It divides opinion like few accessories can, where to wear your watch. Saw a guy at training recently get justifiably irked when someone pointed out his was on the “wrong” wrist, like some fashion faux pas as if he’d somehow been going about his life wearing his belt backwards. Except the truth is it doesn’t matter. Not really. Not unless you care about it looking weird when you’re actually using your hands to do stuff, and trust me, you will. Four minutes into whatever you’re doing.
Traditionally the left, since most of us are right handed and you don’t want your working hand catching on a watch face every time it touches something.
That’s the rule.
Not some Savile Row tailored elitist rule of thumb, just “don’t let the fragile expensive bits get caught up with the hand doing all the work.” So obvious it barely needs saying, which is obviously why nobody does and you suddenly have people treating it like Dr Seuss rhyming couplets instead of common sense.
Left or Right Should Be About Hand Usage, Not Tradition
I’m right handed, wear it on left, didn’t think about it until one training session I was coaching a lad called Baz. Left handed, wears his on the right, but it looked normal on him because it was normal on him. That’s the part people forget when they make wrist armour like some kind of etiquette. Lefties wearing it on the right aren’t doing it wrong, they’ve just applied the same logic everyone else has and flipped it for their circumstances. If your handwriting, throws, tackles, or play Rugby League with your right hand, your right hand is going to want to be watch strap free for snagging on door frames and gym equipment all day.
I found this out through experience rather than asking around. Proper wore mine on the wrong wrist for about a week back when I drunkenly bet someone I couldn’t hack it (bet details have been lost to time), and by day two I hated life every time I picked something up. To pick up the pen to write something, grab a mug, kettle, whatever there was a damn watch getting in the way. Flipped it back to left and suddenly it was like, Gone. No issues. If day one is uncomfortable, day two is infuriating.
The test isn’t “what side do men wear watches on” its “which hand do you not want to do fiddly tasks with a chunk of metal digging into it?” For most people that’s the same hand you use for writing. Left wrist became the standard because of that, not because some marketer thought it looked better on that side. If you’re left handed and have been blindly following the left wrist crowd because that’s what you thought you were supposed to do, you’ve been making life needlessly difficult for yourself for no reason at all and my advice is to stop doing that today, not another ten years out of habit.
What You Actually Do With Your Wrist Is The Part Nobody Talks About
Wearing your watch is about a hell of a lot more than which wrist it’s on though, because how you spend your day affects it more than where it sits. Been through full sessions with it on before, sprinting, throwing, catching drills; actual contact drills with my watch on and while wrist made a difference, the big thing wasn’t my left or right but if the damn thing stayed clipped during exercise. Wore a metal one once just for kicks, around twenty minutes in it worked itself over to where the face was rubbing against my wrist, basically useless at telling the time.
The fact nobody mentions is that while wearing your watch on the “correct” wrist helps, it’s not a guarantee your watch won’t let you down. Your watch being unsuitable for what you want it for has nothing to do with left vs right and everything to do with if you’re picking the right kind of watch to wear with your wrist. A leather look thats great for interviews turns to sloshing jelly if you’re moving around a lot, and that dive watch with beefy bracelet you rock to the office will still clonk against the table all day long no matter which wrist you perch it on. I once wrote up a watch poorly because it slid around too much when I was tossing it around, when frankly it wasn’t made for tossing around at all.
It was made for sitting nicely and looking stylish at dinner.
And that might not be the watches fault.
What changed how I viewed wearing watches wasn’t left vs right, it was realizing how little the wrist matters. How durable it is when you actually use your hands for things all day long is far more affected by the band, weight, and how good the clasp is than whether its lounging on your left or right. Someone watching me during a session asked me if mine was waterproof recently. Not because they cared which wrist it was on, but because they’d watched me knock it around with a muddy football all over it and were wondering if theirs would do the same. Now that’s a watch review if I’ve ever seen one. Not which wrist you wear it on.
Spend ten seconds thinking about which hand you use the most and wear it on the other wrist, that was easy. Spend more time thinking about if the watch you like is built for what you put your wrist through on a day-to-day. Because that’s the thing that’s actually going to decide if you still look at it every hour when you’re bored at your desk, or if you shove it in a drawer for having a strap that gets sweaty and gross.
