Archery Recurve Bows

Archery Recurve Bow - A Powerhouse In Your Hands

The bow and the arrow - perhaps the second oldest hunting gear used by humanity. Other than the lowly rock, the first was almost certainly a crude spear; a stick with a pointed rock or shell attached to one end. One can only imagine some clever ancestor of ours looking for a way to hunt with a spear without having to get in striking distance of the woolly mammoth. So the spear became the sleek arrow.

After the initial prototype, some refining was in order. It was found after some experimentation that how long the string was determined how far the arrow could fly from the bow. Longer equals farther equals more safety for our hypothetical ancestor. Now the bow had to be designed around the length of the string. As we can imagine, the end result of all this experimentation was a happy marriage between the length of the string, the accuracy versus distance ratio, and the average strength of the archer.

Let us suppose the the distance the archer wants to be from the woolly mammoth is six hundred and eighty feet. Oh no, the string has to be very long meaning the resulting bow is too long for the archer to handle! What to do?

The answer was found before too many ancestors got squashed by the woolly mammoth. We call it the archery recurve bow. Basically, this is a bow that has been engineered so that each edge of it is shaped with an outward arc. Visualize it this way, with the archer standing, bow in hand, drawing the string, the ends of his bow are pointing towards the target, not towards himself. The effect of this is that the archer can put additional tension on the bow and string so the arrow will fly further.

Essentially, the archer now gets more bang for his buck. And it is now within the realm of possibilities to reach our desired six hundred and eighty feet. Imagine how important this was when armies were made up of archers!

The recurve bow is the bow you are most likely to see on the archery range, both for contests and for practice. As a matter of fact, it has become such an industry standard that in Olympic competitions, the recurve is the only style of bow allowed to be used.

This bow is also extremely popular in the world of bow hunting. When the hunter is wandering around in the outdoors stalking his prey he has a number of considerations. He wants a lot of horsepower in his shots because he has to make each shot count. But he has to make compromises in bow length because of two main reasons: first, he doesn't want to struggle with too much weight; and second, when he gets into the heavy brush a long bow simply is not practical.

If you found this information on Archery Recurve useful, you'll also want to read about Traditional Archery.

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