Holding bows drawn:
We see it every time: a threat looms, the character readys the bow, draws it… and just stays like that, waiting for the proper opportunity to release the arrow. It is used like that in sieges (with the defenders all with their bows drawn), or as a threat (the villain has a bow drawn, aiming at the hero).
Are you frigging kidding me???
We see this all the time, although most often in medieval or fantasy films.
Katniss and Legolas, guilty!
The humans holding their bows.
The Elves holding their bows, calmly, while Legolas gives instructions very slowly.
I’m using pictures from The Lord of the Rings, a movie I simply love, because I know it is in there. But it is also in so many places:
Now, here’s the thing: do you know how hard is to draw a bow???
Let’s talk about draw weight.
Draw weight is basically how strong is the bow, how much force it takes to draw it and, in turn, with how much force it pushes the arrow. A regular target practice bow today has a draw weight of about 30 to 35 pounds. A youngling’s bow is about 26 pounds. What does this mean? That in order to draw the bow, you have to exert 30, 35 or 26 pounds of force… with just your upper body. My first bow was 26 pounds, and it was a great effort to draw it. Normal hunting bows start on 50 pounds and more. 70 pounds is more or less the average. Mind you, this means lifting 70 pounds with just your arms. And these bows, as heavy as they seem, can barely dent a properly armored enemy. You need a lot more energy for that.
Do you know what’s the draw weight of war bow? Over 100 pounds. Yeah, you read it right, lifting over 100 pounds with just your arms… EVERY… TIME… YOU… SHOOT.
Richard Stuckey said it succintly and very clearly in the comment section: Imagine a 100-lb lead weight on the floor, with a loop of string through it, and imagine sticking three fingers into that loop and lifting the weight with just those fingers!
Do you know how a body exerting this type of force looks? Like this:
Does he looks like he could hold that for very long? Nah, I don’t think so either. In order to shoot those massive bows, archers used their whole body. And the stress was so much, that their skeletons were deformed. Look at this skeleton of an archer:
Notice how much his left arm was developed. And this was a British Longbowman, with a bow of probably 130 pounds. Some composite bows used by the steppe tribes (like the Mongols) had a draw weight of 160 pounds… One hundred and sixty pounds… just with your arms… from horseback… every time you want to shoot an arrow…
So, anytime you see an archer in a film holding his bow drawn, that’s utter bullshit. Those prop bows are normally very light, with less than 20 pounds of draw weight. It is impossible to hold a (traditional) bow steady for too long. It is just too heavy. When you are shooting an actual effective bow, you draw, aim, and release, everything in a couple of seconds at the most, normally less than that.
(I emphasize “traditional” bow, because modern bows with pulleys can indeed be held on for quite a long time… thanks for the pulley system they have… which did not exist in medieval period).
P.S.: Ironically enough, Robin Hood (2018), a movie so bad that I wasn’t even able to finish it, despite all its badness, actually portrayed archers properly in this sense (at least in some scenes…). And we see the soldiers advancing with their bows loaded with arrows, but not drawn.