Imagine picking up a 45-kg weight using only a string held by three fingers. The pressure on the fingers is intense. Getting the shoulders and chest into the pull is the trick, and it's not quite as hard as lifting a weight off the floor because of that. But the fingers are doing a lot of work. Mine had turned white after a few shots, even with a thick leather tab to protect them.
We did do volleys, because the public expected it and it was fun to do. But we could not hold for long - the bloke doing the shouting knew that he had only a couple of seconds between "draw" and "loose" or we'd be all over the place.
If you're interested in archery-focused exercises - https://www.morrelltargets.com/blogs/archery-blog/9-strength...
What makes it various bow styles exceptionally difficult is the draw style -- horsebow drawing by a single thumb is especially difficult; war bow has a strange draw style I've never attempted due to shoulder issues, recurve isn't difficult as you get three fingers, and compound archery is simply cheating.
Most of these draws aren't a draw and immediate release, but a draw and hold to aim. That's where archery becomes physically exhaustive. There was some recent YTer who showed off by drawing a 100#+ bow but couldn't hit worth shit. Hitting your target takes patience and practice.
As noted in another child, draw weights are typically measured at 30", but your draw may only be 29" or may be 31", etc. You'd want a bow that fits your draw length as close as possible, though.
A couple months of training and many folks can consistently hit a soup can at 50 yards with a 75# draw (or better). That would be absurd to even contemplate 100 years ago.
I prefer the antiquity of recurve bows and the lesser amounts of maintenance that comes with them. Though, I also think compound bows are beyond dangerous in comparison.
I have found that recurve archers seem to be better about 'checking' their arrows after missed shots. Many compound users I have known think that as long as the arrow is not completely snapped, then it's safe to use. I just show them the Google images of what happens when an arrow with hairline cracks explodes the near instant the quick-release is released.
This issue can happen with high draw weight recurve bows, but I have never seen the damage like what a compound bow can do.
Always check your arrows, folks!
You don't ever bend over and pick something off the ground?
We have.
Then I became a climber where I "activate muscles not typically used in any other day to day scenarios and activate muscles beyond simply lifting/extending a dumb bell"
My pulling strength now is kind of incredible, especially for my weight. Finger strength too. I actually couldn't imagine a better crossover.
Archer skeletons have recognizably curved finger and clavicle bones.
The first two times he lifted the bag he said this isn’t that heavy, maybe he got defrauded, so he got a scale and checked. But by the time he tried to lift it off the scale he was struggling, and getting it back into the metal can was serious work.
Stamina separates the pro from the amateur, but fatigue comes for all of us.
(Modern bows are different. They use cams and multiple strings to create the opposite effect. They can get lighter as you draw them back, which is a really strange sensation if you aren't expecting it.)
When I owned one, it had a 65lb draw with an 80% letoff. So it took maybe 10/15lbs to hold it at full draw. But my bow could still reliably throw arrows out to around 300m, basically double the range of an english longbow. Nobody ever aims a modern bow for max range. Doing so is incredibly dangerous. World record distance shots have broken 1000m.
I had a teacher that was a bow hunter. I believe he claimed it was the only arrangement fair to the deer. They had a sporting chance. I can’t imagine he fired more than a couple arrows in any hunting trip. Very different from shoot or die.
They consider it a sport, the sport requires physical discipline, and that discipline is a propos of the topic.
If you want to get into the cruelty of hunting, we will first have to decide if raising feedlot animals is less cruel than hunting, and you will absolutely lose that argument. But we aren't here to discuss any of that. We are talking about the stopping power of arrows and arrows don't care what mammal they are aimed at.
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." F Scott Fitzgerald, probably stolen from Zelda Fitzgerald.
Force is force, whether it is due to elasticity or gravity. The difference is that the drawing force increases progressively, whereas the weight of an object is (for these purposes) constant (as stated).
Bands progressively increase resistance as they're stretched.
Chains load or de-load resistance as they're raised or lowered to the ground.
(How much of this was known and utilised during mediaeval warfare training and drilling is unclear, but I suspect the answer is "little".)
1. https://acoup.blog/2019/07/04/collections-archery-distance-a...
A lot of the tests are firing perpendicularly at plate armour that's held in front of a hard surface with no gambeson underneath. When you take account of arrows often arriving at a slight angle, and humans are a movable pile of meat covered in thick cloth with plate on top, then the ability to penetrate deep enough to cause a significant wound is reduced.
Never eliminated though!
But if arrows really did pierce plate armour, and I was a knight in a battle then I'd just get myself a 6 foot tall 3 foot wide, heavy wooden shield and hide behind it until I got to close quarters. But the fact is people didn't bother doing this because they found a less cumbersome shield more effective, and that suggests that rich plate-armour-clad knights weren't dying left right and centre from arrow fire.
> [I]n the war against the Welsh, one of the men of arms was struck by an arrow shot at him by a Welshman. It went right through his thigh, high up, where it was protected inside and outside the leg by his iron chausses, and then through the skirt of his leather tunic; next it penetrated that part of the saddle which is called the alva or seat; and finally it lodged in his horse, driving so deep that it killed the animal.
I wouldn't want to be shot by one, regardless.
Of course longbows could and did kill - they wouldn't have been used in war otherwise! But they did not routinely kill through plate armour at range.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "resilient", but horses running around dragging their intestines on the ground for half an hour is not uncommon in 'gore' material from bullfighting events gone wrong. I have yet to see a human do something similar. Horses are domesticated from prey animals, they are very good at ignoring pain and wounds and still getting away.
I believe it's generally accepted that the longbows we're talking about delivered arrows with more force than Mongol composite bows.
> I'm also not sure what you mean by "resilient", but horses running around dragging their intestines on the ground for half an hour is not uncommon in 'gore' material from bullfighting events gone wrong. I have yet to see a human do something similar. Horses are domesticated from prey animals, they are very good at ignoring pain and wounds and still getting away.
Horses are notoriously fragile. The quote does not say that the horse died instantly, merely that it died.
No, they're not. One could argue that some of the recent breeds, designed for a particular aesthetic rather than practicality, are, but that's not really within this subject.
> horses are big and react poorly to being wounded: a solid arrow hit on a horse is very likely to disable both horse and rider. And while light or archer cavalry might limit exposure to mass arrow fire by attacking in looser formation, as we’ve discussed, European heavy horse generally engages in very tight lines of armored men and horses in order to maximize the fear and power of their impact. Unsurprisingly then, we see from antiquity forward, efforts to armor or protect horses, called ‘barding’: defenses of thick textile, scale, lamellar, and even plate are known in various periods, though of course the more armor placed on the horse, the larger and stronger it needs to be and the slower it moves. Nevertheless, the size and shape of a horse makes it harder to armor than a human and you simply cannot achieve a level of protection for a horse that is going to match a heavy infantryman on the ground, especially if the latter has a large shield.
European medieval cavalry warfare saw the development of sophisticated horse training and group tactics, which mitigates the risk that a horse would bolt at the first wound. The reason infantry with poles were the default counter against cavalry, and not bowmen, is that these weapons wound more deeply and stand a chance to overcome horse training or bleeding out the horses.
If you could flank cavalry with bows it was still a good idea to do so, largely because cavalry knights were heavily armoured and in formation, i.e. not very agile and typically locked into shock advancement. It's important to keep in mind that medieval european destrier horses were big but not tall, unlike the breeds popular among contemporary european militaries, which tend to be slim and tall.
Until mechanised warfare became dominant european warfare was highly bound by tradition and ceremony and honour, rather than efficiency. This is an important reason for the quick fascist advancements in early WWII, and the success of highly mobile mongol cavalry. Previously european militaries typically decided on whether to meet on a field and clash there, or whether one party were to retreat into a fortification and turn it into attrition warfare. Skipping past the enemy Schwerpunkt with a mobile force was more or less frowned upon, and you can see this even in modern military thinkers like Clausewitz or turn-of-the-millenium US warfare.
Deciding on where the field is, where the enemy officers are concentrated as well as their troops and entering into an honourable, decisive battle there has been the dominant mode of european and european-descendant warfare for a long, long time. It hinges on soldiers (and horses) to be trained to not bail out in the face of danger or light injury, and wouldn't be possible at all if horse mounts were frail.
It clearly died with the rider still attached. One can safely presume that the horse didn't travel very far under those conditions.
This is the standard simplified narrative of what happened at Agincourt - English archers wiping out French noble heavy cavalry - although it also seems like that was an exception.
The battlefield killing was done by light infantry wading in with daggers and hatchets apparently during a foot slog up the muddy hill which left the french heavy infantry exhausted. Another wave of killing afaik was when the captured prisoners were all executed since the english position seemed like it might be overrun by some follow up fighting.
(keep in mind the battle took hours and there was a lot more going on then just heavy horse riding up against arrows once or twice)
Wiki page is worth a read actually
First, that archers can actually be more effective against mounted troops than foot: the mounted troops ride close together, horses are hard to fully armor, and one horse getting hit in the leg can cause a lot of chaos.
Second, at Agincourt, the French knights _walked_ through the arrow-fire quite successfully, but the effort (physical, mental, cumulative effect of small wounds) tired them enough that the English soldiers could beat them hand-to-hand. And that this ability to inflict small damage before the main fighting is why archers were valuable.
They pinned his army down with a fresher army meaning to destroy them. The English infantry and cavalry were vastly outnumbered due to attrition, but what he did have were longbows. And somehow they beat a superior army while losing a fraction as many men.
The historical military analysis I saw was that with the front lines so thin, the archers essentially didn’t have to fire long arching volleys. The flatter angle of the arrow trajectory and shorter flight distance increased the penetration force, and they just absolutely destroyed every charge against them, confusing the attacking army. Arrows should not be dropping this many men. WTF.
And at pretty close range. Plate armour very effective at stopping arrows and blades, otherwise they wouldn't have worn it.
I mean there are lots of people that dumbbell row 95s or 100s or 105s for 8-10 reps (I used to be one em...). That's not really "seconds" but sure it's not a lot either. But then again no one literally only trains dumbbell rows so it's not at all unbelievable to me that you could do this (train to draw a high weight bow many times without "gassing").
It's just surprising that the number's that large.
Compound bows of course you can go higher because of mechanical advantage, but either way I don't think that people realize how difficult it is to draw a 100 pound bow. Typical professional recurve bow users would rarely want to exceed 50 pounds as I understand it.
In a war setting, higher draw weights increase both distance and penetration, which are desirable.