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Unless you are ambidextrous, we all have a more coordinated hand that we prefer to use for everyday tasks such as writing. This also means that athletes then, have a particular way that they swing a bat, or throw and kick a ball.
Ballsports allow you the privelage of using your preferred hand most of the time and it isn’t very often that you need to use your non preferred hand and is rarely necessary to warrant hours of practice to develop that skill.
MMA and the fighting arts is much the same in that regard. Traditionally if you are right handed then you shape up in the orthodox stance (left foot forward with your more coordinated power hand at the back) and if you are left handed then you assume the unorthodox stance (right foot forward).
Something interesting I learned while I was studying my Diploma of Fitness was the difference between a cognitive skill and an incognitive skill. Cognitive (derived from the word cognition: the scientific term for “the process of thought.” )basically means that you have to think about something and incognitive means that you don’t.
When this applies to the performance of a skill, for many of us using our preferred hand (even with techniques that we weren’t that familiar with) is more natural and and we do not have to think about the execution as much.
The example we used was kicking a football. Even if you were not a football player and had never really practiced kicking a ball it was a fairly natural action for most people to do with their ‘natural’ leg. However, when we used our non preferred leg, we found that we had to consciously go through the steps in our mind as we were doing them.
This is sort of what happens with your left arm when punching. It is not as natural and smooth and requires more conscious thought to make sure that all the muscle fibers fire in the right order, your hip and shoulder is behind the punch, etc. This of course, like any other skill, can be improved by practice and repetition.
This video from the crew at Damage Control MMA explains a couple of techniques you can use to help develop power and coordination with your non-preferred hand.
Watch more videos from DamageControlMMA
I was going to end this post here but I just wanted to bring up something else that I find interesting, and that is the fact that each side of our body is controlled by the opposite side of our brain. eg. our left side is controlled by our right brain and the right side is controlled by the left brain.
The left brain has always been associated with logic, rational and sequential thinking and the right side with spatial, colors, and creative thinking. Though it has been found that the two halves share jobs, so to speak.
This could explain at least in part (because a large percentage of the population are right handed), why most of us are so coordinated with our right hand, because it is controlled by the logical ‘step by step’ part of our brain, and the left always feels a bit ‘out there’ because it is controlled by the spatial right brain.
Now I am by no means an expert in any of this but I just thought it was an interesting point to bring to your attention. I hope you got something out of it.
