Your bow is slower than the box says. So is mine. So is every bow ever sold. Here's why that's not a scandal — and what the real number actually is.
Every hunting bow comes with a speed on the sticker — 342, 350, sometimes a number with "up to" quietly in front of it. That's the IBO rating, and the first time you put your own bow over a chronograph you're going to be disappointed, because it won't hit it. Not close, sometimes. I've watched grown men get genuinely mad about it, like they got swindled. They didn't. They just don't know what the number is for.
IBO is a test, not a promise
IBO speed is a standardized bench test. Every manufacturer clocks every bow the exact same way: 70 pounds of draw weight, a 30-inch draw, and a 350-grain arrow, with a bare string — no peep, no D-loop, no string silencers, nothing hanging on it. That's it. Same setup for a Mathews, a Hoyt, a Bowtech, a PSE. On purpose.
Think of it like the mileage on a car's window sticker. Nobody believes they'll get the EPA number in real driving — you've got hills, traffic, a roof box, a lead foot. But the sticker isn't a lie. It exists so you can put two cars side by side and compare them on the same yardstick. IBO is the exact same idea. It's the only way to say "this bow is faster than that bow" without every brand testing on their own terms and cooking the books. The standard is the honest part.
The catch is that nobody hunts the test. You don't draw 30 inches and shoot a naked 350-grain arrow off a bare string. You shoot your draw length, your hunting arrow — usually heavier — with a peep, a loop, and a couple of silencers on the string. The moment you do, you've stepped off the bench, and the number comes down.
Where the speed actually goes
Two things pull you below the sticker, and they're worth separating because one is about you and one is about the bow.
The big one is your setup. A shorter draw than 30 inches costs you roughly 10 fps per inch — and most hunters draw 27 to 29. A heavier arrow than 350 grains costs you more, and a real hunting arrow with a broadhead is usually 420 to 480. Between those two alone, a lot of guys are 20 to 40 fps under the sticker before anything else. That's not the bow being slow. That's physics doing exactly what it should — and most of that weight is buying you penetration, which is the trade you want on an elk.
The smaller one is the hardware. The bench bow had nothing on the string. Yours has a peep, a loop, maybe silencers — and those cost you speed too, usually around 5 to 10 fps all in. This is the part people mistake for the brand fudging, and it isn't. It's a bare bow versus a bow set up to actually hunt with.
We went and measured this part, because we didn't want to hand-wave it. We pulled the chronograph numbers from every flagship review we could find over the last three years — 38 bows, 80-some tests — and lined the real speeds up against what the math predicts for that same setup. Even after you account for draw length and arrow weight, the real bows came in about 10 to 12 fps under, on average. That's the hardware-and-bench-conditions gap, and it's remarkably consistent: most bows land within 5 to 15 fps of prediction, a few are dead-on, and only a couple are real underachievers. A couple of brands run a hair more optimistic than others, but none of them are lying. They're all shooting the same bare-bow test and reporting it straight.
Why we show you both
Here's the thing that actually matters for building an arrow: the speed your bow really makes is the one that decides how your arrow flies, how stiff a spine it needs, and how much energy it lands with. If The Forge quietly used the sticker number, we'd be tuning your arrow for a bow that doesn't exist — a naked 30-inch bench gun. So we don't.
What we do instead is show you both numbers, and tell you which is which. The rated IBO, so you can still compare your bow to the next one on the same yardstick the whole industry uses. And your real-world number — your draw, your arrow, your accessories, with the measured hardware gap baked in — so the arrow we help you build is built for the bow you actually shoot. One number to shop with, one number to tune with. No mystery about where the difference came from.
That's the whole philosophy in one line: the brands gave you an honest benchmark, and we give you the honest translation. You should never have to wonder why your chronograph disagrees with your sticker — you should just understand it, and build a better arrow because you do.
Want to see your real number? Drop your bow into the arrow builder in The Forge, flip on real-world speed, and watch what it does to your spine and your kinetic energy. That's the bow you're actually hunting with. Let's build the arrow for that one.