When you look with both eyes open, the brain does not use the two images equally: to line up a near point with a far one, it takes one of them as its reference. The eye that supplies that image is your dominant eye, or sighting eye, and in archery it matters because aiming is exactly that, an alignment between the eye, the sight pin or arrow point, and the target.
The dominant eye is usually on the same side as the hand you write with, but not always. In a French study of 82 right-handed sport science students picking up a bow for the first time, 28 were left eye dominant, one in three. When eye and hand are on opposite sides, this is called cross-dominance, and the question that follows is nearly always the same: should you shoot on the side of the eye? This article covers how to find your dominant eye and what the studies on cross-dominant archers have measured, which gives a less clear-cut answer than the one you hear on the shooting line; at the end, how I would handle it in practice.
What eye dominance is
Eye dominance is the brain's preference for one eye in alignment and aiming tasks. It does not depend on how well you see, because it concerns the way the brain uses the two images rather than how sharp they are: you can have perfect acuity in both eyes and a clearly dominant one, or see better with the very eye that is not dominant.
The consequence for archery is direct. If you aim with both eyes open, as many archers do, the dominant eye decides where the sight line falls. When that eye is on the opposite side to the one you have set the bow up on, the brain tends to line up the sight pin, or the arrow point, with the eye that is not over the string, and the sight line shifts sideways from the line of the arrow. That is why cross-dominance should be found early, before it turns into a habit compensated for in ways that weigh on consistency.
How to find your dominant eye
The simplest method is the triangle test, shown in the figure below: form a small triangle with your hands, frame a distant object with both eyes open, then close one eye at a time. The dominant eye is the one that keeps the object inside the triangle; with the other eye, the object jumps to one side.
An equally quick alternative is the hole-in-card test: hold a card with a small hole at arm's length, look at an object through the hole with both eyes open, then close them one at a time, following the same logic as the triangle. The French study used the finger-pointing test, which works the same way, with your index finger in place of the triangle. Whichever test you choose, repeat it on different days, because in a few cases it does not give a clear result: in the French questionnaire, which asked archers to do the finger test themselves, 72 archers answered "no preference".
What the studies say about cross-dominance
On the shooting line archers are often told that if their dominant eye is on the opposite side to their hand they should switch to a bow for the other hand, or close one eye, because otherwise their aiming will never be accurate. The direct measurements are few and their sign depends on who is shooting, and in the registry the claim that cross-dominance between eye and hand worsens accuracy is contested.
The only result in favour comes from beginners. In the 2009 French study the 82 students, after half an hour of instruction, shot a beginner's recurve with no sight, ten arrows at 7 metres on a 60 cm target face and ten on a 40 cm one: the 54 whose eye and hand were on the same side scored more than the 28 cross-dominant ones, with a statistically clear difference. Eye dominance, though, was established with a single test.
Among trained archers the advantage does not show. In the second part of the same paper the authors collected postal questionnaires from 1,135 French archers, all shooting with a sight, from club to international level: the share of cross-dominant archers, measured on the way they shoot, stayed between 15 and 19% at every level, with no difference between them, and those who had changed side to shoot had almost always done so by keeping the eye and changing the bow hand. As early as 1986, across 81 American recurve archers split into four score levels, cross-dominance did not separate the levels; none of the nine world-class archers in the sample was cross-dominant, but with nine people the trend did not reach statistical significance.
A 2022 systematic review that takes up these data adds two caveats. The first is that the share of cross-dominant people in the general population is not settled, with estimates running from 24 to 41%, so it cannot be said with confidence whether they are rarer among archers than among people who do not shoot. The second is that every study is observational, with a moderate to high risk of bias: if cross-dominant people are fewer among regular archers than among first-timers, that may come from who gives up rather than from lower accuracy. The French authors think the sight cancels out the beginners' disadvantage, but that is their reading, because nobody has followed cross-dominant and same-side archers over time on the same training.
People have also wondered whether cross-dominant archers have a different mental profile, but in archers the question has not been put to the test. The same 2022 review finds no study linking the eye and hand dominance profile to psychological, cognitive or tactical traits. The only hint comes from 26 university students at the end of an eight-week beginners' course, all shooting right-handed bows: the seven with a dominant left eye made more errors on an attention test, but their attention and concentration scores matched those of the other nineteen. The test has nothing to do with shooting and the result points in two directions, so in the registry the claim that an archer's eye and hand dominance profile says something about their mental make-up is transferred.
The options
An archer who finds out they are cross-dominant has three options. Nobody has compared them with one another in a study, so what follows is how I read them in the light of the data above.
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Option 01 · for beginners
Shoot on the side of the eye
You set the bow up on the side of your dominant eye even if your instinctive hand is the other one: a right-hander who is left eye dominant shoots a left-handed bow. The eye over the string then does the aiming, and cross-dominance no longer arises. For a beginner it is the simplest choice, because the shot is being learnt from scratch either way, and it is what nearly all the French archers who changed side had done.
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Option 02 · for established archers
Block the dominant eye
You stay on your hand side and put a small screen in front of the dominant eye: a translucent patch on your glasses lens, or a blinder clipped to your cap, at the point where that eye would see the sight. Both eyes stay open, but only the one over the string does the aiming. The French questionnaire suggests that you can reach a high level while staying cross-dominant: even at national and international level, one archer in five was.
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Option 03 · the minimal version
Close the dominant eye
You close the dominant eye while aiming. It needs nothing, and on accuracy the two studies that compared one eye closed with both eyes open say opposite things: in the registry the claim that aiming with one eye closed gives tighter groups is contested, and in the more careful comparison, 14 university archers with 36 arrows per condition at 30 metres, covering the eye that was not aiming changed neither the score nor the centre of the group. I cover this at length in the article on aiming with one eye or both.
Two cases are different. Archers who shoot without a sight, in barebow or instinctive, are in the same position as the beginners in the French study, the only ones for whom cross-dominance cost points: if their dominance is clear, shooting on the side of the eye seems to me the more cautious choice, even though trained archers in these divisions have not been compared. Those whose test shows no clearly dominant eye, on the other hand, have less reason to move away from their hand side.
Shooting left-handed
Archers who change side to follow the eye often wonder whether shooting left-handed makes any difference. At the top of recurve, left-handed archers are a minority, but in the proportion you would expect: among the top fifteen men and women in the May 2024 world ranking, four out of thirty shoot left-handed, 13%, and among 200 archers aged 13 to 20 at a European youth championship, 11.5% drew with the left hand. These shares are close to that of left-handers in the general population, around 10 to 13%, so in the registry the claim that at the top of recurve archery, left-handed archers are few is reported, with the proviso that few does not mean at a disadvantage.
The opposite idea also does the rounds, that left-handers score more. The only comparison is a Turkish study from 2017 of 44 compound archers at a national championship, where the five left-handed women averaged 670.6 points over 72 arrows at 50 metres against 561.7 for the right-handers. The left-handers, however, are five, picked out by their dominant hand rather than the side they shoot from, and the journal has questionable editorial standards: the registry reports the study but does not use it to decide the status, and the claim that left-handed archers shoot higher scores than right-handed archers remains not studied.
As for the new hand, shooting from the non-dominant side can be learnt, and some archers do it on purpose. In a German study of 75 competitive archers, 25 had been training on their non-dominant side as well for years, 4.6 on average, and in the shooting test they could not be told apart from the other fifty: 14.5 points against 15.7, over nine arrows at 15 metres, a test too short to pick up small differences. The idea that practising on the non-dominant side as well makes the dominant side improve more rests on a single experiment on forty beginners, in which those who alternated sides improved on their dominant side by about 15% against just under 8% for those shooting from one side only; it is reported in two pages with no statistical tests, and in the registry the claim is contested.
Dominant eye and eyesight
Dominance is not acuity, and acuity itself, in the only study that has set it against score, did not separate the stronger archers. They were 102 American recurve archers, from beginners to world class: none of the eleven measures of acuity, phorias and colour vision was related to the average score for the season, and the highest correlation, for colour vision, reached 0.25, on the threshold the authors had set without passing it. It is a single study, from 1986, run with screening tests, so in the registry the claim that visual acuity is not related to an archer's score is reported and no more.
That does not mean eyesight can be ignored. In a pilot study of 57 Iranian recurve and compound archers examined in an eye hospital, about 13% were shooting with an uncorrected refractive error, roughly one in eight; it is a single count and the figure should be taken as indicative, so the claim that some archers shoot with an uncorrected refractive error is reported. If you have not had your eyes checked for a while, testing your dominant eye is a good reminder to see an optician or an ophthalmologist. I write about eyesight more generally in the article on eyesight and perception in archery.
What to do in practice
If you are just starting out, test your dominant eye before choosing a bow, and discuss it with your coach. If there is clear cross-dominance, I would set the bow up on the side of the eye: it costs little, because you are learning the shot from scratch either way, and it avoids the problem in the only situation where studies have seen it cost points, that of a beginner shooting without a sight. It is not a requirement, though, because among trained archers who use a sight, the share of cross-dominant archers stays between 15 and 19% from club to international level.
If you have been shooting from your hand side for years and are only now discovering cross-dominance, nothing in the data gives you a reason to overhaul everything. Try blocking the dominant eye with a translucent patch on your glasses or a blinder, check whether the lateral spread of your arrows changes, and give the change a few weeks before judging it. Switching sides after years is a long job, which makes sense in particular cases, for example when you shoot without a sight and cannot manage the eye, and only with a coach to oversee it.