Stickbow Target Archery Forums

Over the last month or so, I've been practicing form with my LAZ-Air trainer attached to a recurve. This trainer extends about 3 feet from the front of the bow making it considerably heavier than a typical longbow.

At first I had trouble just holding it up for long practice sessions, but eventually became comfortable with it.

Over the past week or so, I've been shooting my Hill bow and can't believe how much my bow arm stays up on target during the follow-through. I believe my muscles, not only got stronger, but learned to contract against a heavier weight upon release.

In order to have bow arm follow through, we all have to immediately contract the lifting muscles of the bow arm....if we did not, the arm would fall straight down.

So it's not just strengthening the muscles that helped, it's the fact that the muscles learned to contract at the moment of release against a heavier weight to keep the arm from dropping.

So here is my suggestion to train: go buy ankle weights, and wrap one around your wrist while you shoot. After a few weeks, you will notice a big difference in bow-arm follow through.

As an added bonus, such weight, in theory, should act as a stabilizer and dampen any swaying or jittering of your bowarm. Wearing weights on your arm is not specifically illegal in any organization I know of, so you could legally "cheat" in competition until someone bans arm weights LOL

Man! I have GOT to try the weights on the wrist thing! Personally when it comes to the bow itself I believe that mass is our friend. However as a longbow shooter, mass is hard to come by.

Thanks for the info!

Let me know how it works. It may even work after a few shots, like the formaster does, just not in-grained until after a few hundred.

I bought some wrist weights, but didn't try them because they're too small. Gonna exchange them tomorrow for bigger and heavier ankle weights.

Please get us posted on your experiments.

I am trying to improve my bow arm, and have gone down other paths, although I see no reason why they should be mutually exclusive.

A path I have let drop, for no particular reason, is regular use of the Power Ball -- improves strength, coordination, and 'feel'.

Current path I am on is to tighten the bow arm triceps before raising the bow, and keep it tight for the whole shot. In addition, 'push' towards the target as part of release. When I do it right, I don't notice the bow hand dropping (but then, I am not taking a movie either, so who knows)

So, it sounds like there are at least 4 approaches:
pure strength, such as wrist weights
timing (extra strength to bow arm at release), from a practice tool such as LAZ-Air
form methods, such as pushing
coordination and feel, such as Powerball

McKinney says all great archers have rock solid bow arms, so this is a topic I hope to monitor.

I just picked up some bigger ankle weights today. I probably won't get to try them out until Monday though.

One of my concerns is that with the added weight, the arrows may act stiffer off my bow, because the natural "give" reaction of the bow will be less with extra mass thrown into the equation.

I have a compound buddy of mine trying it. He should be able to tell immediately if there is a difference in arrow flight.

Back in the 60's some of us were using stabilizer weights to increase riser mass and build up our bow arm muscles. You'd starting off with just a few ounces and work up to at least a pound (or more!), then backing off to about half that weight during a tourney. The added benefit was adding dampening mass riser, which was allowed in freestyle NAA/NFAA gear rules.

Same principle as way overdrawing yer bow as an exercise to increase holding durations during aiming.

The danger is in doing too much, too fast, too soon.

I've seen Jim Powell from Michigan, who usually is in the top 3 at the NFAA Indoor Nationals in Trad Style shoot with a weight on his wrist. It's one way to get around the prohibition against weights or stabilizers in the Trad Class.