How Can I Find My Dominant Eye For Archery?

Eye dominance for archery is important because most all of us have one dominant eye that works a little harder than the other.

Since we use both eyes to see during our daily routines you will use your dominant eye to focus your target making up your point of aim.

Usually your dominant eye is in correlation with whether you are right or left handed.

No worries because you’ll know for sure by the end of this article what your dominant eye is for sure. Don’t feel bad or unusual if your dominant eye isn’t the same as your dominant right or left hand.

When buying a bow you need to know your dominant eye for accuracy and ease of shooting.

It doesn’t matter if you’re right or left handed yet it does matter whether you purchase a left or right handed bow for shooting because of your dominant eye.

First thing to do is overlap your hands in front of you. (See the image above in this article to help see what I mean.) Leave a hole between your thumbs and index fingers. One big enough to see through.

Now look at something in the distance. You can be inside or outside.

Just pick something you can see through the hole you’ve made by overlapping your hands. Make sure your arms are extended.

Now you just simply locate your object and focus on it. Now close one of your eyes.

Do you still see it? If so that open eye is your dominant eye. If you do not see it then the closed eye is your dominant eye.

This really is all there is to finding your dominant eye for archery.

To go a little further and dive a bit deeper into the subject I’ve answered a few common questions below.

What exactly does eye dominance mean?

It’s medically called ocular dominance. In general terms we usually call it eye dominance or eyedness.

It is the tendency to prefer visual input from one eye to the other. It is somewhat analogous to right or left handedness. However the side of the dominant eye and the dominant hand do not always match as stated and proven above

A question comes up often whether a left eye dominant shooter can use a right hand bow.

The answer is yes but you’ll need to keep both eyes open and compensate. It’s a learned skill and don’t expect to shoot as well in the beginning as you can with matching your eye dominance with your bow.

Does everyone have a dominant eye?

There is a range of degree of eye dominance among archers. The same is true for left and right handedness.

In other words, some people may have one eye that is very dominant, while others may have less of a difference in the dominance of their two eyes.

Mainly however eye dominance is “hard-wired” in our brain, so training to shoot with the non-dominant eye would not be to change eye dominance but to enhance the visual accuracy of the non-dominant eye.

It’s completely recommended to simply find your dominant eye and buy a bow that matches.

What’s the correlation between eye dominance and right or left throwing hands?

Handedness and eye-dominance are undoubtedly associated statistically.

Although it has been found that the precise relationship is difficult to explain. There are about 35% of right-handers and 57% of left-handers being left eye dominant.

Of particular difficulty to genetic or other models is that the proportions are distributed asymmetrically around 50%. You can read further about this study from our friends at PubMed here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15513112

Here is another great article to reference for learning more in depth about eye dominance. https://www.aop.org.uk/ot/cet/2016/06/20/the-importance-and-relevance-of-eye-dominance-part-1/article