Main > The Armoury
Warbow
Sir William:
--- Quote from: Leganoth on 2012-08-16, 01:17:10 ---well hopefully it wont snap in 2!, even if it does the website said if it breaks they will replace free of charge! i can pull a 50 pound back pretty easily, i have a 45-50 compound bow, but I wanted to go traditional :)
--- End quote ---
A compound bow with a draw weight of 50lbs is going to be a good bit easier than a simple longbow. The compound bow has a levering system which aids in the draw- you'll not have that luxury in a longbow.
Bent over rows with dumbbells and weighted pullups will help with drawing. Imagine you're half hanging off of a ledge with a 50lb weight attached to your arm- pull and release, pull and release and you're mimicking the movement of drawing and releasing an arrow. Longbowmen of the medieval age are purported to have had as much as 200lbs of pressure when drawing an English yew longbow (conservative estimates put it at ~150lbs for the average longbow) - like pulling up a full grown man from that ledge with one arm, each time you draw the bow. I cannot, as of yet, do that.
Sir Edward:
Yeah, longbow archers from the time, using bows in the weight range of 150 to 200lbs, typically had to practice for about 2 hours a day to keep up their strength and accuracy. Skeletons recovered from the Mary Rose, a ship that sank with a compliment of archers on it, shows that many of the archers had fused bones in their backs, from all that longbow usage.
If you're going to shoot casually, 50 lbs sounds great. At 150 lbs and more, you need to be serious about being an archer.
Sir William:
You'll look like something out of Muscle Beach, according to the studies on those archer skeletons...the fused bones they found were that way to facilitate the large muscle mass required to be able to pull a bow of that power 10-12 times a minute. I've heard of some who practice this profession and they're not small men. Its like an entire body workout from what I've read.
Thorsteinn:
:D
Sir Edward:
Here are parts 2 & 3 of the show, and it's in part 3 that they mention the Mary Rose wreck:
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