All the archery companies I’ve seen were loaning basic reverse bows to beginners, but then, it might not be the case in the USA.
Besides, you need to practise a little before deciding on what kind of bow you want/need (if only because you need to have a clue at what “strength” you’re comfortable with).
Finally, there are bows way cheaper than $ 1200 and perfectly suitable for beginners.
I used to use the archery room in college and got pretty decent at it (consistently put 5/5 into the bullseye at about 20m, I think it was). I tried recurve bows a bit and didn’t care for them too much, I much preferred the inexpensive compound bows they had. No sights, I shot “natural”.
Yes, whacking yourself in the bare forearm hurt like the dickens.
A couple of tips I remember:
Don’t grip the bow - wear a wrist strap and keep your fingers open and hand relaxed. Strangling the bow wastes energy and accuracy goes out the window.
You don’t draw by pulling your arm back, it’s more a “good morning” stretch where you pinch your shoulder blades together. Once I learned that it made drawing heavier bows easier. One guy there was a competitive shooter and he was small - his bow was about 75lbs draw weight and set up for his short little arms, watching someone try to draw it the first time was funny.
If your fingers hurt from drawing and holding the string there are widgets to help with that; simplest was a little leather pad you wear on your fingers to cushion them. There are also mechanical releases - basically a catch for the string with a mechanic trigger. The whole thing is shaped so that it’s easy to hold (or it’s got a wrist strap so the pull is spread out over your wrist) and a little wiggle of the finger looses the arrow.
One of my sisters was really into Native American stuff when we were kids–one of our GGGrandmothers was full-blood Flathead–so she had all the trappings, including a longbow and at least a couple dozen arrows. I started target shooting in our yard when I was big enough. The bow, arrows, and target all got sold just before one of our moves because I misheard and thought she wanted them, otherwise I’d still have 'em. Instead, I have a compound bow around here somewhere that hasn’t been used since I was 20 and had a big yard to shoot in.
I just measured the width of my back yard, in case I ever get to the point where I want to put a target back there. Only about 63 feet. Damn tiny city yards.
I want to get into archery. Anyone know of a class on the eastside of Seattle?
I’ve never done archery myself, but The Kiddo has been in our local JOAD (Junior Olympic Archery Development) club for about a year and a half now, and he loves it. He just turned 10. We bought him a bow for his birthday last year for $100 at the local shooting range; it’s the same model bow that the Club had been lending him up until that point. Nothing at all fancy, but certainly serviceable, and it will last him for a number of years.
I have nothing at all against compound bows, but I am very glad that Kiddo has decided to stick with the recurve…they just seem more “real” to me…and if serious competition is in your future, you really have no choice anyway…
I had my first crappy little recurve when I was a little sprite and got good enough to take rabbits with a bow. It helped that we lived out in the country when I was a little kid, so I could go out and practice whenever I felt like it.
I did a little bit of Japanese kyûdô a couple of years ago and found that the muscle memory is still there, and the skills cross-apply pretty well to other styles. The formalistic emphasis got on my nerves though. It’s more ritualistic and further removed from practical use than most other Japanese martial arts, and this is coming from someone who has been doing old-style sword arts similar to iaidô for the last four years, where the epithet “hidebound” would be a compliment
Takes literally 5 minutes to shoot 3 bloody arrows, and then you have to go through the whole bowing/setup rigamarole again. I just wanted to shoot and get better at hitting the target. Eventually gave up in frustration even though sensei was very impressed with how “fast” I was progressing. I knew that if I had a few weeks of practicing my way along with the traditional instruction I’d be darn good in a handful of months, but doing things the hard way was going to take a year or more and permanently elevate my blood pressure.
While the bows look nice, it’s really odd to see everyone in the photo gallery using three-finger Western releases when those are really made for the longer draw length you get from using the traditional thumb release.
Suburban Plankton, that’s great. Is he competing yet? How often does he shoot?
I went and shot today and it was great. Used a heavier bow and shot at the 30m target. Got a few 10s, even! Mostly lower scores, though, and several were in the white (I think that’s no score), but I hit the target almost every time. I could definitely see this becoming a long-term interest of mine. My abs are sore.
And you just started? Welcome to the next Olympics.
I’ve been into archery for a while now. It can’t be beat. A couple of things…
I hate compounds.
Don’t over-bow yourself.
I shoot Bear recurves circa 1975.
I’m glad you found this sport. I’m glad you like it. I’ll be interested to see how you progress.
Did I mention I hate compounds?
I was shooting at 10m targets that day, kinda hard to miss after tweaking your sight a couple times :D.
I don’t like compounds either - something about them has always seemed too modern or mechanical to me, while recurve seems more “authentic” - but is there a reason you hate them?
What do you mean by overbow? Get a bow with too much draw weight?
I want to give Don’t fight the hypothetical another chance to respond. You were the most enthusiastic archer to show up in the whole thread and then you just disappeared!
Yeah, as long as your form is halfway decent you’ll be able to hit what you’re aiming for pretty easily at that range. No deflection, wind has minimal effect. Archery is heavily dependent upon good form. Consistency breeds accuracy. This is true of any kind of shooting, really, but since there are so many factors in archery form is even more important than it is with, say, shooting a rifle.
I’ll take a stab at both of these. If you learned on a traditional bow, compounds feel clunky. There’s the jerk when the cams let some weight off that particularly feels like crap. When you loose, it also feels odd. The vibration is different, and unless you’ve got a particularly smooth-shooting compound, there’s a bit of a kick. It doesn’t feel as nice and — for lack of a better word — organic as a regular bow.
It also feels like a “cheat” to have a bow at full draw and not have to take the whole weight. With a traditional bow at full draw, you’re getting close to the point where the elasticity of the materials won’t let the bow draw much farther, at the point where it’s the highest load. That’s what can make a compound a bit more accurate and easier to shoot if you’re halfway decent, but that also means that you need less skill, discipline, and strength to do it.
You guessed right, overbowing is getting a bow with too much draw weight. Especially when you’re first starting out, you need to focus on form more than anything else. A heavier bow means that instead of paying attention to form, you’re just struggling to get it to full draw. You have to build up to heavier bows over time. That’s one of the reasons that when England used longbows heavily in warfare there was mandated practice time and rulers gave economic and social incentives for the yeoman class and higher to train with the bow.
The forces involved were so high that the skeletons of specialist archers show adaptations like bone spurs, slight deformation, and higher density in the involved skeletal structure. For something that demanding, you have to start shooting pretty young and keep building for years. For the level of performance you’d have to show using a longbow in battle, where you might have to loose hundreds of arrows, you’d probably have to have done it since you were a kid.
Realistically, you only need to have a draw weight of 50 to maybe 70 lbs. at the high end. You could probably take anything short of an elephant with a 70 pounder. Hunters have taken elk, moose, bear, and boar with bows that only draw about 60 to 65 lbs. For comparison, replicas of the longbows found on the Mary Rose ranged from 150 to about 200 lbs. draw weight.
The advice given to most beginners is to start light, get your form good and consistent, and after a few months or more, move up to a slightly heavier bow. Jumping up to a heavy draw weight before you have your technique will probably set bad habits and will definitely frustrate you in the short term since your shots will be all over the place. And it’ll hurt.
Have things changed in the bow world in the last 20 years? Because when I was shooting, almost all the competitions were shot with compound bows.
Anyway, $1200 for a bow is not necessary. You can get a perfectly fine bow, eithe a recurve or a compound, for $300-$500 new (I just checked), and any range will have a bunch of used ones for very good prices. I bought my wife a compound bow a few years ago, and I think we paid $125 for it and it works great.
Of course, like any sport you can spend as much as you want. Hell, you can spend $500 on 12 arrows, easily. You can buy a top line bow and trick it out with stabilizers, sights, a good release, and other doo-dads, and spend thousands of dollars.
But for a beginner just trying out the sport, you should be able to get started reasonably well for a couple of hundred bucks if you buy used. Or, you could just rent a bow at your local range.
My guess is because they only shoot recurve at the Olympics. Since archery just came back in 1972 maybe it took awhile for everyone to catch up, but most people want to shoot what the top guys shoot. There are of course compound compeitions (as well as primitive bow compeitions, barebow [no sight] competitions, crossbow, etc etc), but recurve seems to be the most popular. Also, since compound bows were only invented ~40 years ago, they probably had a popularity boom in their first couple decades that has levelled off now. These are just guesses.