How to Find Dominant Eye - Dominant Eye Test

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’m going to teach you how to find dominant eye. Now let’s go ahead and get started.

Alright, so first off, what is your dominant eye? And why do you need to know how to find your dominant eye? Your dominant eye is the eye that your brain is going to use to detect minor differences between the two images that it receives from each eyeball.

When it comes to making precise decisions, your brain is going to make a decision as to which eye to kind of trust a little more. So the reason this is important is that your brain is naturally going to have a tendency to want to use that eyeball.

It’s usually not the eye with the best eyesight because our non-dominant eye feels neglected, and it feels like it needs to overwork the eye with the weaker vision. This becomes critical when you want to shoot quickly and accurately. So you need to know where that is.

Chris Sajnog explains what your dominant is.

Dominant Eye Test

There are two dominant eye tests that we can do to test your dominant eye. And they’re both very simple, you can do either these static or moving.

Miles Test

The first one is called the miles test. You’re going to make a triangle with your hands. You’re going to look through that and focus on a small item like a light switch or something very small, You want it to be something that you can’t see through both your eyes.

All you’re going to do is you put your hands up and pick that item, then you’re going to close an eye. Whichever eye you can see that item in, is your dominant eye.

You can also do the moving test. So you’re going to do the exact same thing, make a small shape on a small item and look through it and just keep bringing your hands back until it’s naturally going to move towards your dominant eye.

Porta Test

The Porta test is the next test I’ll discuss on how to find dominant eye. This is a lot like the miles test, the only difference is instead of making a shape with your hands, you’re just going to point at something. So just take your index finger and point at an object off in the distance.

You’re going to point directly at it and then again, then close one eye. Whichever eye that you can see your finger pointing directly at the target, is going to be your dominant eye.

We can do this moving test where we point at the item and then just slowly bring our fingers back. As you do that, you will be pointing out your dominant eye.

Dominance Can Change

And then the next thing that I want you to know is your dominance can change depending on what you’re doing with your hands.

For instance, if you’re holding something in your hands such as a firearm, that hand is sending information to your brain to tell it there is something else in space that it needs to put into the equation. So it might change your dominance a little bit. If you use two hands with the rifle or a carbene, that can change it as well.

Some other things that can change it are lighting. So if you are in a low light situation, sometimes that can change your eye dominance. One of the biggest things that change most people is distance.

Let’s say you go back to like 50 or 100 yards and you go to shoot and you find it very hard to focus. If you’re finding something like that is happening, do another dominance test.

So just keep testing, this shouldn’t be something that you only test one time and then you’re done with it, your eye dominance can definitely change.

Importance of Eye Dominance

So the last thing I want to talk about is the importance of eye dominance and where this becomes critical. That is learning to shoot with both of your eyes open.

When you’re shooting with both your eyes open, you are going to see two pictures because you have two eyeballs. This can be confusing for a lot of people at first and they want to know, “How do I get rid of that second image?”

Well, you don’t want to get rid of that image. What you need to do is train your eyes and train your brain to decide which image it’s going to use for your front sight post. And if you do this, if you train enough, it usually takes just about a week of training to be able to do that.

You will be able to shoot with both eyes open. Now, this is going to allow you to be able to: