Right handed left eye dominant
 

Hello all,

Bought my 8 year old a compound bow for Christmas and now of course that means dad needs to buy one too. Outside of shooting friends a couple times I do
not have much experience with them. I am left eye dominant and right handed, I figure there has to be quite a few others here in the same boat so figured I would ask what people's opinions are for working with this? Drawing with my left arm might take some practice but could probably be fine tuned quickly. Any opinions are greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.

If you have not shot before, and are starting from scratch anyways, definitely shoot left handed. I am left eyed as well. I can shoot either left or right handed, but left is the way to go.

I have seen this condition in several people including my wife. As far as I know it is not possible to change your dominant eye from what it naturally is. The best solution with rifle shooting is to learn and training your body to switch to the side on which you are dominant eyed. I would think the same would apply to shooting a bow. I would think the fact that you have not shot one much before would make it easier for you to learn to do so. Best wishes with it.
It is amazing what can be accomplished with practice. My wife has learned to shoot very very well on her non dominant side.

I found the opposite, it was much easier for me to train my right eye and shoot right handed. There is a lot of fine tweeks or at least for me there was and my left hand is useless with fine movements and using the release.

I am RH and left eye dominant. I swapped my rifle from the right to left shoulder. It was a strange adjustment but I kept at it and now its natural.

I shoot my bow right handed. The folks at Jimbows simply told me to close my left eye while shooting. It works for me. I'm no pro shooter but feel my effective killing range is 50-60 yards after a lot of practise.
Hope this helps

Wife and I are both left eye dominant and right handed naturally. Both decided to take up archery at the same time. Picked up our left handed bows and went from there. Thought strength would be an issue in the left arm for draw but not a problem. Trick is to start at lower poundage and work your way up as you practice. Used to be that everybody encouraged a person to switch because "it was too hard to sell a left handed bow down the road". It's not the case anymore. Shot with several lefties now and we're not such a rare breed anymore!:)

I had the same problem growing up as a kid. I used to shoot a lot of clays and skeet, but I never wanted to learn to shoot left handed. I kept practising and tried to force myself to become right eyed dominant.

Now I'm ocular dominant. If I point at an object, I essentially see double vision and neither eye is dominant.

Training the non-dominant can take a lot of time, and you end up ocular dominant. However I would never choose to shoot left handed. Either close one eye, or wear a patch.

To some degree it depends of you're going to shoot with sights or instinctively. I was in the same predicament back in the day (left eye dom/rt hand) and wanted to buy a custom recurve. Edmonton hosted the Pope and Young awards banquet back in the late 1990's and i had the good fortune to chat about this dilemma with some of the biggest names in archery (Larry D. Jones, Dwight Schuh, MR James, Dave Samuels and a few others) ... if one was to shoot compound with sights the opinion was split (as you can close or squint the dominant eye and look through a peep sight with the non-dominant. However, without exception, every one of them said to switch to left handed if i wanted to shoot a recurve/longbow instinctively. They said that it would take a while to get used to but there would be no turning back. They also said that you could probably get away with shooting right if you were just shooting targets but in hunting situations during the heat of the moment your dominant eye would take over and you'd either miss by a significant margin or worse wound an animal. So, since i was going to invest a significant dollar in a custom recurve i decided to take a first step and i purchased two light weight recurves ... one left and one right ... and then shot them each for a year. it was very awkward at first shooting left as i'd shot compound for 15 years right handed ... but by the end of the year i was convinced that left was the way to go. i'm now the proud owner of a Caribow Taiga takedown recurve and love it. i also ended up switching to a left handed compound as well.

im left eye dom. right handed. i shoot a left handed bow and have no problem with it. i have never shot a right handed bow so i just trained from scratch with a left handed bow and that worked for me.

I am right eye, LH....I shoot left handed with both eyes open. Acquire target with right eye closed and open it prior to shooting.

LC

Thanks for all the replies, interesting how many different ways a guy can go about it. I think I am going to have to try a couple methods prior to buying to see which is going to work best for me. Luckily I have a few friends with left and right hand bows who are willing to let me spend a little time with them. Thanks again fellas!