How to Determine Eye Dominance

For the aspiring archer, your equipment and how it fits you is equally important to your level of fitness and mastery of technique. In previous articles, we've looked at how to find your proper draw length and how that information is used to find your bow size. Now we'll be looking at how to determine your eye dominance and how this information plays a role in determining what kind of bow you should get.

Hold your hands like this and focus on your object

Finding your dominant eye is actually quite simple. Pick an object in the distance (at least 10 feet away) to look at for the test; it can be anything really as long as it’s something you can keep your focus on for a few minutes. Next, hold one hand out as though you were examining your fingernails at arm’s length then do the same with the other hand. Keep your hands in this position and move them together so that the nails on both middle fingers overlap and your thumbs overlap forming a triangular hole with your hands that you can see the object through. Place this hole so that you can see the object you picked earlier with both eyes open. Once in position close one of your eyes but don’t move your hands. If you can still see the object with the one eye you have open then that is your dominant eye. If you can’t still see the object then the eye you have closed is your dominant eye. Typically your eye dominance will match your hand dominance. For example, if you’re right handed then you’re probably right eye dominant, but not always so it’s best to check.

If you find that your dominant eye and your dominant hand are on the same side ( right eye/right hand or left eye/left hand) then choosing the correct bow is a simple matter of matching it to your dominant side. Example a person with a right dominant eye and right dominate hand is going to perform best with a right handed bow. If however, you end up being cross dominant (right eye/left hand or left eye/right hand) then your choice becomes a little less clear. If you’re looking to be competitive then your best option is going to be retraining your hand dominance to match your eye dominance. This can be a little challenging as it feels very strange and uncomfortable, however, it really boils down to putting in the time and practice to retrain your motor skills and develop some muscle memory. There is also the option of retraining your eye dominance, which is a matter of learning to keep both eyes open and allow your normally dominant eye to blur out. For some (myself included) this may prove to be more challenging than retraining your dominant hand.

There are those archers that choose to simply live with the cross dominance. This is typically accomplished by learning to compensate for the additional skew by aiming further to the side which tends to be a little less accurate or by simply closing the dominant eye when aiming which maintains the accuracy, but can reduce stability somewhat. Regardless of the path you choose, retraining is unnecessary for the casual or recreational archer and except in the case of retraining your dominant hand, you always want to get the bow that matches your hand dominance.

Research for this article was conducted at the following sites:

- http://www.learn-archery.com/eye-dominance.html

- https://www.archery360.com/2014/02/25/determine-your-dominant-eye-in-five-steps