IT WAS A superb cross that landed near the penalty spot, a gift for the
unmarked centre-forward. The goal was wide open, the defenders out of place and
he was perfectly placed to take a shot with his left foot. Unfortunately, like
many football stars, a great striker with one foot isn鈥檛 always so hot with the
other. He shifted his footing so that he could use his dominant right, literally
tripped over his own feet and missed.
If Paul Morgan had his way, this would never have happened. A sports
psychologist and adviser to the Great Britain and Irish rugby league teams,
Morgan reckons that his nine-year-old daughter Natasha has better bilateral
coordination than most world-class soccer and rugby players.
Morgan鈥檚 boast is not as remarkable as it sounds. Natasha plays the piano and
does so, like all pianists, with both hands. Two-handed practice helps musicians
develop the kind of bilateral skills lacking in sport, Morgan believes. He鈥檚 now
suggesting ways to take some of the ideas from his daughter鈥檚 piano lessons to
the sports ground to find how to play on natural variations in handedness,
footedness and even dominant eyes. His plan is then to design training regimes
to compensate for any weaknesses. It opens up a whole new range of possibilities
for tactical planning and sporting strategy.
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The potential benefits of two-sided dexterity in sport are immense. In
cricket, ambidextrous fielders leave batsmen uncertain about where to steer
their shots. In rugby league, it is customary to put weaker defensive players on
the left鈥攖he opposition鈥檚 right鈥攂ecause fewer balls move this way.
And in soccer, it鈥檚 well known that forcing a player with a weak left foot onto
that side will render him ineffective.
All these considerations are taken into account in planning tactics. But it
needn鈥檛 be that way. Improving the non-dominant side of a new pupil is the
starting point for every music teacher, says Morgan. Youth sport coaches, he
says, should be doing the same. 鈥淢ost coaches do not appreciate the significance
of the relationship between lateral preference and sporting achievement,鈥� he
says.
To be fair, the relationship is far more complex than it might appear. For a
start, there are exceptions, such as David Gower, arguably the most elegant
batsman in cricket history. He bats left-handed, but does everything else
right-handed, showing that different motor skills don鈥檛 always reside in a
single brain hemisphere. But Stanley Coren, author of the book
Left-Handers, and Clare Polac, his research collaborator at the University
of British Columbia, have found some general trends which might help sportsmen
and women work to their strengths鈥攁nd work on their weaknesses.
Coren and Polac measured the dominant hands, feet and eyes of 2611 people in
15 sporting fields, and found that different combinations favoured different
sports. Being a mixed-hander or footer, equally at ease using left and right,
clearly has advantages in sports like basketball, football and rugby.
Bilaterality was also a plus in hockey or ice hockey, where the player has to
shift grip rapidly to power a shot from the right or left. But racket sports
such as tennis, squash and badminton seemed to favour strongly or consistently
handed players.
Hand-eye relationships also come into the reckoning. 鈥淐ongruent鈥� hand-eye
preference, where the dominant hand and eye are on the same side, is associated
with better performance in racket sports, Coren explains. The larger field of
vision covers the area where most of the action occurs. If a player is
cross-sided, with dominant eye and hand on opposite sides, the racket is
invisible from the dominant eye for most of its swing. Because aiming is done
with the dominant eye, any small corrections in the racket鈥檚 swing come quite
late. But people with crossed hand-eye preference seem to have better balance,
and so may be better suited to sports like gymnastics, running and
basketball.
Morgan hasn鈥檛 yet found a way to retrain dominant eyes. But he has begun to
insist that his subjects practise with their weak hand or foot. He鈥檚 developed a
training pack for teachers of 5 to 8-year-olds, listing what he calls
鈥渕ulti-firing exercises鈥� to promote sensory-motor development. It鈥檚 nothing
complicated, just a regime of simple throwing and catching using both hands,
then the right hand alone, and then the left hand alone. This is followed by
kicking or passing with the dominant and then non-dominant foot, rhythmically
touching the left knee with the right hand, then right knee with left hand, and
other such exercises.
It seems to work for musicians. A couple of years back, Lutz J盲ncke and
colleagues, then at the University of D眉sseldorf in Germany, showed that
non-musicians had the largest asymmetry or discrepancy between their hands;
string musicians a smaller asymmetry; and keyboard players, the least of all.
And the earlier the musicians had started playing, the higher their degree of
mixed-handedness.
鈥淚t seems that early manual skills training interacted with development of
hand motor dominance, leading to improved performance of the non-dominant hand,鈥�
explains Morgan. 鈥淭his is exactly the experience of youngsters like my
daughter.鈥� But the potential for improvement is not restricted to the very
young, he insists. 鈥淚f unknown amateur pianists can manage it, it should be a
doddle for 拢25,000-a-week footballers or top-class cricket and rugby
蝉迟补谤蝉.鈥�
It might sound great to have perfectly bilateral footballers and cricketers,
but does hard graft with the weaker side actually just take up time that could
be spent honing the natural talents of the dominant side? Chris McManus,
professor of psychology at University College London and former co-editor of the
journal Laterality, thinks it might.
He points out a study of chimps that shows a disadvantage of spreading the
workload between two sides. Chimps get a large proportion of their food by
鈥渇ishing鈥� from termite mounds, poking pieces of grass into the mounds which the
termites grab onto. Chimps show handedness too, although right and
left-handedness is equally common whereas around 85 per cent of people are
right-handed. William McGrew and Linda Marchant, zoologists at Miami University
in Oxford, Ohio, found that chimps that used only one hand collected 30 per cent
more termites than those using two. McManus says this backs up the idea that it
pays to specialise. 鈥淎 footballer practising with only one foot for twice as
long may produce better results than someone practising with each foot for half
as long,鈥� he suggests.
You don鈥檛 become ambidextrous if you learn to play the piano with both hands,
says McManus. 鈥淵ou don鈥檛 even get transfer of training between one skill for the
two hands and another. We鈥檝e looked at this in studies with pianists and
typists. But there are other things that are transferred鈥攎otivation,
discipline, enthusiasm and a willingness to train,鈥� he says. 鈥淚n the end I
suspect this may be all it comes down to.鈥�