How to pick a compound bow
With a few of the top manufactures and their stories representing what the compound bow market has to offer, you can now start to see what values and goals each manufacturer wants to sell to their customers. Depending on your current level of experience in archery, each manufacturer may offer a different style of bow that could suite your needs better than one that is too powerful or too weak.
Picking Your Bow: The Beginner
Most people looking to buy a bow are beginners and manufacturers generally engineer a bow just for this demographic. A beginner needs a bow that is able to perform well enough to get the basic fundamentals of archery under their belt without having too much power.
The unquestionable king of beginner bows is Bear archery. Bear specializes in higher end bows but knows that every archer needs to start somewhere. Unlike the other manufacturers mentioned above, Bear actually has specific bows aimed towards younger archers looking to learn the ropes that offer all the bow a child needs for a competitive price.
Bear is also able to help the new archer who is discovering their love of bow shooting at an older age. With a few options in their line-up that come in under 300 dollars, Bear is able to introduce archery with a compound bow to a market that might have originally shunned archery for its high cost of entry.
Picking Your Bow: Intermediate Archers
After learning on a beginner bow, most archers are keen for an upgrade that provides a few more features and more power. A lot of archers get into this area and hold onto their intermediate bow indefinitely as they have more than enough power for the vast majority of hunts. The price range of these bows is higher than the cheaper beginner bows, but they are almost always going to last for a long time.
For the intermediate archer, Bear is once again an excellent choice, as well as a few bows from Hoyt and PSE. The bows at this price range are often built to the highest standards of the companies that make them and all that separates them from the top of the line bows is a little less power.
Including features to reduce noise and vibration, enough power to hunt most game and compound cams that make for a smooth draw, these intermediate bows are able to provide incredible performance for the price.
The only reason Mathews did not make the list is that many of their bows cost a little more than the average intermediate archer is likely to spend, due to the very custom and small-scale manufacturing.
Picking Your Bow: Female Archers
The surge in compound bow popularity among female hunters has led to the creation of some incredible new bows designed just for women. One company that hit the nail on the head in the female bow department is Mathews.
Just as they test and develop all other bows in the field, Mathews put their female bow, The Avail, in the hands of women who were looking for a bow to hunt with that was lightweight, and built with them in mind. Mathews created the Avail from the ground up with a team of female hunters who knew what they wanted in a bow and turned it into a reality.
Mathews was able to take their history of testing and fine-tuning their bows and implementing input of their eager female audience to make a lightweight, stylish, and powerful bow that was built by women, for women.
Bear also saw the need for a hunting bow that women could use and created the incredibly popular Prowess, which embodies the idea of creating a bow that is weighted and sized for a smaller frame, without compromising the power.
Conclusion
It is clear to see from the rich history of bow manufacturing that passion is the primary drive of archery, and it is the brands that want to innovate and revolutionize the industry that always come out on top.
