An often overlooked and very important component in everyone’s game is eye dominance. Your dominant eye can affect what you see and how you see it. You must know your dominant eye and understand its impact and why it is important. It will help you communicate about targeting and visualization techniques as well as understand that when your coach says “Hit 10″, you translate that into “Okay, that means look at 8.”
If you don’t know your dominant eye, here’s how to determine it. You are about to perform some magic by making the pins move without ever touching them. They are going to move behind one of your hands!
Hold your arms out in front of you with the palm of the hands facing away from you. Touch the index fingers together and overlap the thumbs so that a triangle is created between the two parts of the hands that are touching. Keep the hands at arms’ length and, with both eyes open, put something 10 or 12 feet or even farther away from you in that triangle. Don’t cheat and look at whatever you have chosen with one eye or the other. Do it with both eyes open.
Close the left eye and then open it. Then close the right eye and open it. When one of your eyes was closed, whatever you were looking at disappeared from the triangle. That is your dominant eye. Some people think that if what they are looking at doesn’t move, that is the dominant eye. Not. Think of it this way: if you close the eye that is dominant, its dominance will be negated. That’s why it’s dominant! (As an interesting aside, a right eye dominant right-hander will perceive the object as having disappeared behind the left hand and a left eye dominant right-hander will perceive the pins as having disappeared behind the right hand!)
Most right-handers are right eye dominant. The necessity of the triangulation of the target, the eye, and the shoulder (the ball) can cause a miss of the target of about two boards left. It is not uncommon and is not an error. For some people it has no effect. The important thing is that you know whether it affects your accuracy or not. If it does, merely change your targeting. If you want to hit 10, you merely look at 8.
Some right-handers are left eye dominant. This is also not a problem as long as it is known. Left eye dominance in a right-hander usually causes a miss left of three or four boards (sometimes more). No big deal. Want to hit 10? Look at 6. The variance in the miss is caused by how far the eye is from the target. What a left eye dominant right-hander sees with is pretty far from the bowling shoulder!
Eye dominance is common to most of the population. Regardless of which eye is dominant, it is possible you will be able to look directly at what you want to hit. However, if you are missing left, this simple, non-threatening explanation can be a lifesaver. It is possible but rare that your eye dominance doesn’t cause you to miss to the inside but rather to the outside. Don’t worry about it. If this happens to you, just look left of what you intend to hit.
NOW THAT YOU’VE DONE ALL THAT, YOU SHOULD KNOW IT’S NOT ALWAYS TRUE
Keep in mind that it is not only possible but also likely that you may miss what you are looking at in different amounts in different parts of the lane. For instance, you may need to look two to the right when playing 10 or out, look at what you want to hit when playing 11 to 16, and go back to looking to the right to play inside of 17. This is not a problem unless you don’t know it.
It’s up to you and your coach to discover what your tendencies are. You can use tape or ‘clickers’ to mark the lane for this exercise. Some people put coins on the lane. I personally don’t advise this as sometimes when you hit the coins, they put a dent in the lane. Not a good thing for your relationship with the proprietor and laneman.
Clickers are the tabs purchased in the office supply store that affix to files. They will attach to the lanes well (if you remove the oil in that one little spot), cause no damage, come in different colors, and make a clicking sound if hit by the ball. Place one each on the 6th and 9th boards for instance. If you look between them and hit the one on the 9th board, you likely will need to look to the right of what you intend to hit when playing this area of the lane.
Continue to move the clickers across the lane until you have defined your tendencies in all the areas of the lane. This will be invaluable in helping you hit what you intend to hit regardless of where you need to look to do so.
Accuracy plays a critical role in our sport and how to properly choose a target is important. This is also important to the mental game. Let’s say you’re just cruising along, pounding the pocket and getting rewarded, and someone asks you what you are playing. You tell them you are playing 8. They look at you incredulously and shake their head while their eyes roll back in their head. The entire league that is watching your performance from the concourse begins to snicker when your ‘friend’ tells them what you have said. They can all plainly see you’re hitting 12.
“I am too hitting 8. Just watch this,” you think as you squint, bear down, purse your lips, clench your teeth, and really, really try hard to hit 8 all of which will have no affect except to make your facial muscles tired. Understanding eye dominance can go a long way toward teaching you to forgive yourself and understanding where to look in order to hit what you intend to hit. A better answer for your friend’s question is “I don’t have a clue. I just roll the ball and it seems to work.” Or you could ask a clarifying question, “Do you mean what is my target or where do I intend the ball to go?”
This exercise will help you learn how to line up, how to deal with the reality of the lane vs. the perception of the lane, and point out the importance of a precise stance to eliminate misalignment as a cause for inaccuracy. This should help you make sure that if, by some miracle, you miss, it won’t be because you didn’t line up right!