The Complete Handbook of Archery Armguards

Chapter 1: Understanding Archery Armguards

More Than a Leather Pad

The archery armguard, often called a bracer, is a piece of protective equipment worn on the inside of the bow arm, the arm that holds the bow. Despite its simple appearance, it performs several critical functions that directly affect your safety, accuracy, and shooting consistency. To understand the armguard, you must first understand what happens when you release a bowstring.

In most modern bow designs, particularly recurves and longbows, the string travels a specific path after release. It accelerates forward, propelling the arrow, and then it decelerates as it approaches the bow's resting position. The critical moment for the armguard is the "brace height" position, the distance between the string and the deepest part of the grip. If your bow arm's forearm is in the path of the string at the end of its travel, the string will strike it. This is known as "string slap." A typical recurve bow string can be traveling at over 180 feet per second at this point, and the force of the impact concentrated on a small area of the arm is not a trivial sting.

The most obvious and immediate reason to wear an armguard is to prevent the pain and bruising of string slap. A direct hit on the bare skin of the forearm can leave a welt, break capillaries, and in severe cases, cause significant tissue damage. For a competitive archer, a single severe string slap during a tournament can affect