Left-Handed Compound Bows: Do You Need One?

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In archery you aim with your dominant eye, so the bow hand and draw hand are set by which eye is dominant – not by whether you write left or right handed. A left-eye-dominant person generally shoots a left-handed bow (held in the right hand, drawn with the left) so the dominant eye lines up behind the string. Cross-dominance (right-handed but left-eye-dominant, or vice versa) is common, which is why testing matters.

1. Extend both arms and form a small triangle between your hands.
2. With both eyes open, center a distant object in the triangle.
3. Close one eye, then the other.
4. The eye that keeps the object centered is your dominant eye – match the bow to it.

This is the part most “lefty bow” pages skip, and it flips the question this page is named for. Eye dominance and hand dominance are controlled by different, largely independent wiring, and the correlation between them is much weaker for left-handers than most people assume. Studies on the link between handedness and eye dominance put right-handers at roughly 67% right-eye dominant – a fairly strong match. Left-handers, by contrast, come out closer to 40% left-eye dominant, meaning the majority of left-handed people are actually right-eye dominant.

In plain terms: if you are left-handed and searching for a left-handed bow because that feels like the obvious match, the numbers say you are more likely than not to actually need a right-handed bow once you test your eye. This is exactly why the test in the previous section is not a formality – for a right-handed archer it mostly confirms what they assumed; for a left-handed archer it is a genuine coin-flip result that decides which bow (and which entire set of accessories) to buy.

Unlike a recurve riser that can sometimes accept limbs either way, a compound bow’s cams and cable routing are handed parts, not symmetrical ones – the cam geometry, cable guard offset, and riser grip angle are built as true mirror images for each hand, not a single part that flips. That is why you cannot restring or re-mount a standard right-handed compound into a left-handed one; the small number of bows advertised as convertible achieve it with a specific reversible cam-pocket design, and it is a feature of that model, not something you can do to an arbitrary bow. The one workaround archers do use in a pinch is shooting a right-handed bow left-handed “backwards” (bow arm and draw arm swapped from the manufacturer’s intent) – workable with a fall-away rest, but riskier with the rest arm swinging toward the bow hand, and not how the bow was tuned to be shot.

This handed-parts requirement is also the real reason lefty bows are harder to find, not just retailer bias: every left-handed model needs its own cam tooling and a smaller production run against lower predicted demand, so manufacturers offer fewer left-hand SKUs and carry less lefty stock of rests, sights, and quivers. Confirm all of those come in left-hand versions before you commit, and expect a shallower used-market selection too – and the trade cuts both ways. If you sell a left-handed bow later, the same small buyer pool that made it hard to find used now makes it harder to find a buyer, and lefty listings commonly move for less relative to their original price than an equivalent right-handed bow. Our buying a used compound bow guide covers the inspection checklist either way.

Once you know which hand you actually need, picking the bow itself is no different from any other compound: an adjustable draw-length range that fits you, a draw weight you can pull smoothly, and good forgiveness matter far more than the handedness label.