Humans care way too much about wrist placement when it comes to watches. Watches can go on either wrist and if you ask me it matters less than anything else you’re going to decide about your equipment today. There’s no flag being thrown at the gas station while you wear your watch on your right wrist. But a lowly assistant coach actually asked me this question last week at work as if I were protecting state secrets and frankly the truth is it just doesn’t matter like people make it out to be. At best it’s a guideline built around the realities of how your hands work and once you understand why the “rule” doesn’t matter anymore and the logic takes over.
Which Hand Do You Actually Use?
The rule of thumb is to wear your watch on your left wrist because the majority of people are right handed and you want your strong hand free to do things with none of the meat and bones swinging around jewelry and metal you don’t need on it. That’s literally it.
That’s the entire history behind it. Who cares if some fancy watch guy somewhere said “it’s traditional?” If you’re right handed, your left wrist exists exclusively to not get in the way of what your dominant hand needs to do all day, every day. I literally have students who show up to my gym with their watch on their right wrist and I don’t bat an eye because there is no rule. Stop asking me if it’s “okay” just wear your damn watch where you want to.
To be fair though, I kind of figured this out by ruining a lifting session because… idk man that sounds about right for how I learn things sometimes. Anyway I was wearing a watch on my right wrist for two weeks because a friend handed it to me and I never switched it before throwing it on one day and it drove me nuts. Every set of literally anything that used my dominant hand would catch on my wrist wrap during barbell rows, catch on the thumbslip during cleans, even catch on the bar when I was just sitting there racking weights. Moved it to the left and I haven’t thought about it since. It wasn’t right or wrong to wear it on one side, it was simply that my dominant wrist needed to stay clear of extra hardware and my left wrist was fine just hanging there uselessly all day.
If you happen to be left handed then god bless and flip everything I just said and yell at the right handed folks. Left handed people wearing watches on their left are running these exact same numbers in their head, they’re just coming to the opposite conclusion based on their dominant hand. One of my left handed students lifts in the mirror of everything because it just feels better to him and he wears his watch on the right without question. It’s correct, it’s not backasswards, his dominant hand does everything he does and watches needed to stay off of it. The rule was never “left wrist etiquette” the rule was “don’t wear it on your hand that does things.”
Then It’s What You’re Actually Doing With Those Hands
Here’s where things can get more specific than “ Wear it on your non writing hand” because once you really start to dive into it your profession and how you use your hands matters way more than simply left vs right. I train people for a living, so my dominant hand is under a barbell, wrapped around something heavy, or catching a medicine ball an average of nine hours a day. When I wear my watch on my dominant hand I notice it, a lot. I’ll dive into a training session with a watch on that hand just to prove theories like this to myself sometimes and by the second or third exercise my wrist band is slipping or my watch is catching on the inside of my wrist constantly. Put it on the left and I don’t feel it at all, and that right there is the highest praise I can give a piece of equipment.
But if you’re typing at a desk all day? Or sitting in meetings? Watches will literally never bug you because your hands aren’t under load they aren’t swinging around, they aren’t being used like hands are supposed to be used. Where wearing your watch on your “correct” wrist matters most is if you’re using that wrist to do physical work. Barbell trains, sports, manual labor, heck even swinging a golf club. If you’re using that wrist to rotate, lift, or flex repeatedly against something your watch is going to start screaming at you if it’s on the wrong wrist.
The caveat I will give is my own personal flaw because I judge 90% of gear by can I workout in this? criterion and if you’re wearing a watch to a wedding or your office was literally not designed for that kind of torture. Every watch isn’t made to be worn while you’re throwing ducks and not every shirt you own needs to be able to cover a beefy wristband. If you’re going to sit at a desk all day and type on a computer wearing that watch it honestly doesn’t matter which wrist it’s on because you’re not going to feel a difference either way. Just wear it where feels comfortable to you.
So now we’re back to the answer I gave at the beginning.
If you do anything that requires manual labor with your dominant hand wear your watch on the other wrist. Plain and simple. If you’re right handed that’s your left wrist and if you’re left handed it’s opposite, pretty simple convention and it exists for a reason. If you’re one of those magical ambidextrous folk? Congrats mate you literally win at life and can wear it on whatever wrist you please because you’ve single handedly destroyed my argument entirely. It doesn’t matter because you’re awesome.
Wear it where feels comfortable if your job or daily activities don’t require one hand to do things more than the other. Watches only live on your wrist because we told them too, there’s no guidelines buried in the operating system of a watch that sorts out which wrist is correct. It lives there because for most people that’s the best place for it to not interfere with what your dominant hand needs to do.
Connor coaches rugby in Bristol and has never quite stopped training. He writes about kit that copes with a proper session and still looks fine on a Saturday, and he won’t recommend anything he hasn’t sweated in first.
