Sadly doesn’t seem to really get into the details. For target shooting, aperture sights on with the gun or your eyes have a variety of interesting benefits, such as reducing parallax error and providing a better depth of field (bringing the target more into focus when focusing on the front sight).
Here’s a decent overview of the AR15’s classic aperture sight, and the reason why when looking through the sight that simply having the front post roughly centered somehow works better than you’d think: https://thenewrifleman.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-the-ar15-ir...
I occasionally do competitive matches with handguns (USPSA in the US), so I have some background knowledge. The eye cover is to reduce strain / fatigue from squinting, however it also helps the other eye focus on their aperture sight naturally, thus making it easier to take a more accurate shot (with all of the science behind closing apertures and front sight posts, linked in this thread).
In USPSA, while we don't use eye covers in a match, but a lot of competitors will use them on their dominant eye to practice fast target acquisition, independent of their pistol red dot or iron sights. Translates to very refined muscle memory when you don't need to rely on your optics to align your aim.
In most type of shooting, you're generally NOT closing either of your eyes while aiming. It's counter productive to your situational awareness
A few things. It makes for no distraction in the eye you’re not using, while still allowing you to have both eyes easily open with focus where you need. Keeping both eyes open vastly reduces strain on the facial/eye muscles.
Sometimes a white opaque shield is used, on the theory that allowing light through won’t have potentially negative effects on iris contraction. I can’t speak to the validity of this one.
We use tape over the left eye of my youngest’s eye pro when he’s shooting a rifle. He’s cross eye dominant and scotch tape on the glasses is cheaper than a left handed rifle.
I shoot quite often. If you learn to shoot with your left right shut you will need to calibrate your sight to shoot for something I know as a 'counter-paralax'. When i say "left eye" that might be your right eye, it depends on how you shoot. You cannot calibrate a sight properly without choosing left, right, or having both eyes open...
Both eyes are preferred for a killer, because you want to have awareness. But it is not an easy way to shoot, or train, or learn.
On another note, I had a cal .22 blow on my face once, on a perfectly tuned rifle, and the reason I kept my eye, is because the exit is on the right hand side. Most rifles are build like that.
"Both eyes are preferred for a killer, because you want to have awareness. But it is not an easy way to shoot, or train, or learn."
I think you're entirely wrong, but the sport USPSA is vastly different from any Olympic style shooting you would seen. It's speed and hit factor (that is, the caliber of your gun as a TLDR). Different priorities than Olympic sharpshooting.
I'm no olympian, but squinting one eye shut can mess up your vision when aiming. Leaving both open takes some extra attention away from the target. I don't shoot competitively, but I leave both eyes open. I assume the same for them.
I teach drawing and my students are required to measure alignment of objects using their pencil as a straight edge whilst looking through one eye. Some students have trouble with this and have to place one hand over there non dominant eye.
Since I lost my left eye I have no trouble looking through only one eye. However, I have acquired plenty of troubles with balance.
I'm not a shooter, but people do the same thing when looking through a telescope, or a microscope with one eyepiece. You learn to ignore the other eye.
extend your arm, now focus your vision on a tip of your finer, and (still focusing on a finger tip!) try to point your finger just below some small object in the distance of few meters. If you use both your eyes, if done properly it should be impossible because the object you try to point to, but not look at, will be seen double and will move as you move your finger. Then do do same but with one eye closed - now it still should be blurry, but nothing more so you can aim.
This is how you aim in shooting (always focusing vision on pistol, never on target) so you need to do it with one eye. You don’t want to keep it shout as this creates additional tension in body, and probably may affect your face after years of training, so simple piece of paper or plastic to shield the eye is enough.
Interesting, I’ve essentially done zero pistol/rifle shooting but I shoot clays regularly and this is pretty much the opposite of the advice you’d give a new clay shooter. Mount the shotgun properly with both eyes open, track the clay, work out the lead, then boom. Is the “focus on the pistol” thing because you’re aiming at a static target?
For precision shooting, the alignment of the sights with each other has a much bigger impact on where you hit than the alignment of the sights with the target. An intuitive explanation for why might be that the distance from either sight to the target is much greater than the distance between the sights, so a misalignment between the sights creates a much larger angle than the same amount of misalignment with the target.
Yes, for pistol shooting iron sights (just learned the english term, that’s what I meant by “focus on pistol” ;) ) are what you have to focus on. The target is black bulls eye, clearly visible on a white background, even if it’s blurry.Then you aim just below the bulls eye - so what you se is black iron sights (vision focus, sharp), then small white gap, then blurry black bulls eye. And then you learn to have all those elements spaced exactly the same on every single repetition.
You don’t have to track target, as it’s always in the same spot.
I know you must know this, but for others reading, this also is not a static view, like in a video game, but the sights are 'swimming' around usually in a figure 8 pattern as your heart beats. It is not just a matter of getting a good sight picture, but breaking the trigger when things aren't perfectly lined up, because by the time the mechanism fires and the projectile leaves the barrel you will no longer be lined up. This is worse for air pistol due to the slow velocity of the pellet.
In other words it is not like you are holding a tiny dot in the exact center of a circle, it is a messy blur of trying to hold 3 things in alignment where the front sight is about as big as the entire bullseye (hence why you aim below, so there is white visible, you would otherwise obscure the target entirely.
If you do it well, you are consistently hitting something the size of the period at the end of this sentence from 10 meters away (again, air pistol).
That’s for bullseye style shooting. In other pistol formats like ipsc sight focus shooting is too slow. Target focused is the way top competitors shoot.
What I’m curious about is the rapid fire Olympic event. It’s not particularly fast as these things go but very accurate (though less so than the other events).
It's basically the same, just with a lot more of a "good enough" attitude to aiming.
So you really mostly on a muscle memory to have pistol somewhere in a target, then aim using iron sights. For whole 8,6 or 4s you focus vision on a iron sights.
During the first phase - moving your arm up from the 45 degree position, you look in the target direction so you know when to start, then focus your vision on iron sights in the end phase of raising arm motion so you are almost immediately ready to aim and pull the trigger, then just move you eyes to the next target, but with "locked" focus (at the distance of iron sights, not target), so again, arm moves to the target area and you can aim and shoot.
And then there's Turkish pistol silver medalist Yusuf Dikec who just wears his regular glasses and foam earplugs and shoots with one hand in his pocket.
It's not unlike the race driver Jacky Ickx who walked to his car at the 1969 24 hours of Le Mans (while all the other drivers were running to their cars), took his time to fasten his seatbelt, and then won the race.
Primary source is myself, I shoot the same programs as those in the olympic, and more.
And sure, if you use it like that it's something else. I was primarily thinking of what's allowed in the programs I know of, where "two hands" means both hands on the gun.
edit: I don't think bracing would make a huge difference anyway, unless you're fairly new. The primary source of error, by far, is due to sight misalignment, not the general direction you're aiming. And bracing would only help with stabilizing the general directionyou aim.
I mean the big hat is like a baseball cap, that's within the nonchalant part of the Venn diagram, but the headphones are classed as using tools, only no tools and hands in pockets fall in the center of don't give a fuck.
I watched the final match after seeing the memes, another thing the commentators kept saying about the guy (Yusuf Dikec) is that he is 51, an age rarely seen at the highest levels of competition in any sport.
I would’ve expected this to be the norm in shooting sports. Shooting is more skill and experience based, less physically demanding, and age might prove advantageous
Love how try-hard and over the top the rest of the younger participants ended up looking, admittedly many of them with excessive/unnecessary equipment, compared to him.
The rifle shooters wear stiff clothing, while pistol shooters tend to wear looser things (and there are lots of rules around clothes not being allowed to provide support).
This is correct. All pistol shooters just wear shirts. All of them have their hand in their pocket. If you don't have astigmatism you can get away without the fancy eyeglass holder, and just use regular glasses. The lack of blinder is somewhat impressive, because most people will get a headache after too long without an opaque blinder on the off eye.
Meanwhile in rifle it's all $2k kit of rigid jacket and pants. If you aren't using the rigid jacket and pants, you will get absolutely wrecked. Your score will be lower, and your back will get injured in the long run because of the contortionist posting when holding the 13 pound rifle up for hours. It's not possible to be competitive without it.
Though in that specific case, I'm pretty sure she's got part of the hand in the pocket, and that shooter Kim Yeji also does hand in pocket other times, if you've seen her at other issf events (here's a random example):
I've also done finger through belt loop, it's basically the same thing. (Guess it wasn't technically a belt loop, but like a utility holder loop, like you'd put a small hammer in on the side of work pants?)
An analogy would be if there was a big news cycle about programmers and people were really shocked about a specific programmer usinv a "text editor", and people went on and on about how that was... except all the other programmers are sitting over there thinking "wait, every programmer uses text editors".
Sure you can find a few that don't, but that's real missing the point.
People who use equipments actually have fear of failure. Fear of something makes you want to avoid it, and they try avoid failing in case their bare abilities are not good enough
People who fear failure in general don't compete in Olympics.
But going naked eye when everyone else wears equipments is the ultimate not giving a fuck.
Especially because it's not your personal competition and if this costs your country medals people will NOT like you and if you say "ah you know it's just because I didn't wear equipments, which I totally could but didn't" they will not like you more because of it.
Off-topic: I really hate those linkedin influencers telling me what a "senior software engineer" is or is not, or how I should use TDD or not use TDD. I keep removing them from my feed, but there's an endless stream of them.
You’re fighting a losing battle. LinkedIn ‘s feed is about as useless as Facebook or twitter’s… because they basically copied it whole cloth. All it is is an algorithmic shot at engagement so they can get paid for ad impressions. The aim is not to keep you up to date with what your contacts are up to.
There was a period a few years back where LinkedIn was the easiest place on the internet to get organic reach. As such, the marketing guru set were all recommending LinkedIn as the best place to “build an audience”. I haven’t checked, but I’d guess the juice has been mostly squeezed out by now.
I don't even know what kind of "audience" people are trying to build? Who even reads, let alone cares about these generic business grindhustle posts? And what is the "audience builder" getting out of any of this? I mean, if you read this, are you really going to offer the writer a job?
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I think it's the same thing that makes people take on "support" roles on message forums for tech products (Microsoft, etc.). They're worse than bots, and I don't know what motivates them, but you will always find them.
Oh I love the mental gymnastics that some of these posters accomplish to try and fit a lesson they wanna teach to the picture, and somehow attach themselves to that person's notoriety.
If they're allowing this gear, why not allow all competitors to use glasses to get 20/15 vision? It doesn't make sense that "shooters are only allowed to use prescription lenses if they are part of their regular eyewear", given that optometrists tend to slightly overprescribe anyhow, which means there's no uniformity.
Because when shooting, you focus your vision on a pistol iron sights, so you need to see perfectly sharp on a distance less than 1m. Not sure if you can “cheat” with glasses to have better vision on that distance, if your vision is healthy
You must still be looking where you want to shoot otherwise you could point in any direction since "you're just looking at the iron sights". By that logic I could make any distance shot even if I couldn't see anything past 1m.
You look at the target, but without focusing your vision on it - it is locked to the iron sights. So the target, which is black bulls eye, is always blurry when shooting. Increasing depth of field as described in the article, would be beneficial. No idea if prescription glasses would help for someone with no vision issues.
Before you start shooting, you perform a few practice lifts of you arm. One way is to close your eyes, raise your arm and then see where you are aiming. Adjust the position of your back foot if you're off the bulls eye. Key is to keep your wrist locked in position.
Once you raise your arm for real, you don't really need to look at the target, your hand and hence pistol will be in the right spot.
All you need then is to fine-adjust the sight alignment, hence why you focus entirely on the front sight post.
Once you get good you just know how to stand and such, so you'll be mostly bang on right away.
For this reason, if you get glasses for shooting, you'll want them made so your best focus is at the front sight.
Can you provide evidence to this? Every new prescription I have gotten for glasses through my entire life has been too strong and required my eyes to basically degrade to be correct. Avoiding getting new prescriptions too often is pretty much the only reason my eyes are okay.
An optometrist cannot see through your eyes, so they use that lens comparing machine and ask you "which is better", and that leaves plenty of room for the patient to bias the results towards "different from normal is 'Better'", such that they vastly bias their new prescription upwards. Even if every optometrist is thinking about that and purposely downgrading the results of that flow, that could still provide room for the ratchet effect of eye prescriptions that many people with glasses have experienced.
Wearing glasses for 40 years and talking to ophthalmologists and optometrists.
Also I don't know where you are getting your glasses from, but where I am it's been decades now that the measuring of eyesight (with a machine) is done before the lens fitting, which mainly focuses on astigmatism.
Not an optometrist myself, so please excuse if I'm using all the wrong words here. The way it's been explained to me: you want to leave some challenge for the eye to overcome, so the muscles that do the focussing stay in training. If you overadapt, those muscles have less to do and could atrophy slightly, leading to ever more loss of eyesight.
> given that optometrists tend to slightly overprescribe anyhow
I've been wearing glasses for myopia since I was ~10 years old and this is exactly opposite of my experience. Optometrists almost always prescribe the number slightly lower than they determine using tests.
When my number was constantly increasing, I remember ordering the next available increment just because the prescribed number was slightly annoying when looking at far away objects.
Now my number has been stable for a decade and I still sometimes get annoyed when using glasses at the prescribed power.
There's a great video that asks and answers a lot of these questions. For instance, I didn't know you can use replacement legs in professional athletics:
Interestingly from the article: “it's worth noting that Oh Ye-jin, the South Korean competitor who took Gold in the 10 Meter Air Pistol event this year, eschews the irises.”
I got my glasses a year ago and just did a checkup. Apparently my current vision (with glasses) sits at 21/20. They did two tests using the rotating lens machine.
I might have better vision (with glasses) than a lot of people who wouldn't get glasses because their vision would be good enough.
I'm in Germany and my glasses are mainly used to correct my astigmatism.
> If you're wondering why competitors don't just rely on prescription glasses, it's because your eyesight can actually change over the course of the day.
Sounds like this article was written by someone who doesn't know basic optics. You cannot replicate the action of an iris with a choice of lens, no matter how stable your vision is. Lens (to first order) adjust the plane of focus, while irises control the depth of field.
Oof. Has nothing to do with the iris. The actual shape of your eye can change throughout the day depending on what you're doing. Your eyeball is just a fluid filled sac.
Yes I am well aware of the basic optics, but the author is not. These headsets come with adjustable lens as well as adjustable irises; if your eye curvature was drifting a bit you’d correct with that. (And if it’s drifting a ton, increasing the depth of field is a poor fix indoors.) The dominant reason to have the iris while shooting is to help you keep three points at different distances in simultaneous focus: the target, far sight, and near sight.
No it can't, because the shooter is aligning the target with the near sight and the far sight. (I believe they typically focus on the far sight, but the issue arises regardless.)
This seems to skip over why this might be useful. I don't know either, but seeing how it literally is just an adjustable iris I'll make a wild guess and assume this is about depth of field. With the "external" iris close enough to the eye it mostly stops being a field stop (=blocking off the field of view) and starts to act like an aperture stop (=influences the aperture aka "f-stop" aka depth of field).
I assume this is the explanation because for accurate shooting you have to bring the two thingies on the gun in line with the target, but the gun is quite close to you and the target is not. Lots of depth of field allows you to reduce the amount of blur you get on either. I'm guessing this is also why their posture is always with the gun extended as far away as possible, the closer the gun is to your face, the blurrier either the gun or the target gets.
If you wear glasses you can test this yourself quite easily, punch a small hole into a piece of paper and take your glasses off. At an arm's length it's obviously a field stop, because you can only see a very narrow solid angle through the hole. If you put it basically on top of your eyelashes, it still reduces the field of view a bit, but you'll also notice how depth of field is increased.
>I'm guessing this is also why their posture is always with the gun extended as far away as possible, the closer the gun is to your face, the blurrier either the gun or the target gets.
That certainly may be part of it, but the primary reason is simpler. Consider a straight line between your eyes and the target, going through the pistol sights. The closer the sights are to your eyes, the bigger the possible "error".
Getting the iron sights further away from you is like turning down your mouse sensitivity, if you want to think of it that way.
i especially dislike the logic too. if he got silver then maybe he would have actually won if he used the same gear? ignoring the fact that he only got silver as the team event and got 13th individually
Weird argument, in my opinion. It may be that eyesight is only one of several factors that determine performance in shooting events, and these devices help the athletes that use them but provide less benefit to others. Stating it's placebo just because other athletes don't use them is, to me, akin to saying that tape or compression sleeves don't work since some athletes don't use those.
According to a video posted in this thread; it is to give people with less eye dominance a chance.
High eye dominance you can see fhe sight without it fine.
I think the focus of the sport is not on how specific your eyes are as you cannot train them like you can muscles
A lot of athletes at the very top level use things that provide, at most, a microscopic edge - because a microscopic edge can be quite significant with people that close to their genetic potential, competing against comparable others. Take something like the buoyant body suits in swimming, which do genuinely provide enough of an advantage to have been banned. If a regular person wears one of those, it's not going to suddenly turn you into Michael Phelps. In all reality you would probably notice 0 difference in feel or results, but if you're doing laps with a delta time measured in the milliseconds, then yeah it can really make a difference. But for regular people engaged in regular sport, these differences don't matter and are not even generally observable.
If anybody likes bowling there's an example there at basically every bowling alley where a guy shows up kitted out in hundreds of dollars of top brand professional gear, custom ball(s), and everything - and bowls a 120.
Hunting typically has less precision requirements, relative to bullseye shooting. Bullseye shooting can get pretty extreme in the level of precision required.
A bullseye rifle competitor at 200 yards lying down is generally unhappy with a shot that is more than 1.5" away from the centerpoint.
A deer's vital area is like over 5" from centerpoint. Even varmint hunters have bigger targets.
I don't hunt, but I compete at bullseye and practice at a range with a lot of hunters, and we routinely get into discussions of how what I need to be good at (precision stuff) has like literally nothing to do with what they need to be good at (mostly, finding the critters, and not spooking them).
I do shooting competitions from time to time, and I agree that Olympic target shooting has too much strange equipment. Most great shooters don't even bother with it because it's so boring and equipment-specific. Instead they do stuff like USPSA, IPSC, and IDPA. All of those competitions depend more on movement and speed, not slow fire accuracy and special equipment. (Though USPSA does tend to have ridiculous looking guns in its unlimited division.)
With any of the practical shooting competitions, a skilled shooter can be competitive with an unmodified handgun. Also, the skills required have a lot of overlap with real world defensive handgun use. Oh, and it's way more fun.
I did smallbore 3-position (Olympic-style rifle) in high school, and I've shot a handful of USPSA/IPSC matches. I think they're both fun to do, but only the latter is fun to watch. IPSC would be a better Olympic sport than the current precision shooting sports.
I've been pretty deep into competitive fencing (B rating?), which is a pretty gear heavy sport (but mostly around the whole "not dying / going blind" angle). I also have a master classification in bullseye rifle.
Rifle competition has a staggering amount of kit. It's bonkers. Special jacket, pants, underclothes, shoes, blinders, gloves, slings, a rifle that is like a space gun with adjustable weights and pieces all over. Most serious 30 rifle competitors will have three separate stocks to reconfigure the rifle on the fly between positions. Special kneel rolls, special mats, $1000 training cameras. You have this special tripod for holding the rifle between shots, and all your pellets (or cartridges if it's smallbore or high power). If you're not shooting electronic targets, you have a whole separate tripod and sighting scope to see shots & scores.
When I go to the range I'm lugging no joke like 50 pounds of crap.
Bullseye pistol... actually not that much. Special eyewear if your eyes need it. Earplugs. And that's kinda it.
Olympic rifle is some insane gear race bullshit.
But then again, so is internationally competitive bicycle racing. Anything that doesn't have literal $$ caps on gear will end up that way.
The only specialized equipment I'm seeing in Olympic pistol shooting is a very fancy pistol, and shooting glasses which may optionally have a blinder and an aperture. Since people are winning Olympic medals with and without specialty glasses, I think it's fair to conclude they're optional.
Well it's pretty clear to me. Silicon Valley and Optometry companies haven't been producing enough cyberpunk paraphernalia and the only ones open to the future are the sharpshooters.
Here’s a decent overview of the AR15’s classic aperture sight, and the reason why when looking through the sight that simply having the front post roughly centered somehow works better than you’d think: https://thenewrifleman.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-the-ar15-ir...