Shooting both eyes open--tell me there is a light at the end of the tu

[Nemesis Lead]

So I have always shot with tape over my left eye. I took a Manny Bragg class this weekend and he encouraged me to take the tape off.

I have decided to give it a shot. 2 days of dry fire with both eyes open and unobstructed.

The results so far--terrible. I see either 2 front sights or 2 targets.

Tomorrow will be my first day of live fire with this.

2 questions:

1) For those who have been down this road......is there a light at the end of the tunnel?

2) Are there any specific drills that can speed this process up.

Tomorrow is the first day of live fire.

[motosapiens]

I'm not an expert, but I believe different people simply have their eyes wired differently. I shot for a year or two with both eyes open and always had trouble at speed sorting out the visual clutter. As far as I can tell, neither eye is particularly dominant, so my brain is unable to filter out the extra images. My scores started going up significantly after I started using a square of tape (about 1/2" x 1/2") over my non-dominant eye.

brian enos used to shoot with tape over his eye, and there are other GM's that do so as well, so I don't really worry about it. I can see everything I need to in my peripheral vision with the tape.

[toothandnail]

Sorry no help here, I have always been Rt eye dominate. As well as better vision R. 20/15 L. 20/30

It was pretty easy for me to get used to.

Now that I'm hitting 50 (never thought I'd be saying that) I have contacts coming to correct for old age.

I have the R. eye for distance , L. for reading.

Doc thought that would be easy since I'm already used to the difference.

[Hi-Power Jack]

2 days of dry fire with both eyes open The results so far--terrible. I see either 2 front sights or 2 targets.

Tomorrow will be my first day of live fire with this.

I wouldn't try live fire until I got some positive results from

the dry fire.

Don't know how you can expect to hit the target with two eyes open if

you see two sets of sights and two targets.

There is an advantage to keeping both eyes open, but until you're ready

to do it successfully, I'd definitely postpone that live fire day.

[rottenit]

Mine switches sometimes.. Hasn't happened with firearms much but with archery boom id switch and miss the bail every 100 shots or so. I think you just keep practicing.

[Aircooled6racer]

Hello: First thing I would do is get your eyes checked. You may find that both eyes are almost the same and you are switching dominant eye for the other eye. I do this when shooting a shotgun and I get tired, then my scores go to hell. I am going next month to work with an eye doctor to see what we can do to correct this. It will take a while to get used to both eyes open. It is worth doing since you end up seeing twice as much. Thanks, Eric

[hax]

have you tried looking at the target and focusing on that instead of your sights. try focusing on targets at different lengths then bring you gun up.

[Jshuberg]

You should see two sets of sights, in crisp focus. You should see *one* target out of focus.

Normally, our point of focus and our point of binocular convergence are at the same point. These are however separate mechanisms that are fairly easy to decouple with some practice. You should also be able to shift between eyes in your head. For example, you should be able to shift the sight your looking at from being solid, to being almost completely transparent. This is a mental technique that most people are able to develop with time.

Because the target is out of focus, you want to clarify it as much as possible by setting your binocular convergence on it, resulting in a single target. You can actually shift your focus up and down the focal continuum as necessary, from a front sight focus to a target focus, while continuously holding a single target.

There are plenty of threads on this here. I believe I posted a few training exercises for both decoupling focus and convergence, as well as shifting which eye the mind is preferring in your head.

You should strive to utilize and master the equipment you were born with, rather than using external equipment to solve the same problem. In fact, most "problems" people try to solve with equipment aren't actually problems at all, but rather conditions that simply need to be understood.

Edited August 7, 2014 by Jshuberg

[Jadeslade]

Most humans lose accommodation ability starting in their forties. This is the ability to change focus by contracting and relaxing the iris. We switch back and forth between target and front sight when aiming. As this ability is gradually lost, it becomes harder to switch. The tape thing is to maximize the benefits of both eyes open-peripheral vision is better, 3D perception is possible, and there is less tension in your face and in your brain. Some people cannot use both eyes open. Just can't do it. If you used to do it and can't now, you should have your eyes checked. Sometimes a cataract can creep up slowly. The front sight and rear sight are not in focus together. Most shooters I know focus on the front sight, the rear sight is there and in the field, but is not sharp. The target is in the picture but it is not sharp. Practice tells us when the triad is in line like we want it-to pull the trigger. Lots of people with one eye shoot really well. Through practice they learn how to compensate. Why God gave us two eyes. Some shooters close one eye on far or difficult shots. Don't get hung up on "both eyes open".

There are a lot of threads on this subject, but they all end up at the same place. Try going out of forum to Google and searching and then drop back in to the forum-quickest and easiest way to get to the topics you want. Good luck and don't get discouraged. There is a light at the end of the tunnel.

[Psynapse]

I struggled for too long to keep both eyes open before I resorted to the tape. I shoot right and am "kinda" right eye dominant. Slow shooting I could do it but fast IPSC... Not a chance. Way too nauseating. I am going to try some inserts with my right eye set for the front sight and the left for distance however.

[Jshuberg]

Accommodation is the ability of the eye to focus. Binocular convergence is the ability to aim both eyes on the same object. They are separate functions, controlled by separate and independently controllable muscles.

People wear glasses or contacts to correct for focus issues. And yes, this ability degrades with age. However, this is *not* the reason people put tape on their shooting glasses. Tape does nothing to improve or compensate for focus issues.

People put tape on their glasses to correct for binocular convergence issues, or a perceived problem with cross dominance. If a person is unable to "fade away" the 2nd set of sights being viewed by their dominant eye, then closing one eye or putting on tape may be the only option. Also, if a person is unable to see objects at distance without double-vision, this may be the only option. However, unless there is a physical problem with the eyes, most people (but not all) are able to learn the skill of fading back and forth between eyes in their head, and hold target convergence regardless at which point in the focal continuum the eyes are focused on.

Most people don't understand how their eyes are supposed to work when shooting both eyes open. "Focus on the front sight" is an extreme simplification as it doesn't deal with most of the problem space. What I've posted above, and what has been posted elsewhere on the forum describes how the eyes should work when shooting both eyes open. Try the exercises, but exhaust trying to do it the correct, natural way before giving up and closing an eye or putting tape on your glasses.

At the end of the day, use whatever works, but don't look to equipment to solve what is very likely a well established bad habit or training problem.

[Jadeslade]

Jshuberg, you have some knowledge. How it applies to shooting, not sure. Trying to make definitive blanket statements in technical terms-you lost me at binocular convergence and perceived cross dominance. How things should work and how they actually do work is quite often very different. This is a shooting forum, not a ophthalmology convention. Keep it simple. Don't make people feel bad because you think they have bad habits or a training problem. Not everybody is stupid.

The tape is not the same as closing your eye. You lose 3D perception when you close the eye.

If you feel the need to become superior, I'm going over to Doodie and doodie you.

[Jshuberg]

OK, here are a few exercises that you can use for training both eyes open:

Focus your eyes on a distant target, around 10 yards away or more. Stick your thumb up like fonzie with an outstretched arm below the center of your vision. While continuing to look and focus at the target in the distance, bring your thumb up until it touches it. You should actually see two fuzzy, transparent thumbs, one of which is directly below your target. Now slowly shift your focus to the thumb below your target, but maintain the double image of your thumbs, and keep them the same distance apart. What you want to see is one single fuzzy target in the distance, and two partially transparent thumbs in crisp focus. Only pay attention to the thumb below your target. Once you get this working, then work on sliding your focus back and forth between your thumb and the target, while always keeping a single target behind your thumb.

Do this exercise fairly regularly. One great way someone mentioned in another thread is to replace your thumb with a bug or chip in your windshield when in stop and go traffic. Practice shifting focus between the bug and the car in front of you, while keeping a single image of the car in front of you.

Training for binocular issues, being able to switch between which eye the mind is favoring is more difficult, but also possible for most people.

Go to the store and get 2 pieces of white, 1 piece of red, and 1 piece of blue 8.5x11" construction paper. Put the two pieces of white on top of each other, and cut out a plus (+) symbol, around 4" wide and 4" long. This should give you two identical plusses. Mark the backs of both with an up arrow, so you know how they line up with each other perfectly. Tape one to the center of the red paper (oriented vertically) and measure it from the top and left edges. Then tape the other one in the exact same position on the blue paper. The arrows on the backs should be pointing in the same directions. Now tape both of them to a wall, side by side at eye height, blue on the left, red on the right. This is your "Binocular Training Aid".

Stand a few feet away looking directly at your binocular training aid, and cross your eyes until the two plus symbols overlap. Try to keep your eyes crossed and your head level so that the two plus symbols are directly on top of each other. What you will perceive is actually 3 plus symbols. The one on the left on a blue background, the one on the right on a red background. The one in the center will most likely be on the background color of the eye that is dominant.

While keeping your eyes crossed, try to "lead" your ability to see with one eye over the other. This can be hard to figure out, but what you want to be able to do is change the color of the background of the center plus between red and blue entirely within your head. Eventually you'll be able to do this on demand, and then you'll discover that you can actually shift the background from red, through various shades of purple to blue by "fading" between which eye your brain is choosing to use most when it stitches the two images together into a single perceived image. This can take awhile to work out, but it's very cool when you get it. Crossing your eyes does two things - it gives you instantaneous feedback as to which eye you mind is currently preferring (by the color of the background), so if you sort of get it for a second or so, you'll see it happen so you can learn to control it. The other thing is that because your eyes are crossed, the mind is more able to let go of your normal eye dominance bias. Since your vision is basically all messed up already, your brain wont fight you as much when you try to teach it to do something it finds unusual.

This is a training aid that I developed for learning to control eye dominance on demand. The technique is derived from a well known experiment to see "impossible colors". I use red and blue rather than blue and yellow, since those colors mix in the mind to produce purple, just like they do in nature. The idea for this hit me when researching optical and mental illusions that can have an effect on shooting. So far, everyone I've had try this technique has been able to learn to control which eye is dominant on demand. YMMV.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_colors

Once you figure out how to favor a particular eye on demand, and all but drop the image from the other eye from your perceived image, the idea of having to use tape or close an eye just seems silly. When shooting from behind a barricade, if your trying to minimize your exposure to the target, you can switch to the use your right eye when shooting on the right, and switch to your left eye when shooting on the left. This isn't much of an issue in competition, but for those in a real-life scenario, only exposing 1/3rd of your head instead of 2/3rd of your head to the bad guy is a definite benefit!

Moving beyond handguns, the ability to shift between eyes on demand is incredibly powerful when using an AGOG or similar illuminated optic while utilizing a variation of the Bindon Aiming Concept. Basically what happens is that you use your rifle both eyes open, with your right eye behind a 4x optic with an illuminated reticle. When you shift over to your left eye, you see everything naturally and without any magnification. However, the mind will stitch the illuminated reticle from your right eye over the field of view of your left eye. You'll perceive the reticle floating in space, and you can use it to aim and shoot when preferring your left eye. When you shift to preferring your right eye, you're looking through the 4x ACOG, and simply see a magnified image behind the illuminated reticle. The effect of this technique is that you can actually switch between 0x and 4x magnification in your head, simply by switching which eye the mind is favoring. You can see and use the reticle for shooting regardless of which eye is currently dominant. It's really very very cool when you get this working the first time

https://www.trijicon.com/na_en/company/unique_to_trijicon.php

Again, the problem is that most people don't know what they're supposed to be seeing or perceiving when shooting both eyes open, or what training techniques will give them mastery of those skills. These are a couple that can help you master the complexities of 2 eyes open shooting. As you can see, these are not problems that need to be solved, these are perfectly natural biological conditions that you can learn to manage and actually leverage to improve your shooting skills beyond what is possible with one eye or with taped shooting glasses.

Hope this helps.

Edited August 7, 2014 by Jshuberg

[bountyhunter]

So I have always shot with tape over my left eye. I took a Manny Bragg class this weekend and he encouraged me to take the tape off.

I have decided to give it a shot. 2 days of dry fire with both eyes open and unobstructed.

The results so far--terrible. I see either 2 front sights or 2 targets.

Tomorrow will be my first day of live fire with this.

2 questions:

1) For those who have been down this road......is there a light at the end of the tunnel?

Depends: how many lights do you see with both eyes open?

Just kidding. If your sighting eye is strongly dominant, it's an easy skill to master. If not, maybe not so easy.

[bountyhunter]

have you tried looking at the target and focusing on that instead of your sights. try focusing on targets at different lengths then bring you gun up.

+1 That's the best starter. Put a black dot on the wall about 50 feet away and lock focus on it. Then point your finger of your right hand and bring it up like gun sighting until it is in line with one eye, keeping focus on wall. The eye it lines up with is the dominant eye. The secret to shooting with two eyes open is that you focus on the target and "look through" the sights along the dom eye line of sight. There will be a second sight image off line that's easy to ignore. Sights will not be in perfect focus, but you can still have "visual awareness" of the sights even though mechanical focus of the eyes is on the target. It's easier to do than it is to explain.

[Nemesis Lead]

Some great thoughts here. I have done dry fire and live fire and it has not gone well. I will add a couple of the exercises mentioned above and see what happens!

[Jshuberg]

It takes awhile for your mind to get used to the idea and allow you to shoot well like this. I'd avoid focussing on the target though. If you feel it's necessary, only do it for a short while. Shooting both eyes open shouldn't cause you to lose one of the fundementals of accurate shooting, and if you do it too long will ingrain bad habits. The main skill that you need to develop when shooting both eyes open is to decouple accomodation from convergence. Training techniques and exercises that don't do this aren't going to help you at all, and can actually hold you back in the long run.

You don't need a gun in your hand to train on and learn this technique, and honestly I think putting one in your hand before you've learned to do this can be counter productive. It's not what's in your hands that matters here, it's whats going on in your head.

Do the thumb exercise I posted above, and don't use a shooting target as your "target" in the background. Use a lamp or a plant or a lightswitch or something. Using a shooting target will cause your subconscious to go into "shooting" mode, and it will fight you trying to do anything other than what you've done in the past. You want your visual landscape to be something new and unrelated to shooting. Work on shifting your focus up and down the focal continuum between your thumb and the [whatever non target thing your using in the background]. Once you become proficient at that, then do it with a proper shooting target. Let your subconcious know that the technique you've just learned will also be used when looking at targets. Then replace your thumb with your front sight. Don't be surprised if you find it more difficult to do with a gun and target that your thumb and a lampshade. This is your subconscious mind arguing with you about what you should be seeing when shooting a target. Just keep at it, you'll eventually win your subconscious over to your side

Again, what you're striving for it to perceive a single fuzzy target in the background, and a crisply in focus partially transparent front sight. You'll actually be seeing two sets of sights, but with practice your mind will drop the unused one from your consciousness, and you won't even notice it's there.

Being able to shift which eye is preferred by the mind on demand isn't necessary for shooting both eyes open, but is very cool, and will give you further mastery of your binocular vision, and how the mind stiches what your eyes are seeing into a single perceived image. Learning to do this will definately improve your visual skills when shooting.

Edited August 7, 2014 by Jshuberg

[Jaxshooter]

I shoot shotguns, scoped rifles and my open gun with both eyes open. Iron sighted pistols and rifles past 15 yards I squint my left eye (non dominant). I have tried to learn to keep both eyes open and cannot due it without tape on my left lens. I feel that I loose depth perception with the tape. It is easy for me to slightly squint my left eye before breaking the shot and have the advantage of opening my left eye for transitions and movement through the stage.

So I use both eyes when using target focus and squint my left eye when focusing on the front sight. I am 64 and wear Rudy Project Plano lenses with contacts that correct my vision to 20/20.

Edited August 7, 2014 by Jaxshooter

[hax]

It takes awhile for your mind to get used to the idea and allow you to shoot well like this. I'd avoid focussing on the target though. If you feel it's necessary, only do it for a short while. Shooting both eyes open shouldn't cause you to lose one of the fundementals of accurate shooting, and if you do it too long will ingrain bad habits. The main skill that you need to develop when shooting both eyes open is to decouple accomodation from convergence. Training techniques and exercises that don't do this aren't going to help you at all, and can actually hold you back in the long run.

You don't need a gun in your hand to train on and learn this technique, and honestly I think putting one in your hand before you've learned to do this can be counter productive. It's not what's in your hands that matters here, it's whats going on in your head.

Do the thumb exercise I posted above, and don't use a shooting target as your "target" in the background. Use a lamp or a plant or a lightswitch or something. Using a shooting target will cause your subconscious to go into "shooting" mode, and it will fight you trying to do anything other than what you've done in the past. You want your visual landscape to be something new and unrelated to shooting. Work on shifting your focus up and down the focal continuum between your thumb and the [whatever non target thing your using in the background]. Once you become proficient at that, then do it with a proper shooting target. Let your subconcious know that the technique you've just learned will also be used when looking at targets. Then replace your thumb with your front sight. Don't be surprised if you find it more difficult to do with a gun and target that your thumb and a lampshade. This is your subconscious mind arguing with you about what you should be seeing when shooting a target. Just keep at it, you'll eventually win your subconscious over to your side

Again, what you're striving for it to perceive a single fuzzy target in the background, and a crisply in focus partially transparent front sight. You'll actually be seeing two sets of sights, but with practice your mind will drop the unused one from your consciousness, and you won't even notice it's there.

Being able to shift which eye is preferred by the mind on demand isn't necessary for shooting both eyes open, but is very cool, and will give you further mastery of your binocular vision, and how the mind stiches what your eyes are seeing into a single perceived image. Learning to do this will definately improve your visual skills when shooting.

Not sure if i agree with this. I dont have too much experience in the open field but i do with an AR with an aimpoint mounted. I was always looking for a sharp target and the dot would be over it. if it was a fuzzy target then there woould be no way to shoot at targets 300 yards away. Correct me if im wrong, but i would have my focus on the target and the dot will come. If you are focusing on your sight you will always have two sights because you are not looking past it.

[Jshuberg]

I was talking about iron sights when discussing a front sight focus

Edited August 8, 2014 by Jshuberg

[DreGarciaTAT2]

It took me about three weeks of forcibly keeping my left eye open (and shooting very poorly) until it happened... My moment of clarity... It just clicked one day, mid match... Was really forcing it, and now, I couldn't imagine going back... It shattered my plateau, and I've been climbing since.

[jkrispies]

Try the tape over glasses trick... but maybe with old glasses you don't care too much since it can be a problem to get the tape off sometimes. One thing I have to say from my experience (especially since my eyes are beginning to age) is that I've found that I have no problem shooting with both eyes open when competing "at speed" since I'm able to get my dominant eye to focus quickly and I can get the shot off and I'm off to the next target before anything goes awry. The problem occurs when I hold the sight picture for more than about two seconds, and my non-dominant eye kicks in and I'll start to see double. This seems to occur more when I'm dry firing at 1/2 speed than in live fire. It's still no problem when the image splits, as one image appears to be aiming the pistol with correct sight alignment, and the second image looks like the gun is a bit diagonal-- squeeze a quick shot at the image that is properly sighted and you'll be perfectly fine... or just close your non-dominant eye at that point and aim one-eyed. (While this sounds complicated, I believe it's worth it as both eyes open gives a far better peripheral view to assist in engaging the next array; typically if I have a choice, I'll shoot from left to right, as I'm left eye dominant, and as soon as I squeeze off a shot I'm able to pick up "the next target" to my right with my right eye and swing my line of sight into it, giving me a fraction of a second more focus time while I bring the gun into my line of sight, shifting my point of focus to the front sight as it enters view, etc., etc.) YMMV

[OUshooter]

I had a pair a clear glasses from Lowe's i think, with tape on left side. I wore them all the time at home, even driving. Took about 6 months for my brain to figure it out, but it was like magic one day.

My advice is to wear the glasses for more than just practice.

[jkrispies]

Just be careful forcing dominance into one eye. That can result in a lazy eye if pushed too far.