newbies request advise - cross dominant issue

[rfu]

I've been browsing this forum for quite some time but only yesterday decided to become member of this lovely shooters community.

Being a new comer to AP shooting, first time investment is necessary on an AP to start train in 10m. Finally decided to buy an LP10 after looking at so many opinions from topics around which AP is the best, simply because I like the shape and dealer support here in New Zealand.

Now, here comes the tough decision to make. I’m cross dominant left hand right eye when it comes to shoot air pistol. However, I’m shooting right hand right eye with air rifle and currently planning to be involved in field target shooting in about 4 years time. Should I keep left hand right eye on AP and right hand right eye for AR just as it is ? or should I change one toward another ? What is your opinion on this and why ?

Many thanks in advanced
Robert

[Nano]

RFU:

Many shooters of world-class are crossed dominant eye, as Robert Di Donna of Italy.
Personally firing with the right hand but I aim with the left eye in air pistol, in metallic silhouettes use right hand or right eye.

You say you are lefty, If your left eye does not have any problem, you shoul to try to use the left eye, use the eye and the arm of same side (both left or right), if your left eye has some problem, as for example in my case, a 1.5 increase of dioptrias, you use the crossed eye.

In notes of Don Nygord have a complete exposition on this subject.

Nano

[Dragon 2]

RFU,
My wife shoots RH LE dominant. Never had a problem with it while shooting AP or .22 gallery. As you indicated you can switch for AR on the dominant hand????!!!!! You might consider using a shade/blinder and staying LH/LE dominant for AP. With AP it doesn't make a lot of difference because recoil and recovery are not issues. In fact, some after market grip makers offer cross eye dominant grips. I strongly recommend you stay with your dominant hand whatever your final decision.
I use a lot of optics in my line of work and have found my own dominant eye shifting on occasion. I didn't think that was possible but it happens. I always shoot with a shade to relieve strain on my non-dominant side eye. Trying to focus on a pistol sight with both eyes in the game is beyond my mental control. I can manage it with rifle sights but not pistol.

I hope that helps and good shooting,
Phil

[crosshairs]

I am cross dominant, left eye right hand.

I have been shooting with my right hand all the time, both eyes opened.

Results are satisfactory, but in all honesty, there are times when the image in the brain gets a little "interference" from the dominant eye. Looking at getting shooting glasses.

Another issue is with adaptation. After shooting for so long with the right eye, I can no longer tell which eye is the dominant one, though my left eye vision is sharper.

I advocate following the dominant hand. It's pros of controllability outweigh the cons of the cross dominant eye.

[2650 Plus]

Most of us [coaches] teach using the best/dominating eye for pistol shooting. Its not difficult to do a little work on the grips to get good sight allignment for either eye and the opposite hand . The things the hand has to do are relatively simple and can be trained to perform the shooting tasks in a relatively short time. Most of us do not believe the same can be said of the eye.[ some may disagree] Good Shooting Bill Horton

[jipe]

The goal is to have the sights aligned with your wrist in its natural position without the need to turn/bend the wrist in a un-natural position..

For most cross shooters, in order to have the sight aligned with the wrist in its natural position, the barrel must make an angle with respect to the grip.

The LP10 frame provides adjustment to angle the grip with respect to the frame. But the maximum possible angle is about 3 degree. This is often not enough.

To solve this issue, there are angled grips made specially for cross shooters.

Rink has such grips with an angle of 7 degree.

Adding up the 7 degree of the grip to the +-3 degree adjustment allowed by the frame provides the possibility to go have an angle betwen 4 and 10 degree, so to adapt for most shooters.

[Nicole Hamilton]

I advocate following the dominant hand. It's pros of controllability outweigh the cons of the cross dominant eye.

I agree. Cross dominance is a problem mostly only for rifle shooters, where you have to put your cheek down on the comb of the stock to line up your eye with the rear sight. If you're cross-dominant, e.g., LE/RH shooting rifle RH but sighting with your LE, that's a problem.

But with pistol, where you hold the gun at arm's length, most shooters find they can easily move the gun or their head enough to line up their dominant eye with the sights, regardless of which hand they shoot with. Yes, yes, I know the NRA says, "It is recommended that a shooter use the hand which is on the same side with the dominant eye," (The Basics of Pistol Shooting, p. 58), and I am an NRA instructor, but personally, I think this is just plain wrong.

But even with rifle, I'm not so convinced that the best answer for cross-dominant shooters is always to shoot shouldering to the dominant eye. Admittedly, not being cross-dominant myself, perhaps I just don't know what I'm talking about. But in addition to the obvious advantage of the better fine motor skills in your dominant hand for trigger control, it seems to me that for LE/RH shooters, there's an even bigger reason to shoot RH if you can: There are vastly more RH rifles to choose from! Nor does it seem like shooting with the non-dominant eye should have to be rocket science. Why would it take anything more than a piece of Scotch tape across one lens of your shooting glasses?

[_trinity_]

Having done both Cross Dominant shooting, as well as trying to move to the weak hand to follow the dominant eye, and finally settling on switching the aiming eye to follow the dominant hand, I'll give you my experience.

I started pistol shooting as a cross dominant, left eye, right hand. My left eye was, and is still my stronger eye, the vision is definitely clearer with my left eye. After 3 years of shooting AP and SP, I did attain some decent scores (near 380 in AP, and above 570 in SP). However, I was constantly struggling with the awkward angles imposed by being cross dominant. I felt this was especially true in SP rapid, where 3s really doesn't give you enough time to adjust for angle problems. Also, my head was terribly canted, in order to, as one poster suggested, move my head in to position behind the sights. This too was causing problems for balance not to mention neck pain.

So, during one off season, I thought I'd try left hand shooting. I managed to get a left hand grip for SP first. But soon I realized that although the vision was clearer, I was only able to maintain fine muscle control for maybe 15-20 shots. It wasn't a matter of strength, as I'd been doing strength training on both sides, but it is just a matter of the fine motor control learned and practiced for 3 years that didn't exist on the left side.

Next I decided to try the only thing left, using my right eye to aim. After getting a prescription for my right eye, I gave it a try. I thought it'd be a lot more difficult, but much to my surprise, by the end of the first practice, I was quite comfortable in my new position. And it has pretty much gotten better from there.

One thing I have had to adapt is since my right eye has poorer vision, I have had to change my shot routine a little different, I don't actually start focusing on the sights until I am holding just above the bull. This is because if I focusing too soon, my vision will have gone blurry before I can let the shot go.

The biggest benefit of having switched to right eye, I think, is it makes the angles much simpler. My stance is now almost completely perpendicular to the firing line. As such, everything is in one straight line. Trigger pressure back, into palm of hand, through arm, straight into eye.

I know with many pistols such as the Steyr LP10, Hammerli AP40, SSP, MG2 you have rotational adjustments in the grip to compensate for cross dominant shooting. But IMHO, you really don't want to mess with any of that since once you rotate the grip in any direction, you are no longer applying trigger pressure straight back, you are pushing off in some angle, which only makes you fight that force vector with your wrist. You can get away for a while, but as you fatigue, it becomes harder and harder. The same is true for all the rotational adjustments for the trigger, great in theory, but I don't know how much it actually helps.

In summary, I am not saying that cross dominant shooting is not possible, or that you can't attain good results with it, there are numerous top international shooters who are cross dominant. However, IMHO, it is harder to attain top results because of the problems introduced by the non-inline angles, so you spend a lot of energy fighting with those off center force vectors.

-trinity

[jipe]

I know with many pistols such as the Steyr LP10, Hammerli AP40, SSP, MG2 you have rotational adjustments in the grip to compensate for cross dominant shooting. But IMHO, you really don't want to mess with any of that since once you rotate the grip in any direction, you are no longer applying trigger pressure straight back, you are pushing off in some angle, which only makes you fight that force vector with your wrist.

The trigger pressure is applied by your finger and your hand, it doesn't induce any force in your wrist.

What applies some force in your wrist is the recoil of the shot. Indeed, with an angled grip it is not straight and this would generate some (small) effort. But actually, even with non angled grip, recoil nevertheless generate some torsion on your wrist because the barrel is above your wrist and so not aligned with your wrist/arm.

I never noticed the additional torsional effort induced by the angled grip and I do not think that it can be noticed because the angle is pretty small and the effort it might generate also small compared to the effort due to the non alignment of the barrel with the wrist/arm and the recoil of AP is also quite small. With a center fire powerful ammunition, it is a different story but this is not the subject.

What I confirm is the comfort and also reproducibility (because you do not need to turn your wrist to align the sights that are "naturally" aligned same as a non cross shooter with a normal grip) as provided by an angled frip for a cross shooter when the angle is big enough.

As already said, the 3 degre maximum angle allowed by the frame adjustement of the LP10 (and also FWB P44, I do not know how much is possible with the others) is usually not enough to compensate for a cross shooter (the cross shooting is not the only parameter, the physiology of the arm/wrist/hand has also an influence that makes that some non cross shooters also need an angled grip or that some cross shooters need only a small angle).

[_trinity_]

The trigger pressure is applied by your finger and your hand, it doesn't induce any force in your wrist.

You are right, I have reconsidered the picture in my head. Rotating the grip or using an angled grip merely changes the point where trigger pressure's counter force comes from... instead of coming from center of the hand, it moves towards to base of the thumb (assuming you are pivoting the grip counter clockwise).

One issue I forgot to mention is when I was shooting cross dominant, in order to try to get a reasonably comfortable head position, I tried to angle my grip out a lot. Problem is, the more the grip is angled, the less palm shelf space I had, and the more I felt like I was gripping with my thumb. This of course made the grip feel less comfortable.

-trinity

[Nicole Hamilton]

Just for the heck of it, I decided to try an experiment, Scotch taping the right lens in my glasses, forcing me to use my non-dominant eye. Then I went and fired 20 shots AP. I had never actually tried this, so I figured it was about time I did, rather than just guess at the result.

Guess what? It didn't make any difference in my score. If anything, this was a rather better-than-usual target. I did have to shift my feet to turn slightly more toward the target to get a comfortable natural POA than I would normally and I admit I more aware of the white cloudiness from my covered right eye than I would be covering my left, but otherwise, no difference.

The big problem was still all about controlling the gun and the trigger and for that, I think I'm way better off shooting with my dominant hand (though I admit that with the RH grip on my LP10, it's not straight-forward to test that.) In this experiment, the two shots I threw were both clearly poor trigger control; I was easily able to call those miscreant shots based on the sight picture I had when the gun fired. The rest were all 9's and 10's and all those were no more difficult to call than usual.

My bottom line is I think it's likely better for most people to shoot strong hand, regardless of eye dominance. If that means they're shooting cross-dominant and they find the position they need to make that work is uncomfortable, I think that's what Scotch tape is for, so they can use the non-dominant eye.

[jipe]

Your test is very interresting Nicole.

Now, I see some issue for a real cross dominant. I think that the natural tendency is to have the dominant eye on the same side as the domainant hand unless there is a physical reason for it to be different. That reason being some problem/weakness of the eye on the same side that the dominant hand.

This problem/weakness of the eye on the side of the dominant eye will then make the switch more difficult that what you experienced (here I assume that you do not have a weaker eye).

[iow]

I might be wrong , but i thought everyone has a dominant eye & hence a weaker eye ( apart from Steve Austin of course ! )

[rrpc]

I might be wrong , but i thought everyone has a dominant eye & hence a weaker eye ( apart from Steve Austin of course ! )

It's actually incorrect to refer to a dominant eye and a weaker eye. Dominance is not like handedness in that it's more likely the dominant eye is the weaker eye as it does more of the work. My naturally dominant eye (the left) is actually the one with the most need for correction wheras my right eye has perfect vision. Being a right-handed shooter I have always used my right eye for rifle shooting and blinkered my left.

I recently have taken up pistol shooting and while training I used the left eye for sighting. Very recently however, I have discovered that I can consciously change dominance from my left eye to my right eye with both eyes open. It's kind of a wierd feeling when you sight, change dominance and have to move the pistol to resight.

Anybody else heard of somebody being able to do this?

[crosshairs]

I might be wrong , but i thought everyone has a dominant eye & hence a weaker eye ( apart from Steve Austin of course ! )

It's actually incorrect to refer to a dominant eye and a weaker eye. Dominance is not like handedness in that it's more likely the dominant eye is the weaker eye as it does more of the work. My naturally dominant eye (the left) is actually the one with the most need for correction wheras my right eye has perfect vision. Being a right-handed shooter I have always used my right eye for rifle shooting and blinkered my left.

I recently have taken up pistol shooting and while training I used the left eye for sighting. Very recently however, I have discovered that I can consciously change dominance from my left eye to my right eye with both eyes open. It's kind of a wierd feeling when you sight, change dominance and have to move the pistol to resight.

Anybody else heard of somebody being able to do this?

Erm.....me? I was an ex sniper. Left dominance. Shot SSG69 with both eyes open.

[mikeschroeder]

Just for the heck of it, I decided to try an experiment, Scotch taping the right lens in my glasses, forcing me to use my non-dominant eye. .... If that means they're shooting cross-dominant and they find the position they need to make that work is uncomfortable, I think that's what Scotch tape is for, so they can use the non-dominant eye.

Hi

That's definitely what the scotch tape is for. I found out in Shotgun instructor's class, that I can shoot fine left handed. I'm VERY right handed, and slightly left-eyed. What I can't seem to do is LOAD anything left handed. Never tried a left handed bolt action (YET).

Mike
Wichita KS