For either it is most important not to be overbowed. When I went to the PSE shooter school in '96 or '97, out of a class of @ 30, selected from a population of active shooters, most people aren't even interested enough to go to one of these, 3 out of about 30 weren't overbowed. All of the rest of us were.

If I had to advise a person I would say this: There are bows you can draw, at that time I had shot bows up to 100#, and my regular bows were various @ 75# recurves and longbows. But I would say that even I knew that with cam bows I wasn't gaining any effectiveness by going 80# and up. My regular bows were all 60-70# Mathews in the compound area. I had as much right to be shooting these bows as all the other 27 people in my class who were overbowed. My real handelable weight was a ridiculous 50-60# rubber band bow, and of course if speed really didn't mater dropping down to 40-50 indoors would have been nice. What this tells me is most people should be handling two bow weight ranges down from where they perceive the cutoff is.

There are a lot of other things you hear said, like can you draw it sitting down, and so forth. I could do all that stuff and I was still overbowed.

Put differently, in ten pound ranges: There is the bow you can pull back easily enough but would never seriously want to shoot regularly; there is the bow you can easily pull back, but you can't shoot, but you don't know it; and then one hopes there is the bow you can shoot.

Keep in mind that even at 60# modern bows develop more energy than the recurve Fred Bear shot his elephant with.

It isn't how well you shoot the first shot, how well will you shoot the 40th shot. But interestingly the PSE lasers show that virtualy none of us had enough time to shoot the first shot properly either (though we had been shooting a fair bit before lunch).

People will say hey there is only 2 lbs difference between 60 and 70 # at full draw with an 80% let-off. It's the area under the force draw curve you had to displace to get there that maters right along with the holding weight.

Also don't listen to a word anyone else here says, because in a post a few weeks ago it was revealed that almost all these other guys are manic weight lifters.