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Warbow speed shooting
peasant1381:
There's four of us in NZ who are doing similar stuff with bows 115lbs and up. We shoot every week at a 220 yard mark. Occasionally we'll do a speed shoot. Our focus at the moment is shooting a whole sheaf in one round. I use rubber bungy cords as a training device. The other day I did 24 draws @105lbs in 75 seconds at a nice easy pace. It's not exactly the same as drawing a bow as there is no arrow to pick up and nock but the same muscle groups are being worked.
There is no big mystery to any of this. It comes down to the strength and muscular endurance of the archer.
ChrisM:
--- Quote from: bow-toxo on November 20, 2010, 02:21:43 pm ---
--- Quote from: ChrisM on November 14, 2010, 03:00:56 pm ---There are half a dozen folks in our longbow club (Companions of the Longbow, Swindon, UK) shooting 100#-plus bows. All of us can achieve 10-12 aimed shots per minute from arrows chucked into the ground. One of the lads can shoot 18+ surprisingly well aimed shots from his 90#, next summer it will be 100#. This isn't guesswork, it's one of the recorded challenges we perform from time to time throughout the year.
--- End quote ---
Your group seems to be above par. In “Secrets of the English Warbow”, Mark Stretton says that with a heavy warbow [like 150 pounds] under stressed conditions, he could manage an aimed shot every seven seconds, not more. The quote concerning the Duke of York and the dismissal of four of his 300 archers that couldn’t manage 10 arrows a minute sounds like the truth to me. That would be a shot every six seconds. While Mark Stretton seems as close to a mediaeval war archer as possible, I can imagine that some archers trained from childhood could manage one second less, but Mark’s record might be the one to aim for.
--- End quote ---
We're just ordinary folks Bow-Toxo, like yourself, and 150# under stressed conditions is quite different to 100# - 120# under relaxed conditions.
--- Quote from: peasant1381 on November 20, 2010, 04:08:12 pm ---There's four of us in NZ who are doing similar stuff with bows 115lbs and up. We shoot every week at a 220 yard mark. Occasionally we'll do a speed shoot. Our focus at the moment is shooting a whole sheaf in one round. I use rubber bungy cords as a training device. The other day I did 24 draws @105lbs in 75 seconds at a nice easy pace. It's not exactly the same as drawing a bow as there is no arrow to pick up and nock but the same muscle groups are being worked.
There is no big mystery to any of this. It comes down to the strength and muscular endurance of the archer.
--- End quote ---
Nice work Keith, and you've made the point well. It's nocking and aiming which takes the time and effort. Repeatedly drawing up the bow is the easy part.
peasant1381:
One more thing to take into account Chris which I don’t think anyone has mentioned yet– adrenaline. As you would well know the human body is capable of quite amazing feats when the situation demands it. That fact combined with the years of practice and the professionalism of the English armies of the 100 Years War suggests to me that 10 or more aimed shots loosed in rapid succession would have been quite achievable when required.
We may never know how they managed their (for want of a better expression) “fire discipline”. Once we have a group of say 50 modern archers shooting bows averaging 140lbs it would probably be then possible to carry out some useful research in that direction.
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