Focus on the Front Sight or Not? – Retired Navy S.E.A.L. Tips
Hey guys, I’m retired Navy SEAL sniper instructor, Chris Sajnog, and the founder of The New Rules of Marksmanship training system. In this post, I wanted to discuss whether you should focus on the front sight or not. Now let’s go ahead and get started.
When it comes to whether you should focus on your front sight or not focus on your front sight, there is a lot of debate going on out there. I want to try to clear this up for everybody.
When it comes to training, I hope we can all agree that we want to train for perfection. I think we can also agree that there is a reason that your pistol has two pieces of metal sticking up on the top. Those are designed to make you able to hit your target.

When Should You Concentrate on the Front Sight?
When you train, you want to train to be able to focus on that front sight. So you can hit targets that are either farther away, or they’re smaller. Through training and repetition, your ability to focus and line up your sights is going to become faster and faster.
That is what I talk about when I say paving your path to perfection. You’re literally building neural pathways that allow you to quickly and smoothly do those repetitions that you’ve been practicing at home.
When Not To Concentrate On The Front Sight
On the other end of the spectrum, if you have a target that is right in front of you and you want to shoot them, you just point your gun at them, and you’re going to shoot them because you’re so close.
Then, of course, you don’t need to focus on the front sight. If we trained to never look at our front sights, we’re not going to be able to take those farther shots because we’d never practiced at it.
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Sliding Scale
I have a sliding scale, and that sliding scale for me goes to site priority focus or target priority focus. So with site priority focus, your priority is more crystal clear focus on your front sight. Now that’s going to be for a target that is further away. So a long-distance shot or a target that is smaller.
Now on the other side of the scale, you have a target priority focus if there is a target that’s right in front of you. Your focus needs to be on that target. That is shots that are going to be so close that it’s just going to take more time to actually line up your sights than it is to just point and shoot.
What I want you to do is just remember it’s a sliding scale. It’s not one or the other. If it’s further away, you’re going to need to focus and you’re going to need to practice that way. If it’s closer, you’re just not going to need to use the sites.
So that is it for today. I hope that cleared up some questions that you might have had about whether you should focus on the front sight or not and helped you out. Until next time, keep paving your path to perfection.
