Eye Dominance
By Bob Mastroianni
Eye Dominance is a very complex issue that has a significant impact on shooting. Can you have an eye dominance problem and not know it? Absolutely. Could you have been shooting a shotgun for years with an eye dominance issue? Absolutely.
There are more people with eye dominance problems than one would think. 8 out of the last 10 people I've worked with had some sort of eye dominance issue.
Can you become a decent shooter with an eye dominance issue that is undetected or unaddressed? The answer is yes! Can you do something wrong long enough and get pretty good at it? The answer is yes! Will you ever reach your true potential? That answer may be different depending on who you talk to. If you have a dominance problem which is either undetected or unaddressed this could have a significant effect on your shooting. If you have not made the commitment to address this problem you really don't know what's on the other side do you?
Most of the test we have used in the past to test for dominance have been based on an aperture related technique i.e. hole in the paper, looking through a cylinder, making an aperture with our hands. These old testing procedures make you choose an eye which is incorrect. I've evaluated students that come to me and tell me they have been tested and that they were told they are right or left eye dominant and are having problems with certain target presentations. We will perform the test on them and they are neither right eye or left eye dominant but a combination of both. Confused I know.
Fear not. Your eyes are the input to your computer brain. Your eyes tell your brain what they see. If you are not seeing things correctly your eyes will give the brain the wrong info. Try one of the tests. Again this test is not 100% accurate and is only used to determine if you may have some sort of an eye dominance issue.
Look out the window and point to the trunk of a tree or something similar, shut your left eye, if you are solid right eye dominant there should be absolutely no movement with your finger. Now try it again this time shut your right eye, your finger should move a significant amount. If someone is solid right or left eye dominant there will be no movement when closing one and significant movement when closing the other. If there is some movement when closing either eye , that lets us know that the dominance is somewhere between the right and left eye. Stay with me now. Let's say your finger was the end of your shotgun barrel and you are going to be shooting an incoming target at its peak. By only looking at the target {remember it's always an eyes first move to the target} you make the move to the target with the muzzle and pull the trigger. What happens? You miss. WHY? If you swore to it you would say "I was right on that target". Believe me I know, I've been there. Again you are not seeing the right picture if you have an eye dominance issue.
The answer to all of this is get with someone that really understands eye dominance and get yourself checked.
Once you have been diagnosed with an eye dominance issue the ball is in your court. Your options are shutting an eye or taping your lens. You have to decide if you want to make the change and commit to it. Bouncing back and forth is not the answer. I am strong left eye dominant. I can personally tell you I can break targets without my tape on my glasses. But if I miss a target I cannot tell you what I did wrong or correct what I did wrong. With the tape on my glasses if I take the nose or the back end off a target I'll center punch the next one because I'm seeing the correct picture.
You need to be consistent in this game of sporting clays if you want to fare well. In order to be consistent you need to repeat what you did over and over again as many times as it takes to run the station. With that being said if you are not seeing the correct picture when you are shooting and you have a miss on a target how could you ever correct what it is you just did wrong?
I hope we all know that you should be looking at the target with soft focus until it enters your break point then it's hard focus until you pull the trigger. Just like in sporting clays there are different levels of shooters, the same goes for the way different shooters look at the target.
I've been asked by my eye doctor and good friend Dr Rich Colo to come up with a way to show my students how they look at targets and the way I personally look at targets so they can see the difference. I have used this in the past and I feel that it really shows the student the difference. Here is what I explained to Dr Colo. "Look at something in the distance. Now take a funnel and look through the small end of the funnel, get it as close to your eye as possible. Put the object you were looking at right in the center of the field of view you have. Look side to side and up and down, see just how much you can see all around the object you were looking at. Now turn the funnel around and look into the big end of the funnel, look at the same object. Observe how little you can see other than the object you were just looking at". That's the way you want to be looking at targets. As you can see by this demonstration there is another way to look at targets.
Good Shooting,
Bob
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