Can Archery Be a Great Fitness Activity?
The Hunger Games books are popular and hard to put down and many people have been thinking of Archery as a fun sport for them selves or their kids. A great way to combine one’s love for the series and get a workout at the same time is to try the new archery themed workouts inspired by the Hunger Games.
Unlike in the book or movie, the only killing in Hunger Games or archery workouts is done to calories. Students participate in a scheduled workout that mimics the books, from intense cardio in the beginning in grabbing mats and weights to pitting participants against each other, fans of the book may forget they’re even working out. This is considered interval training which helps the muscles from forming memory to repetitive motions and is a great way to combine cardio and strength work.
Archery Workouts
Training in archery is not typically considered one of the more common forms of working out. When it’s broken down, archery actually involves many core principles of a full workout. As tributes in the Hunger Games know, archers must be fit to succeed…and live.
- Strength – An archer must have arm and upper body strength to achieve distance and speed with their arrow. The farther a person can stretch their bowstrings back, the more powerful a launch of the arrow.
- Flexibility – The poses of an archer are not standard body motions and many archers find themselves contorted in all sorts of poses. A great archer must have body flexibility to strike and maintain the arrow drawing motion.
- Coordination and Focus – An archer must also have strong hand-eye coordination and intense focus to be patient for a target and hit it when it arrives.
The individual archery workouts include strengthening the upper back and shoulders as well as arms. This can be done with both resistance training to emulate a bow and also free weights to build muscle. Hand and finger workouts can be implemented as well to deal with the stress of repeated bow firings in practice. To increase flexibility, a variety of stretching routines should be performed as well as some yoga. Also a healthy cardiovascular system is crucial to an archer running through a forest or chasing down a target so running and aerobics should be implemented into the workout.
The fun part of archery is the reward of all the work out being channeled into a final activity – archery. See how your fitness level can improve your aim and endurance.
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It would be really great to feel like Katniss Everdeen and at the same time, be healthy and fit.
Of course, there’s all the walking back and forth to the target as well. If you shoot a full outdoor FITA round, you will have to walk almost three miles just going to collect your arrows – not including sighters, setting up the field etc. Some people jog back and forth. That’s on top of pulling the bow 144 times, pulling the arrows out the target, searching for lost ones…