A lot of us have only seen archery on episodes of Game of Thrones, or maybe we have hazy memories of a simple fiberglass bow at summer camp. If that’s your picture of the technology, than a modern bow probably looks like it was dropped off by aliens.

To find out how this equipment actually functions, we took a subway ride to Gotham Archery, where Anjalie Field walked us through all the moving (and, hopefully, stationary) parts of a bow that’s fit for competitive archery. Field got hooked on the sport while young, and she loved it so much that when she ended up at a college without an archery team, she founded one.

Field explained that there are two classes of bows. The string on a compound bow is threaded through a series of pulleys. These pulleys rotate off-center as the string is drawn back, changing the forces involved. Typically, this means that the initial draw requires considerable force, but once it’s fully drawn, less effort is involved in holding it there.