An Important Consideration When Adjusting Your Poundage

I'm slowly starting to increase the poundage on my hunting bow as I get closer to season. I'm a few weeks out now, but I don't know if I'm gonna go as heavy as I did last year. To be honest with you, I'm shooting so well at this lower weight. Typically, I haven't really made this long of a transition between the two poundages. Normally, I just go from one, kind of jump up into the other. But as I've been practicing more and more, and this year is a lot of reps for me, over 20,000 at this point, I'm actually finding that finding a comfort in my draw weight is proving better. So today, I added two more pounds to my bow, and I wanted to show you what those few extra pounds did. You can see I am getting some extra speed from the poundage, but it isn't a lot. This is actually at a longer distance. So at the closer distances, this would be pretty dang minimal, but you have to focus on your accuracy too. Now, this is only two arrows, so it might take me a little bit longer to make a decision on this, but the poundage of your bow is affecting the spine or the stiffness of that arrow. And so sometimes you might be three pounds one direction, and you might get an arrow that's kind of having a little bit of highs and lows, and maybe off to the right or to the left a little bit more. And then once you change that poundage, when it really starts to agree with that arrow, it's gonna shrink down that group like that. I call it a hill method, a horizontal impact line method of tuning, and it gets you to the same place really as walk back tuning or bear shaft tuning, lots of different things, but how spine is reacting to the weight of your bow. I always look for groups. I'm not worried about the fact that adding some extra poundage is giving me a little bit faster arrow, and I'm impacting a little bit higher. So now I'm gonna be able to get a tighter pin gap or change my pin gap. What I'm worried about the most is just the tightness of those groups. If you start to increase your poundage and you see your groups opening up, then that's an indicator that even though you're going up in that poundage, you're starting to weaken the spine of that arrow too much. And as it gets too weak, those arrows will start to expand in their left to right grouping. This is telling me I really have really good options right now. I can move up this three pounds. I can get a little bit of extra speed. I'm still staying really tight with my groups. But at this point, the verdict is still out if I'm gonna go with that 70 plus, or if I'm just gonna take this year and shoot in the upper 60s and see how this produces out on the range. And what I can tell you is, I think all of you out there will see that when it comes to effectiveness in the hunting woods and on animals, you're really trying to nitpick if you're worried about one or two pounds here or there. It's all about comfort for you to the draw weight and groups down range. That's what's most important.