In my sport of archery it is not uncommon to find individuals who do not appear strong or muscular to pull back extremely heavy bows, bows that very large weightlifters can’t pull back. In one extreme example we have a lady that weighed at most 105# pulling a bow with a draw weight of 100#. Ken Norton the boxer attempted to pull the same bow and failed. I would imagine other sports have similar examples.
I think there may be some mental in it. I also think pulling a bow requires a fairly specific set of muscles, one that could really only be developed through either a very specialized workout routine…or drawing a bow thousands of times. Many sports have specific muscle memory and coordination; I’m thinking of guys whom I could crush in arm wrestling, but who can drive a golf ball literally twice as far as I can.
Not terribly surprising: a boxer is good at propelling his fist forward as forcefully as possible, but won’t have wasted time building the muscles for forcefully pulling his arm back.
I think the “mental” aspect of strength doesn’t come into play until you’re at the edge of your “normal” capability. I doubt that’s likely to be an issue in archery, since if you’re pulling for all you’re worth, you’re probably going to do a crappy job of aiming.
“Panic mode” results in an override of “normal” capability. People have been known to lift ridiculous weights in panic situations - the kind of weight that causes bone/joint/muscle damage. If your reptilian brain thinks your survival is at stake, well, a little chassis damage is a small price to pay in order to get out of trouble - but your brain won’t allow access to that kind of strength on an everyday basis, no matter how psyched up you are (assuming you’re not actually panicking).
Thru practice you can learn to contract more fibers in a given pattern of movement. This accounts for a lot of the apparent increase in strength that beginners often experience when they start lifting weights, even before their muscles begin to grow. There is a genetically determined upper limit to the number of fibers you will ever be able to contract at once, but you can approach that limit with practice.
If that is the sort of thing you mean.
Regards,
Shodan
The type of archery I do is called flight archery, we don’t aim exactly as much as we do hold the bow at 45 degrees and try to keep it as close on line as possible, we are distance shooting. I have always been a physicaly strong person but never really able to draw a very heavy bow.
The lady I mentioned above, her fiance held the record for the heaviest bow ever drawn, he was well built and strong but nothing like what you might expect for the type of record he held. She claims it is all tecnique and I am not in a position to argue with her aside from the fact that I find myself pulling as hard as I can pull and the bow stops moving when I seem to run out of strength.I think what were talking about is technique. It’s learning how to apply your physical strength at the most effective point of a system.
A lot of athletes will talk about ‘focus’, keeping your mind on the physical task, or at least not getting distracted by other things. Weight lifters also talk about working through the pain, not necessarily an injury, but taking your body past it’s comfort zone. And on top of that there is some level of ability to consciously cause your brain to trigger hormone production that gives you greater speed, strength, etc. I don’t know how to assign a percentage to those things, nothing makes up for practice.
Technique and sport specific training. You want to build up the specific muscles that are needed, which may not be apparent for some sports.
Imho, all strength is mental. I think about it like this: to be strong, you have to do physical exercises almost daily for years. To do anything relatively unpleasant on a regular basis for years requires OCD-level mental strength. Then, when you actually do the act, your mind automatically tells you if you can or can’t do it. If you believe you can’t do it, most people won’t even try. This is true not only for feats of strength, but virtually everything we do in life. And then, during the act itself, it requires mental strength to overcome discomfort, pain, and any type of hurdle to complete the task.
Without mental strength, there can not be physical strength.
Unless you’re young and gifted. I’ve known many athletes who were capable of amazing physical feats without significant training. The ones who were gifted *and *trained were even better, no doubt. But some folks can be fairly high level without mental strength to train.
I would argue the prerequisite for becoming a world-class athlete is the desire to become a world class athlete.
Also, the number of people who have the desire without the ability outnumber and continue to try longer than those with the ability without the desire.
Bone structure and muscle development play an important part. Plus some people have a natural ability. And practice, of course. Everyone is different. Mentally, a person can/could overcome some of the limitations of the human body, such as discomfort, pain, and endurance but if you can’t swing an atlatl, you can’t swing an atlatl.
I believe that rowing a boat is the motion most physically similar to properly drawing a bow (ie. rotating the elbows horizontally around the shoulder joints). Boxers, quarterbacks, and soccer players excel at sports that require other, non-archery-specific motions.
A 105# woman who can draw a 100# bow would probably get her butt kicked if she entered a boxing ring with an over-the-hill Ken Norton. But she could out-shoot him. Their roles would be reversed in The Hunger Games.
I’ve seen many RH archers extending their left (bow) arm towards the target and then dragging the bowstring back with just their right arm. That motion puts a lot of strain on the right shoulder joint, tendons, and muscles and, I believe, leads to early muscle and joint damage.
English longbow re-enactors “bend the bow”. Pushing the bow forward while pulling the string several inches past their ear, in the same motion.
There are many things you can do, if you do them before you access any doubts you might have in your head or before anyone suggests or convinces you it’s difficult or can’t be done.
I’ve always thought that if you put a bunch of teens in a room and simply tell them they can do anything thing they want, except “this one thing”, they’d find a way.
Whether you’re doing something that you don’t know you’re not supposed to be able to do or just having a “you’re not the boss of me” fit - the mind is a powerful thing.
Women’s core muscles can be incredibly strong, and the pelvis provides a powerfully stable base. Force comes from the whole body working together in precisely the right angles for the task, not just the arms.
I would warrant that what you’re seeing is neither raw strength nor mental toughness, but rather, a combination of physical talent and unique mastery of body mechanics.
The small woman has less potential power, but she’s applying what she has in an incredibly efficient way. Those bigger stronger men aren’t applying their force as efficiently.
The majority of early (8 to 20 weeks) strength gains in any weight training program come not from building new muscle but from training the muscle fibers you already have to fire in a more coordinated way - neuromuscular adaptation. Those adaptations are to no small degree very task specific.
Much of strength is therefore mental.
I believe you are right, no small coincedence that her fiance /trainer held the world record for heaviest bow pulled. I think he weighed about 180#.
This likely does come into play with heavy bows as well. I have been shooting for about 20 years but my weights have remained pretty constant. I imagine I am not tapping into those fibers you speak of.
I wonder how much leverage plays into it, and if there are circumstances where being smaller allows the person to move a proportionately greater weight.
For instance, in archery, the muscles in the back act as the effort, the shoulder as the fulcrum, and the bowstring as load (E-F-L, a type 2 lever). All other things being equal, the shorter the distance between the shoulder and the bowstring, the more the effort will pull off.
Yogi Berra had it figured out: “Sports is 50 percent physical and 90 percent mental.”
I went out this morning and tried several different methods of concentration, on one of my pulls I suddenly found about 7# more strength and it felt easy, not sure what happened. I suspect I did a better job of engaging my back muscles. If I pump the bow the way I would weights to pump up my muscles I find the neck and shoulder muscles pumping up and not my larger back muscles. So I know I have a tecnique issue going on.