Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Dominant eye again

I shoot rifles right handed but am left eye dominant and trying to decide whether to attempt to switch eye dominance or shoot left handed. At 68 years old, either one is going to take some doing. So far I can shoot left handed with both eyes open, just not very well. I've had no eye health issues other than normal aging and wear progressive bifocals which seem to be fine for everything but shooting mostly because of relatively small frames. I figure that getting the big aviator frames or the traditional shotgun shooting glasses frames with the high brow band would solve the problem of the brow piece, but the fitter at the optometrist's tells me they can't get lenses made for such "abnormal" frames. I don't mind changing eye doctors at this point. I use scopes for hunting but still like to shoot peeps and posts occasionally. Any suggestions?

I also am left eye dominant . When I started shooting no one mentioned those kind of things.

I started hunting with an old winchester lever action and held it on my right shoulder because I am right handed. But I laid my face over far enough that I could use my left eye.

The first hunting rifle I purchased was a remington bolt action . I was forced to switch to left shoulder , left eye.

Guess what , I was shooting better than before. So it always has been left eye since then.

Oh it did take most of the first hunting season to be comfortable and automatically hold the left hand hold..

Well trapshooters shoot alot. I've seen trapshooters who just about all wear shooting glasses prescription and non prescription a like that were right handed and put a sticky dot right where they look thru their glasses on the LEFT eye to force right dominance. You do what you want but if I had your problem that is where I would start to fix it.No not a gun writer but you did ask a question.MB

Thanks; I appreciate the reply.

We can put people in space and walk on the moon.

Find a different supplier.

I doubt it is even possible to go from left-eye-dominance to right-eye-dominance at 68 years old. That's not how the brain works, and "neural plasticity" is all but non-existent in brains of people that age. If you weren't wired that way before, there won't be much rewiring to alter things. It's worth a try, because there are always outliers, but my guess is that confusion, dizziness, and headache are more likely than a satisfactory result.

For rifle shooting I don't think it is worth it. Get a good pair of prescription shooting glasses. There were some mail order places that did this with Ziess shooting glasses but not sure which ones are still around. For shotgun shooting I think left handed would be better. Been shooting Lefty from the start but just now finally got a true left hand stock for my Winchester 101, hope it improves my hit ratio.

It might not be a bad idea to try it and the trick of putting tape over the right lens works. I would get something inexpensive to shoot like a CZ 527 in .223 to play around with. Old dogs can learn new tricks but they may take a little longer to do so.

My wife is right handed but left eye dominant.First time i saw her shoot I asked what's up. She said it's more comfortable, so ok. She shoots lights out, end of story.

Lots to discuss here. First, I strongly recommend going to a professional that serves the shooting community. It is absolutely possible to get what you have discussed. I use and highly recommend to clients Morgan Optical, and have had great service from Tom Morgan:

https://www.morganoptical.net/

These new glasses will not change eye dominance, which is another issue. Eye dominance can be accommodated, but not changed.

A deep look at eye dominance may help. Eye dominance is simply the eye the brain tells to do most of the optical work. It sometimes changes with age, but cannot be changed via medical or other adjustments. While the subject seems on the surface to be cut and dried, it is far from it. It is not so simple as "right", "left" or "co-dominant", as there are degrees of dominance. The test for this I prefer as a long time shotgun shooting instructor is standing about 10-12 feet away from the client and asking the client to keep both eyes open and point their finger at my nose. The relationship of their finger to their face will tell a lot, and tell the degree of dominance (or co-dominance). Some people's fingers are just slightly favoring one eye, while others are much further toward the dominant eye. If the finger stays in the center of the face, the person is visually ambidextrous or co-dominant. This is important information to know before a person begins to shoot, as sometimes the tests are wrong and true dominance becomes apparent in the shooting (a good instructor can "read" the shot). There are several other tests of dominance, but this one gives more data in terms of degrees of dominance. And BTW, I and others have found that about 55-60 percent of women are cross dominant, while about 30 percent of men are. Who knows why?

What to do about the situation is another matter and there are several paths here. First off, the OP is rifle shooting and I would strongly suggest staying on the current/off shoulder from the dominant eye, as folks much past youth have a hard time with the switch. Especially if the point of this is hunting, I would suggest squinting or fully closing the off eye during the shot; same for handguns. I would absolutely avoid obscuring partially or fully blocking the off eye in a hunting scenario.

In shotgun shooting, presuming that the shooting bears out the cross dominant condition, my first move is to have the client close the off eye (if able; some folks can't). This will normally work, and it can be closed late in the process, such as when the gun comes to cheek in the move and mount in the field. In target shooting, I prefer to obscure a small portion of the off eye by placing a small piece of translucent (Scotch) tape over the spot on the glass to obscure the muzzle of the gun. This normally works, and there are some terrific shooters who do this (multi-Olympic gold winner Kim Rhode is one of them).

This will not always work, however. I have had three clients whose brain could actually see through the visual barrier such that the eye over the gun could not take charge. In these cases, the only path was to switch shoulders (and that worked, BTW, despite the uncomfortable period of building new muscle memory). All three were dedicated to the change, and felt as if someone let them out of jail as they began to crush targets confidently.

Again, this is a very complex subject, and much is trial and error in getting to the right solution. Sorry for the length, and I hope some of this is useful.

GF1's post is money if you are a shotgun shooter.

I'll offer you my insights as a competitive rifle shooter and coach...
At your age, I'd weigh the pain of relearning things on the left side against the pain of lack of success you're apparently having right now. In coaching juniors we have the luxury of molding them early and following the dominant eye without the baggage of decades of doing it the wrong way.

The research is pretty clear that as the demands of your shooting increase (high expectations and precision), the benefits of following eye dominance become greater. Our experience teaching kids to shoot competitively mirror the research, and that's across hundreds of kids. Boys are generally the most problematic because they've grown up following their "handedness" without regard to eye dominance. That's years of experience to unlearn. I'm guessing you have decades to unlearn.

Other solutions suggested offered come with their own problems. Occluding the "off eye" with translucent tape, a blinder, etc can potentially affect your peripheral vision; a negative if you are hunting. David Tubb did this and he did not have an eye dominance problem. If you simply close your "off eye" you're introducing something called "sympathetic dilation". Your sighting eye's pupil will dilate often causing loss of acuity, and a shallow depth of field. Especially bad if you're shooting irons.

One area where my experience differs from GF1 is the prevalence of contralateral eye dominance (eye dominance different than handedness. Ipsilateral is the term for eye and hand sides synced.). My observation is that the overall prevalence is maybe 10 percent. The prevalence of left eye dominance is maybe 20 percent. And empirically we're seeing more boys than girls with contralateral hand-eye dominance. And we do check each shooter multiple times during their first couple of years.

Thanks for all the background and suggestions. Transitioning to routinely shooting left handed may not be all that bad for me since it doesn't feel completely unnatural to shoulder a rifle that way. I naturally drew a draw a bow left handed from an early age. I'm not a competitive shooter. I'm content to improve my plinking/casual shooting and to be able to place a quick offhand shot at deer with regularity.

Thanks GF1 and ChrisF for the professional response. Not to hijack this thread but what causes a shift in eye dominance and how prevalent is this? My worst nightmare is after years of scrounging for left handed guns my eyesight will shift dominance.

No worries! I think that it's best to let the thread go where it will. I recall others saying that eye surgery caused it sometimes and that it happened spontaneously in other people.

In my experience, it involves something like Steven60 said - injury, developing eye disorders/disease, medical procedures (I’ve heard of LASIK and lens replacement surgery causing changes in dominance, but have not seen this first hand). I don’t think I’d worry about it just popping up with no other visual issues.

Be careful of a rote diagnosis and actions to accommodate it. For example, I know two very experienced shotgun shooters, one of whom is a long time skeet instructor. These guys are technically cross dominant, and have essentially trained their brains to see the correct barrel/target relationship. Neither can tell you exactly what they see, but somehow and over a period of more than a decade of high volume shooting have gone from occluding the off eye to shooting with both eyes open. No explanation I have heard explains this, but it’s fact. Just realize that this is complex and people are very different.

GF1 knows more about all this than I do (we're friends, and have discussed it some during a few get-togethers), but I would also like to emphasize that eye-dominance doesn't just switch for a while,, then go back to "normal."

I mentioned in the other recent thread that in her early 40s my wife's eye dominance switched occasionally, for one shot. This was discovered while she was shooting a compound bow with sights. Once in a while (maybe one shot out of 20?) the arrow would zip several feet to the side at 25 yards, when she'd been laying them right in there.

In fact, I suspect this might be happening to me now and then these days. Am 67, and while have been slow in developing cataracts (to the point where my eye-doc says I shouldn't even notice them much), last fall I shot twice at a medium-range rooster pheasant angling only slightly away. I have killed thousands of gamebirds in my life, and a flushing wild pheasant no longer flusters me. I was also shooting my favorite upland shotgun, which normally hits where I look--and I did not miss another rooster with it all fall, almost all more difficult shots. And it was a very good pheasant year.

So am now wondering if my own eye-dominance is switching only now and then. Have always been strongly right-eyed and right-handed, and guess I will find out more this fall!

I’ve experienced a similar thing to what you describe, John.

A few years ago I noticed while shooting long crossing sporting clays targets occasionally I experienced a feeling of frustration at the moment of the shot, and missed the target whenever this happened. It bugged me so much that I really went to work on it. It was only on left to right targets, in a big open environment, with targets from about 45 to 50 yards. I am right handed, strongly right eye dominant. What I discovered, I think, is that if I initially picked up the target with my left eye alone, the left eye “hung onto” the target through the shot. My brain subconsciously knew it wasn’t right, but for some reason couldn’t command my right eye to “drive”. It didn’t happen every time, but often enough that it bugged me. My fix was to blink my left eye when I begin my move on the target, which apparently does something of a reset to my eye dominance, and puts my dominant right eye in charge as it wants to be.

Incidentally, I am no spring chicken either (I’m 65), and I also have slowly developing cataracts that I really don’t notice consciously and that may have something to do with this. I also know that I have a mostly believable built-in excuse for missing a bird!

My experience was similar to ipopum's. My bolt actions are lefty's. Have more leverguns than bolts. My lone shotgun is an Ithaca 37 12G.

That makes sense! Especially because when shooting left-to-right targets we tend to set our foot-position to the right, and concentrate our eyes on the the area we anticipate breaking the target. Naturally, we'd tend see the target with our left eye first.

Ok I am going to wink at all the birds before I shoot, especially the right to left ones. I guess I will be safe enough winking the right eye so no one accuses me of being a 270 shooter. Thanks for the good info.

Are you saying you concentrate your eyes on the area of the break point prior to calling for the bird?