Stabilizer Set-Up

Stabilizers, over the last decade or so, have become all about vibration damping. Sales of stabilizers and the perceived quality of a stabilizer are measured by how dead it makes the bow feel. Vibration damping isn’t the most important thing stabilizers are for.

Stability improves accuracy is two ways. There is a mechanical improvement and a mental improvement. The mechanical improvement is just simple aiming stability. The tighter your hold is, the tighter your groups are going to be. The mental improvement is less straightforward and it affects different shooters in different ways.

A stabilizer adds stability to the bow, your form relaxes and your bow becomes more still.

Stability, shot execution, and form are intrinsically connected to each other. If there is a problem in one area it creates problems in the other areas. It’s a cycle that feeds itself. You can give it positive input and see a cascading effect through all three parts of the shot cycle. It works something like this. A stabilizer adds stability to the bow, your sight picture moves more slowly, and covers less area on the target. Added stability allows you to relax a little mentally, and reduces the struggle to keep the dot centered. Your form and frame softens a little. You find it easier to hold the bow with a relaxed pressure and less use of opposing muscle groups. Hardness through your framework and muscles can create rigidity that causes a low frequency vibration in the bow that never really settles. Softening the bow movement with stabilizers and gaining better balance, helps the bow feel lighter and stay on target with less effort. The overall mental ease, form relaxation, and the stability it creates allows your shot execution to speed up. Soft, relaxed hands that are elongated under the pressure of your form give a more consistent and timely activation of the release. Your stabilizers are a seemingly simple part of your setup; who would have thought that you could fix so many things with a good stabilizer rig?

Form, and shot execution do play an equal role, but lets concentrate on stability; specifically, your stabilizer configuration. I see shooters all the time set up their new bows with just any old stabilizer rod. Many arbitrarily put weight against the riser, many use side rods or V-Bar kits, because everyone else uses them. Often I see people using the stabilizer rod with no weight on the end. You can’t swing a cat by the tail without hitting a stabilizer company these days. Everyone has a rod out now that promises to be the cure for everything under the sun. They all have their sales pitches and they all have a pretty good-looking product too. In fact some of the stabilizer setups walking around out there are quite beautiful, Ineffective in my opinion, but beautiful nonetheless. There is a lot of voodoo flying around concerning stabilizers, and the bulk of the people out there don’t really understand how it works or how to use the laws of stabilization to create the most effective setup.

Essentially the purpose of the stabilizer and adding weight to a bow is to raise its moment of inertia. Moment Of Inertia (MOI) is the measure of an object’s resistance to rotation. A high MOI is very resistant to torque. A low MOI is not resistant at all and is very unforgiving. The lower your moment of inertia, the more perfect you have to be. Your aim has to be perfect, your execution has to be perfect, and your form and muscle consistency has to be exact from shot to shot.

Many Stabilizers are heavy overall through their entire length. Some have vibration-damping pistons; oil filled bladders, sand kits, and the like in the rear of the rod close to the bow. Though these vibration-damping modules do make the bow feel great by reducing much of the ringing vibration out of the bow, they do little or nothing to increase the forgiveness factor of the bow. Today’s bows are pretty heavy before you add anything to them at all, so when you add more weight with the idea of making the bow more forgiving and stable, you have to be sure the weight is located in the proper spot to give you the most forgiveness. Just mass weight alone doesn’t create accuracy. Mass and balance together will be most effective in reducing tremor and keeping the bow still while it cycles and launches the arrow.

First of all I want you to shoot your bow without any stabilization at all so you can get a feel for how it moves. Without stabilization you can see the effects of draw length issues, tension in your frame, or misalignments in your form. However that is a whole other article worth of information. Once you have shot your bow without rods you can watch the affects when you add the rod and weight. After adding the rods and no weight you should barely notice any change at all, though you will see a very slight balance change. While you are shooting the rods with no weight at all installed notice your sight movement and direction. You may also be able to see the side to side waggle in the rod at full draw as well.

Many people think the side rod is there to offset the weight of the sight. Though hanging the weight off to one side helps reduce the natural cant of the shooter. That cant isn’t really caused by the weight of the sight. The sight is so close to the center line of the bow, it would have to be very heavy to really have a significant effect on your bow balance. The cant or offset is really caused by your bow arm. The twin bones in your forearm are in a slightly coiled or in a twisted state to hold the bow upright. As you relax through the shot these bones begin to uncoil to parallel. You will want to add weight to your rear rod or rods to offset the leverage of your long rod. You can split this weight between two rods or put it all on one rod. Whatever feels best to you will work just fine.

By offsetting the leverage of your long rod, you can create a basic balance like the tight rope walker. Though 14 oz sounds like a lot of weight, you will be amazed at how light that feels when it is in balance. The extra mass will reduce the effect of muscle tremor while you aim and preloaded torque as the arrow is launched. I recommend shooting as much weight as you can work up to as long as it is in balance.

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