For bow hunting, you can learn the basics at home, practice on the range and only take your bow into the field when you know you have the accuracy needed for an ethical kill shot. Your reasons and motivations for learning archery will determine exactly what it is that you need to learn. Your draw weight will increase as you practice with your bow and increase your muscle strength, but you need to start at a beginner weight and work up to your peak draw weight over time.
The following charts are designed with beginner archers specifically in mind:. Keep in mind that the above figures are to help beginner archers in selecting the proper draw weight when buying a recurve or compound bow. As you progress in archery your draw weight will increase as you shoot your bow more often. Your draw length is simply your total arm span from your right fingertips to your left divided by 2.
Your body will determine your individual draw length, and therefore, the size of bow you can handle comfortably. Draw length matters when buying a compound bow, recurve bow, or longbow. Trying out equipment before you buy helps you assess what type of bow best suits your approach to archery. You have plenty of choices — from the traditional longbow, high tech compound bows, and the competition favorite — the recurve bow.
Learning about bow types before you set out to buy your first bow lets you pick the right equipment to suit your archery goals from the beginning. Most beginners start with a recurve bow, but you may prefer to begin with a traditional longbow or a compound bow. Recurve bows are shorter than a longbow and a little more difficult to learn to shoot. A recurve bow is the competition standard, easy to source, and has plenty of accessories like stabilizers and sights that can enhance your archery practice.
Compound bows look more complicated than a recurve bow with cams and cables and are more powerful and faster. Compound bows are a favorite with bowhunters for speed, power, and accuracy. The English longbow or the American flatbow has the traditional bow shape and has a long history.
It is a simple shape but requires dedication to master it — appealing to traditionalists. If you try to shoot a longbow that is too short for you, you will struggle to get a smooth draw. While a longbow that is too long will take an excessive amount of energy for you to draw. No type of bow is better than another bow; the right bow for you depends on your goals — do you want to go bowhunting, shoot targets for fun, take part in medieval re-enactments, or enter competitions?
Your individual goals determine the type of bow that will suit your needs the best. An archery shop preferably one with a shooting range can help you to try out the bow and get some basic instructions on use before buying.
If you intend to be an excellent shot, you need a bow that fits your hand, as well as your individual draw length and draw weight. If you want to really dive in, I wrote this post on everything you need to know about arrows.
Arrows come in a range of different weights, materials, and arrowhead styles. To master your bow, you need to shoot a lot of arrows.
Plus, they need to match your bow to be safe to use. Archery like golf, carpentry, and art is better if you start with quality tools from day one. It may be tempting to go for cheaper beginner products, but they may stop you from achieving your best results. Damaged arrows are very dangerous and should never be used. For thousands of years, the bow was the primary weapon for hunting and warfare. Modern bows deliver an arrow with lethal force, and you need to respect that.
Your practice space needs to be safe. If you're an experienced archer, we can already hear you arguing with us—yes, there are many types of bows, such longbows, crossbows, composite bows, Japanese yumi bows, and so on. We'll get there. We're talking in generalities here. Recurve bows look like this:. They have a sleek, graceful design and they're mostly used for target shooting, although some experienced hunters use them for bow hunting.
Compound bows. Compound bows look like this:. These bows are a favorite among bowhunters, because they are able to shoot with incredible speed and force. That said, there are plenty of people who use compound bows for target shooting and competition shooting, like the woman below:.
If you look at the top and bottom of the bow, you'll see that there are rounded wheels that hold the draw string. These are called "cams. Sound complicated?
It is! The compound bow is a technological marvel that was created only recently—they were invented in , and when you consider that we've been bow hunting for tens of thousands of years, that's a pretty recent development. You don't really need to know about the science of compound bows right now—bows are fairly simple to use, but the physics behind them gets fairly complicated—but if you're interested, we've written extensively about the physics of compound bows, and you can read about that later on.
If you go to an archery range—and we'll talk about ranges in a second—you'll see archers using both types of bow.
Before we get off the topic of bows, here are some terms you'll hear when you talk about bows. The parts below refer to both recurve bows and compound bows:. If that all seems like a bit much, don't worry about it!
You'll understand the details of those terms in no time. In general, recurve bows are easier to buy and use. You just need to get your measurements right and we help you with that below. That sort of simplicity is fantastic for a new archer, and you can dive right into the sport. Compound bows, with their cams and accessories, can be a little more difficult to tune, and if you buy one online, you may need to bring it to a brow shop or archery range and have them tune it for you some models have videos on YouTube that show you what you need to do, though, and that can make things a lot easier.
The benefit of compound bows is that once you get them tuned right, they can be a lot easier to aim and shoot, and they make it a lot easier to hit your target. For most archers, consistently hitting your target is deeply satisfying! If you're drawn to compound bows, use compound bows; if you like the look of recurve bows, start with a recurve bow. There's no right answer—it's totally up to you, and many archers use both over the course of their lives.
As we mentioned above, people who are interested in target archery generally use recurve bows, which are designed to enhance form and accuracy, and people who are interested in bowhunting generally use compound bows, which are designed to be short and transportable through hunting environments, and shoot arrows that are blistering fast and powerful.
But, that said—those are generalities. There are plenty of target archers who enter competitions where the contestants use compound bows, and plenty of hunters who train extensively and use recurve bows made for hunting.
And, there are a LOT of folks—the good people who write for this website included—who have fallen in love with both target archery and bowhunting, and who shoot both recurves and compounds. Either will do, and if the bow isn't a surprise gift, it's always a good thing to show your child both types of bows to see which one they're interested in. In most cases, the heroine is using a recurve—Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games used a recurve, as did Merida from the Disney movie Brave —and younger female archers may have recognized that.
Again—that's just our observation, made after talking with hundreds of parents, but it's definitely not a hard and fast rule—there are plenty of boys who love recurves and girls who love compounds.
For recurves, we almost always suggest the Samick Sage Recur ve Bow. We love it. For compound bows, we like the Predator Raptor Compound Bow. We describe it below. For recurve bows for young adults, we recommend the Samick Sage see above.
It also comes with some gear—a quiver, an arm guard, five aluminum arrows , and a hex wrench that you can use to adjust the draw weight of the bow.
Now that we've talked about some good options, we've come to the hard part: your measurements. In order to find a bow that you can shoot safely, you'll need to learn how to find a bow with the right settings. This can be something of a challenge for new archers, so if the following sections get a little confusing, have no fear— most new archers get a little confused when first taking their measurements, so don't worry about it if you get a little tripped up.
Re-read the sections that give you a little trouble, and if you have any other questions, jump over to our "Contact" page and drop us a line. Draw Length. The first measurement, draw length, refers to distance to which you can comfortably pull back the bow string. Draw length is important because in order to make accurate shots, you need to draw the bow string back the same distance for each shot, every time you shoot. Taller people typically have a long draw length, and shorter people typically have a shorter draw length.
As a quick reference, you should pick arrows with a length of 2 or 3 inches longer than your draw length. Also, you can select an intermediate hardness, determined by its spine. Selecting a hardness of spine is enough for starting.
But, please, if you have some time, go and head the link in the paragraph above. It will give you a broader knowledge about why and how to choose your first set of arrows.
You have to warm up your muscles, tendons, and joints before and after doing archery for several reasons. On the one hand, you will prepare your body for a prolonged shooting session sometimes in archery you can be shooting for 2 hours straight like nothing. On the other hand, these exercises will help your body to gain flexibility and might help to improve your posture, form, draw length, and more.
In this post, we summarized the most common archery injuries. It is known that archery is not a violent sport, and most of the injuries are mild. But there are some places, like the rotator cuff that, if injured, it may ruin your shooting experience, sometimes for life.
We have on this blog a post fully dedicated to teaching you a very basic, but necessary warm-up routine. They are important because, as you will see, you emulate the handle rising and the drawing motion. As you can see, these are very easy exercises that you can do in a couple of minutes, and without needing any fancy equipment. There are many other exercises to stretch or to gain strength in the muscles needed in archery basically, the upper torso and shoulders.
Thanks a lot for this detailed guide. It has actually covered everything in detail, especially the test for checking the eye dominance is something that has really helped me in getting started with my passion. Will surely be coming back for seeking more help. Hello Steven. Thanks a lot for your kind words. Please, feel free to continue browsing it to find more helpful content. If you authorize me, I can keep sending you mail updates when new content is up.
Thanks a lot! I also wanted to join the Olympic games in the future.. As for your request, if you want to become an Olympic archer, I suggest you train hard and consistently. My best advice is to try to contact a local archery club near your home or at least a coach. It may help you to grasp some concepts, but you need an in-person coach. Your email address will not be published. If you are a human, do not fill in this field. Can you learn archery on your own? Archery is as old as time, well….
Whether you were inspired by hunger games, or Hawkeye of the Avengers, or by a friend or relative, this guide will help you get started. All you need is a clear safe space, and the right equipment to learn archery at home. Now for the list of bare essentials:. This will probably be the hardest choice you have to make before starting. Why do I say that? Because this is definitely not the last bow you will buy.
If you need help picking one out be sure to check out my recommended compound bows. Draw length and weight will be the two largest deciding factors when choosing your new bow.
In all honesty, the best way to figure this out is to go somewhere you can try a few bows. Especially for the draw weight. If you have a local pro shop, club, or friends with bows, see if you can pull a few back and see what draw weight feels comfortable for you.
The next thing to consider when choosing a new bow is your draw length. This is critical as learning to shoot with an improperly sized bow will be frustrating at best. The key here is to get a helper, then stand relaxed with your arms out to your side forming a T.
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