Work on form.Good form will make drawing heavier bows a little easier.But if your form is good?

Maybe get an archery trainer.

Its a bow simulator, and can be set to different weights.

Hey Redspaw,

If you can get one of those archery trainer things that may be the go. They look about as functionally perfect as you can get.

If you’re like me and don’t have one, I’d be attacking the problem in three ways.

The first is that while you’re in the progressing stage, I’d keep shooting the bow you’re comfortable with now once or twice a week. That helps you have a regular reference (“this is how it should feel”) with your form as you’re shooting the heavier bow.

The second is to shoot your heavier bow. Day on, day off perhaps, but not day after day. One of the things I love about trad archery is that it is physically arduous, especially with heavier pound bows. The worst thing you could do is give yourself an injury preventing you from shooting anything.

With all that in mind I’d treat it like any other strength training. Warm up first! Then perform the exercise (shooting an arrow) until you can no longer maintain perfect form. Rest for 3 minutes. Repeat for a total of 3-5 sets. You may only get away 1-3 decent shots before you rest and that’s fine. If you can’t get one, that’s fine. You won’t know if you don’t try. If you can get access to an intermediate weight bow from a friend or club or something great, if not, that’s where the third approach will pay dividends.

The third is to cross train. Shooting any trad bow is an athletic activity. Any athletic activity is going to benefit from crosstraining, especially when you’re trying to break a barrier like functioning a heavier weight. So again, perhaps day on day off, or 3 times a week, whatever is going to work for you, I’d train a few different exercises. You don’t need a gym or anything. Do pushups, inverted rows, planks, side planks and superman. If you need help figuring out exactly how many to do or how to approach them pm me, we can figure out a specific program or something.

If you have access to a barbell and weights, hanging power cleans and close grip upright rows are good exercises for bow strength. Don’t feel like you need them though, you can guarantee Robin Hood never saw the inside of a gym.

So that’s what I’d be doing. It’s worked for me. Actually, that may be jumping the gun. I’m going to be shooting a 70# longbow at a club shoot next week for the first time… we’ll see how I stack up 😯 But I feel like it’s worked ok 😀

My approach has really been from a general athletic kind, I daresay you might get some good advice from the many excellent and experienced archers that lurk around tradbow as well 😉

Jim

PS

Here are some links to examples of those exercises I talked about:

Inverted Row:

http://www.exrx.net/WeightExercises/BackGeneral/BWSupineRow.html

Plank:

http://www.exrx.net/WeightExercises/RectusAbdominis/BWFrontPlank.html

SidePlank:

http://www.exrx.net/WeightExercises/Obliques/BWSidePlank.html

Superman:

http://www.exrx.net/WeightExercises/ErectorSpinae/Superman.html

Red, while I sure can’t add anything to the above, I can say “Welcome” and glad you’re here asking good questions that can benefit others as well as you. Hang in and one of these days you may be here answering questions. 😀

Welcome Red, I guess I would like to know your definition of heavy and why you feel you need to increase your draw weight? All most all of the people I shoot with are using bows in the 45 to 50 lb range. I am considered a neanderthal for still shooting 60 lbs. I guess the only reason I have for still shooting 60 is because that what my bow is and I still can. Another website has a group called the heavy bow society for my age I would have to shoot 80 lbs to qualify. So you see heavy has a different meaning for different people.

I STRONGLY recommend a little gizmo called the BowTrainer, not a stretch band or some other training device but an actual BowTrainer. It simulates the actual drawing of a bow. I’m not into gadgets and gizmos much but this thing really does work. I’ve added over 40# to my max pull in just a few months. Follow the instructions, make sure you actually do have a day of rest between training sessions, and eat a good diet high in protein. Best of all the BowTrainer is inexpensive.

Well shucks, it’s easy…

Step 1. Put heavy bow on table.

Step 2. Pick up beer and drink up.

Step 3. Go find 50lb bow and shoot that.

Step 4. Put 50lb bow away so people think you shot the heavy bow.

Well, as you can tell this advice ain’t very useful. But you may wish you had listened to it later…

Good luck. I envy you burly types.

Red-Welcome. Much good advice from the experts here–Steve’s is darn good. Jim’s is great.

You won’t believe this but Dave’s advice is right on in a few weeks you will be answering ?. That’s what’s great about this site all are welcome no matter their experience and your opinions/advice are treated gently as befits a trad bow hunter and this clan.

As a beginner –I can offer only a few thoughts:

1. Shoot the weight bow that you can handle comfortably from any position. The amount weight you pull is only important based on the animal you hunt–we are not working out in a gym.

2. Arrows that are tuned to the bow fly straight to the target and are heavy enough to provide the ethical kill (see the Ashby section) are most important.

3.Woodsmen skills are in my opinion just as important as the preceding 2. Awareness, tracking, observing,stalking etc. will add enjoyment to your time in the field.

Enjoy and trust we will hear more from you.

Semper Fi

Mike

Steve’s advice is excellent, except I’d do my drinking after my shooting 😀

Our original poster did not give the information and I did not ask, but for those thinking he may be falling into the demonstrably unwarranted trap of bigger is better, it is not necessarily so. All men are not in fact created equal and some have to work harder to achieve the same goals. I’ve met a grown man that could barely work a 40 pound bow without his core collapsing, so for a chap like that, all the advice I gave above would apply for him to step up to 40#, let alone 50.

Just a thought 😉

Jim

Ausjim, Your advice on the how to was spot on. IMHO I only asked what his goal was to find out which path he was taking. I have seen a great may archers suffer from heavybowitis for years after dropping weight when they realized with age that it is not size that matters but how you use it.

Well, I’ll throw in my approach. A few years back I made myself a 65 lb longbow. I was shooting a 46 lb recurve at the time so I had the benefit of shooting a bow I was comfortable with while building up to the heavier weight bow. So I shot my 46 lb bow about everyday, shooting at only about 15 feet and concentrating on good form. I was not concerned about where the arrow hit, as long as it hit the backstop.

About every other day, I would string the longbow and shoot 5 arrows, again concentrating on form and not shooting more then 15 feet. After about two weeks, shooting the recurve one night, and the longbow the next, I moved up to 8 arrows thru the longbow. As the weeks went by, I increased the number of arrows from the longbow and once I was comfortably shooting 20 to 25 arrows, I shot only the longbow and kept increasing the number of shots each week.

Be patient, go slow and focus on form. If you rush, trying to hit a spot on the target at greater distances, you will become disappointed. Focus on the use of your back muscles, well the ones between your shoulder blades, and pull thru the release.

After you start shooting at longer distances, if you have trouble hitting a spot, go back to a lighter bow and concentrate on form, then once your form is good go back to the heavier bow. Form is everything regardless of draw weight.

Fallguy wrote: IMHO I only asked what his goal was to find out which path he was taking. I have seen a great may archers suffer from heavybowitis

I didn’t take it any other way Fallguy 😉 I just didn’t want anyone to feel embarrassed if that wasn’t the case 🙂

This may be helpful for targeted muscle development as well. I took some video this morning of me drawing a 60# bow, really just looking for signs of my core collapsing, but I pulled this still from it showing some muscle recruitment…

So if you can see the lower trapezius (long skinny muscle next to the spine, below the shoulder blade) you can see the right hand side is loaded up. Well during the actual drawing process it stands out massively as the shoulder comes around. The lower trap can be developed by a simple shoulder rotation exercise like this:

http://www.exrx.net/WeightExercises/Infraspinatus/DBLyingExternalRotation.html

You should be using a very light weight for that exercise, just a few pounds so you don’t even need weights, just something from your fridge or pantry that’s comfortable to hold would probably do. I’d add that to the list of exercises.

The only things I really do for my back are overgrasp heaves, inverted rows, cleans and shooting a bow, but I’ll be adding that rotation to the list after seeing my little video today. I daresay Howard Hill’s were bigger than mine 😉

Jim

The Aussie is right on. While recovering from my rotator cups, the PT asked me to bring in my bow, and tried it themselves. Then worked up exercises to help me add about 20 lb to my draw weight. It worked. Now I can pull 55# and the 45# feels like a 35# used to. That is just what I wanted, you can’t get accuracy if you are working at it.