey, I'm Ben Greenfield. In this video, I'm going to show you some of the things that are going to help you out a little bit when it comes to shooting a bow. And when it comes to bow hunting, we're going to talk about your shoulder mobility, your grip strength, your eye health, and then being able to shoot when your heart rate is jacked. So let's go through each of those different components. The first is your shoulder mobility. Now, underneath this video, I'm going to give you a bunch of extra links to articles that I've written on shoulder mobility. But when you're hunched over a computer, when you are wrapped around a steering wheel for long periods of time, one of the best tools in your arsenal will be a couple of lacrosse balls that you duct taped together or something like this. These are called tune up balls. And the way that these work is if you're in this position, your shoulder retractors that you're going to use when you draw are super weak. Now, if you're able to increase mobility in your thoracic spine, you're going to go from here to here. The way that you would use something like this is you actually put these balls on the ground, you lay on top of them in your mid spine area, you can do your whole spine, but the area that you really want to target is your mid spine. For this purpose, you clasp your hands like this, then you roll, go to the right, go to the left, roll up to the next set of vertebra. Ooh, got a nice pop there. Roll to the right, roll to the left, and you basically work your way up your thoracic spine. And you can do this anywhere from everyday as part of your wake up routine to before you shoot to once a week if you've got pretty good mobility, but you just need to maintain. But that's number one is your thoracic mobility. Now number two is your grip strength. There's obviously all sorts of ways that you can work your grip strength. And I'm going to tell you one of my favorites because this one also really does a great job working your cardiovascular system as well. It's called a kettlebell walk. It's just what it sounds like. You go on a walk and a lot of times I'll put in an audio book or an MP3 player or something that helps me be productive. Preferably rolling terrain is better because it gets your heart rate up and down and you simply walk holding a kettlebell. Now, you want to use a weight that will get one hand pretty gassed after about five to 10 minutes. Then you switch to the other hand. Now, there's two components of grip. There's grip strength, which you might get if you were say, doing five reps of a deadlift or pulling an animal out on a tarp over the course of maybe 50 yards. And then there's grip endurance, which allows you to grip for long periods of time or repeatedly over and over again as you might do when shooting. So, so these kettlebell walks, all you do is you just walk for as far as you can and then you shift hands. Now, occasionally I'll even stop and I'll do things like swings, I'll do rows, push ups, et cetera. But it's kind of a fun way to train the grip and kill a few other birds with that stone. So that's, number two is grip strength. Now the other cool thing about grip strength, by the way, is it doesn't just work your grip, right, it works your forearms. So even when you're drawing and you're using your forearm muscles to, you're working some of those same muscles when you're doing grip. Okay, Number three is your eyes. Now, a lot of people don't realize this, and I brought out a couple of good nutrients for your eyes. Lutein and zeaxanthin are two nutrients that are really, really important for your retina and for your vision. And a shortage of these can cause myopia and can cause short sightedness. So if you want to really have good vision, you not only need to be careful with burning out your eyeballs with computer screens or staring at your smartphone, instead of taking glances to look out of the horizon, look at the trees, look at the mountains, look at a building, something far off. But you also, in addition to training your eye muscles, need to take care of your eyes from a nutrient standpoint. Now, some of the best sources of lutein and zeaxanthin are any dark leafy green, like spinach, kale, mustard greens, stuff like that. And then also eggs, and specifically the egg yolk. Egg white omelets are not your eyes friend, but, but the egg yolk, right? Just like the pupil floating around in the white of your eye. That egg yolk is really good for our eye. Nature gives us clues like that. Okay, now the last thing is to be able to shoot when you're tired. Now this is where a heart rate monitor comes in. Okay, so I'm wearing a heart rate monitor right now. This is one of those GPS monitors. This is a Timex gps and what I can do with this is I can set it up to start beeping once I've reached the heart rate at which I want to stay below. So let's say that heart rate is 70. I like to talk about age, predicted maximum heart rate. To find out your age, predicted maximum heart rate, you take the number 220 and you subtract your age, right? So I won't tell you my exact age, but for me, it's in the 180s. Okay? So what I do in a situation like this was I would set up my heart rate to be at about 20 beats below my maximum heart rate, right? Which is about 162 or so. And then what I would practice doing is what I call a five minute burpee set. Okay? You do as many burpees as you can in five minutes. But the rule is, every time your little beeper starts to go off that your heart rate has gotten within 20 beats of maximum, you have to stop and do anything you can to get that heart rate monitor to stop beeping. Okay? This can be deep breathing.
Can be mouth breathing.
Relaxing the muscles, anything it takes to get your heart rate down quickly. And what you do is you keep track of the number of burpees that you're able to pull off in five minutes, and you repeat that test every week. It's a really good way to practice heart rate control and to be able to shoot when you're gassed so that once your heart rate is up, you're able to quickly draw and get a shot off while the heart rate is relatively high. So those are four your thoracic mobility, your grip strength, your vision, and then also your ability to shoot when tired. I'm going to put plenty more links and a great article for you underneath this video, but in the meantime, I'm Ben Greenfield, signing out.
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