I broke my bow a couple weeks ago, and bought a used but better bow than the one I had. This new-to-me bow was used by a top Canadian archer at the World Championships a few years ago… it’s a better bow than I’ll ever need. But I’m having such a hard time with it.

To be clear, it’s not the bow, it’s me. I’m a go cart driver trying to drive a Ferrari. With my old bow, I could tell when I was shooting well and when I struggled. With this bow, I’m shooting and it feels good, but with inconsistent results. Good shots and bad shots feel the same. Worse shots feel like the bow has a mind of its own, torquing in my hand after my shot, the string hitting my arm. I never had this issue with my old bow.

Here’s the challenge, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong? I don’t know what I don’t know. I’ve made all kinds of adjustments and still get inconsistent results. Yesterday while practicing, my buddy who is helping coach me heard me complain (again) that the bow feels too narrow on my hand, and I don’t know why.

He said, ‘Well, you can keep complaining and do the same thing, and get the same results. Or you can stop and try to fix it.’ And he sent me to get cardboard and tape, and try to make the grip wider to see if that helped. Covid makes these conversations a bit tougher, because he’s making suggestions from a distance, where we would normally be shoulder-to-shoulder working this out. So, he shot a couple more rounds while I hacked away at cardboard and wrapped my handle in tape.

It seemed to work, a lot of inconsistencies went away. I started shooting better, and the string stopped hitting my arm after my shot. I came home and wrapped a new handle with better material than cardboard, surrounded by some tennis racket over grip.

I’ll give this a try for a while. It might help considerably. It might be one of many adjustments I make. It might be something that promotes bad habits and I might need to undo it and start all over again. I need to remember that I’ve only had this bow for two weeks, and I’m still a rookie on a huge learning curve. Right now I’m in an experimental phase and need to shoot my next 1,000 arrows before I can consider my feedback valid enough to ‘know’ more. It’s hard to fix things when you don’t know what you don’t know…