Giving targets the wink?

Most clay shooters are introduced to eye dominance through a series of awkward hand-triangle tests, usually conducted while standing in a breezy car park, with someone pointing at their nose. The result is often treated as an immutable law of nature, set in stone before you even call your first target.

But for anyone trying to build a repeatable, bulletproof target lock, relying on a thirty second thumb test is a fast track to failure, even on simple crossers.

Eye dominance is less like an absolute binary and more like a dynamic mechanical variable. Understanding how your visual system actually processes a moving target is one of the single most effective ways to stop fighting your vision and start dusting targets with consistency.

The classic test: Looking at a distant door handle through a gap in your hands is supposed to tell you which eye takes over when your visual field is constrained and static. The moment you step onto the layout, your brain is forced to process speed, distance, lead and background contrast simultaneously.

Under those dynamic conditions, visual inputs change dramatically. And in real-time.

A shooter can display clear right-eye dominance in a stationary environment but still experience a subtle shift or visual ‘noise‘ when a fast, low clay flashes across a busy tree line. When the off-eye attempts to take over the shot, the brain receives two conflicting pictures. The gun feels right, the lead looks right, but the pattern lands nowhere near the target.

Rather than treating eye dominance as a simple left-versus-right verdict, it’s helpful to monitor how your eyes perform under the actual physics of a round.

To get a better picture of what your eyes are doing, you need to introduce motion and barrel alignment into the assessment.

Mount to a stationary line, then track: Pick an object on the horizon. Close your eyes, bring the gun to your cheek, open both eyes and check your alignment. If the barrel sits directly beneath your supposed dominant eye without adjustment, your static alignment is sound.

The moving point test: Have a coach or shooting partner hold an object and walk across your field of view while you track it with both eyes open. Mount the gun smoothly to the object mid-journey. If you notice the rib angling towards you or you feel compelled to wink or squint at the point of break, your non-dominant eye is attempting to steer the ship.

Background contrast sensitivity: Pay attention to how your eyes react against different backgrounds. Many shooters maintain strong dominance on high-visibility targets against open sky, but experience eye pull on dark clays traveling against dark foliage.

Discovering that your eye dominance isn’t entirely central or absolute doesn’t doom you to a shooting career spent squinting. It simply gives a clear baseline for how to set up your gear and your mount.

If your off-eye occasionally fights for control, subtle adjustments often yield far better results than aggressive interventions. Some competitors use a micro-patch of tape on their shooting eyewear placed precisely over the off-eye’s line of sight to the bead to help keep both eyes open. This method preserves depth perception and prevents the off-eye from taking over when they least want it.

Equally, gun fit plays a massive role in guiding the body’s visual system. When stock dimensions are engineered precisely to the facial structure, the rib aligns naturally beneath the visual axis. This eliminates the physical need for your head to tilt, which is often a trigger for the off-eye to step in and cause chaos.

Understanding visual mechanics shouldn’t involve trial and error or guessing games on the shooting line. Once you know exactly how your eyes process a targets in motion, you can stop fighting your vision and let your natural hand-eye coordination do the work.

The ‘both eyes open or one eye shut’ debate is as old as the hills – but it rolls on subsetted with eye dominance.

You might get a different answer every time – it just depends on who you talk to. My view is that what works for one shooter doesn’t necessarily work for the other. Yes, if you have both eyes open when looking at literally anything in the world your perception of it’s size, speed, distance etc is going to be better – that’s just the default programming of our eyes and brain.

However, brains are trainable objects – so if shooting with both eyes open is causing issues, it’s better to train your way around the issue. The good news is, it’s not impossible to do.

I know a very good AA class sporting shooter who sits bang in the middle. He picks up and tracks all targets with both eyes open, mounts into the target flight line and at the same time begins to close his left eye to a squint right up to his absolute break point.

Does he hit more than he misses? You bet.

Can I shoot like that? Not a bloody chance.

He’s trained his brain to process what he sees both with his eyes open and squinted at break point in a seamless transition. He gets a wide angled full HD view during the pickup and initial movement, then switches to a laser-like focus like a rifle shooter at just the right second to smoke the target.

So for us eye dominance is it not a problem, it’s just another anatomical quirk we need to recognise, understand and adjust to. Quite simply, if one eye shut or squinted breaks more clays, do that.

If you’re at your wits end with anything vision related  and just can’t get past it, look up Ed Lyons at Flint & Partners. I can personally vouch for his skills and knowledge, he’s helped me a great deal over the past 2 years and my scores have benefitted too.