Can a Compound Bow Help Me Stick to My Exercise Regimen?
When Beth first started assigning Lifehacker fitness tasks to writers on the site, I pretended not to notice. I never knew how to train. I can hardly spell this word. Except for softball when I was five years old, I didn’t play any team sports as a child. I dabbled in gymnastics and dancing until I reached puberty and “developed”, and never did any physical activity again after that, except for the Pilates exercise for beginners, which I got from a book I did every night at for several years. my teens are trying to get “long and lean”, which I just can’t do.
About six years ago, I trained and ran / completed a half marathon in an attempt to save my marriage. (At the time, my ex-husband was very fond of marathons and triathlons, and it seemed reasonable to take an interest in his interests.) We got divorced and I had to remove both large toenails.
I have never had much success in sticking to any physical form – that’s what I’m talking about, but perhaps I found my “trick”. It turns out that all I needed was a compound bow.
I originally planned on learning how to roller skate for my Lifehacker fitness challenge, but I don’t like falling and decided to devote my time to getting strong enough to kill a moose. I bought my compound bow in May when my father informed me that we would hunt moose with bows instead of rifles. (The archery season is much longer than the rifle season, and our buddy Kurt is really into archery.) I went to Archers Afield, got dressed for a bow and fired my first arrow.
“Damn it, this is fun,” I said, and someone nodded and straightened my left hand so I didn’t get a big purple bruise. (This string is really breaking.)
On the day I brought the compound bow home, my pulling force was 37 pounds. According to Kurt and other people I spoke with at Archer’s Afield, I needed to gain at least 40 pounds if I wanted to hunt moose. I asked Beth if she wanted to put together a strength training program for me, and luckily she did.
I got a membership to my local, aggressive purple Planet Fitness, although I haven’t had much gym success in the past. It always seems to me that I’m hanging out without a clear purpose, and that other, stronger or thinner patrons are better at it, judging me by my “bad shape”.
I did my first workout, Archery Strength Workout A, on May 14, bench pressing five pound dumbbells and lifting a whopping 25 pounds. The maximum weight I could move was 105 pounds and I moved it with my legs on a leg press machine. I also managed to hold the board for a minute, which was a bit surprising because if you look at the way I sit when I work, you don’t think “this woman has decent core strength.”
I sent my workout to Beth via SMS and she advised me to get some fucking weight on the barbell , which is honestly the best workout advice I’ve ever been given. Every time I went to the gym, I put on weights on almost every exercise, and after seeing a little PR notice in the app, I felt very good.
I alternated my workouts, going to the gym at least three times a week, sometimes four. Meanwhile, a couple of times a week I tried to shoot a bow. I took an introductory lesson at Archer’s Afield and learned where to place my hand (on my cheek, close to my ear) and how to keep my shoulders, arms and body stationary so that I can shoot the arrow smoothly in one fluid, continuous stream. motion. Doing this seemingly simple movement required a much larger percentage of my muscles than I expected, and I began to understand why Beth chose this particular set of exercises.
Even with all the strength training, I was surprised at how quickly my arms got tired during shooting practice. I would start fairly accurately, but that accuracy would decrease with each arrow. It was frustrating, but after the first week I started noticing improvements and it made me go back to the purple gym.
I began to feel cautious and confident, although (oddly) shy of increasing weight, especially if I noticed that I was gaining more weight than the man exercising next to me. I finally got over it when I realized that most of the people in the gym were also trying not to get noticed, and that everyone was comfortable doing their own thing. Nobody looked at me.
I continued to put on weight and noticed that my groups were getting tighter, even if they didn’t land exactly where I wanted. I hardly believed it, but having a progress marker completely unrelated to my body weight and shape was very helpful. Years of food writing have (somewhat unexpectedly) helped with body image issues I struggled with in my 20s, but I can still get obsessive and unhealthy if I focus on restorative goals like weight loss or reducing calories rather than additive targets like eating more vegetables, lifting more weight and shooting more accurately.
I was looking forward to going to the gym, gaining weight and shooting arrows. I had fun, although admittedly it was more tiring than other things I do for fun (drinking martini in the jacuzzi). This kind of “progress” is something I haven’t experienced many times, and I began to feel hopeful that I would reach my goal of 40 pounds of pull before the start of moose season. But more than that, I was cautiously excited that, perhaps, finally, after three decades, I had found “my thing.”