Compound Bows

Deciding the draw hand

The draw hand is the hand that pulls the string. This means that a right-handed bow is held in the left hand and drawn with the right hand.

Determining your personal draw hand has far less to do with whether you are left-handed or right-handed than you might initially assume. It is much more about determining the dominant eye. The dominant eye is used for aiming. This then automatically results in the draw hand.

The term dominant eye refers to the eye whose visual information is superimposed on everything. If a shooter tried to aim with the other eye, he would have to close the dominant eye.

There are two ways of determining the dominant eye: On the one hand, it is the eye that is generally favoured, for example when looking through the viewfinder of a camera, through the peephole or similar situations. On the other hand, there is a small exercise that can be used to determine the dominant eye beyond doubt:

• The arms are stretched out and a triangle is formed with the thumbs and index fingers of both hands.
• A small target is aimed at through the triangle, for example a socket or a cupboard knob. Focus on this object.
• The hands are now slowly brought towards the face without taking the target object out of focus.
• The triangle of thumb and index fingers will involuntarily tend towards one side of the face and this is where the dominant eye is located.

If the dominance of the eye and hand do not match, the bow should still be selected according to eye dominance. The arms can be easily retrained for the new draw hand, but not the eye.

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