Question to watch wearers.

[TPMB12]

I'm curious about something that can only be answered by people who regularly wear watches as part of their routine.

Do you have a smaller wrist on the arm you wear the watch on? Assuming you're a creature of habit like me you'll probably wear your watch on the same wrist every day. That's what I've done for 30 years and my watch wrist is one or two watch strap holes smaller on my watch wrist. Is this normal?

BTW I wear it on my non dominant wrist so it's weaker slightly anyway. This could be the watch or the fact my other wrist is bigger because I do more with it. I'm just curious because a sprain or something in the forearm near the wrist on my watch arm is causing me to notice it more.

[rafletcher]

Slightly, but again it's my non-dom wrist.

[Little Jim]

Just about exactly the same on both wrists, but I do wear my watch on my dominant wrist.

And I never realised just how hard it is to put your watch onto the other wrist!

[De Sisti]

,,,but I do wear my watch on my dominant wrist.

And I never realised just how hard it is to put your watch onto the other wrist!

Try using a deployment clasp on your watchstrap.

[Greenbank]

Comfy on left wrist (I'm right handed) and there's 9 holes left in the strap (they're quite close together).

Comfy on right wrist and there's 6 holes left in the strap.

3 holes in the strap equals 14mm.

But there's often a bit of variation even during the course of a single day and I have to adjust it. I guess this is all to do with fluid hydration and time spend lying down compared to standing, etc.

There's a noticable indent on my left wrist where the watch strap goes.

I wear my watch (Garmin Forerunner 935) all the time (including during sleep) as it does 24h HR monitoring.

[Wobbly John]

I wear a watch on my left wrist. My right wrist is visibly bigger, mainly due to smashing the bones in a motor cycle accident.

[TPMB12]

I've always worn a watch during the day only. I never wear it at night unless I have to and then I put it on the other wrist to give my left wrist a break.

Now I wear a tracker on my dominant, right hand but have only just stopped wearing the normal watch as well on my left wrist.

Exercise, especially cycling on an upright, increases my wrist size as does sleeping. However it's the same amount for both wrists so the difference between wrists is constant.

[Kim]

I haven't worn a watch since I developed nickel dermatitis at around the point where mortals could afford Nokia 6210s, but my wrists do appear to be the same size.  (And my hands have about the same strength if the physioterrorist's grip-o-meter is to be believed.)

Barakta (who has no radius in her left arm) looked at this thread and giggled.

[Basil]

I just tried this.
I wear a watch on my non dom wrist. Always. All day. Never at night.
Putting it onto my dom wrist was quite difficult.  Having to use my non dom hand to do the buckle and lack of practice made me quite fumbley.
Result.  Same buckle strap hole, but felt much tighter.
So only a very small difference.

[ian]

You may expect me to make a masturbation joke here, but I'm not, so there. But if you've imagined it, my work is done.

At my school, it was claimed as playground lore that if – as a boy – you wore a watch on your left wrist, you were gay. That said, I suspect on any late 80s school playground, any perceptibly errant behaviour was labelled as gay. I had 'gay handwriting*' (these day's its 'girl's handwriting', we're a lot more inclusive). We didn't have actual lesbians though, they just lived on VHS, so I'm not sure about if the watch phenomenon says anything about their sexuality. Well, they were never wearing a watch in the videos.

*because I flamboyantly print each letter. In infant school I was punished for refusing to join up my letters by having to write I must join up my letters one hundred times which I did, carefully printing each line. A formative case of teacher exasperation that continued through my educational career. My mum claims I used to a be a sinister who changed teams but I've no recollection of this fact, so I'm not convinced.

[phantasmagoriana]

I wear mine on my non-dom wrist (all the time - it's a Garmin that does HR monitoring). Fits on the other wrist with no adjustments to strap length, though it feels a bit tighter.

[LEE]

Peter O'Toole wore a watch on both wrists so, "...I don't waste time looking at the wrong wrist my dear fellow".

But then again he was a legend.

[hellymedic]

I wore a watch on my left wrist for decades and it was thinner then.

It's filled out a bit since I stopped wearing a watch but I am thinner overall.

I think the strap pressure reduces the subcutaneous fat beneath it.

I think my specs have given me grooves on my head, behind the ears...

[Kim]

I think my specs have given me grooves on my head, behind the ears...

Barakta has a groove in her head from wearing a bone conduction hearing aid on a (necessarily quite tight) Alice-band as a child.

[Samuel D]

I have unusually thin wrists for a man if not a cyclist and my watch wrist – the left – is indeed fractionally smaller. I doubt this has anything to do with the watch. There’s next to no fat on either wrist and consequently I cannot tolerate the strap being anywhere near tight enough to leave marks. Therefore the strap has always been loose.

[T42]

Rings are worse.  One of the ways they know that ancient skeletons belonged to the rich is that the finger-bones are deeply grooved from the rings they wore.

[mrcharly-YHT]

I wear a sports watch some of the time. It gets irritating where it presses on a bone graft, so I tried it on the other wrist. 4 hole difference in the strap position.

[ian]

I once swapped my wedding ring to see if would reverse nuptial polarity. It didn't, but it took a lot of lubricant to remove from the wrong hand. To be fair, when you've been married this long the only lubricants you have in the house are for bicycles and spreading on bread. Anyway, it took some work. Looking at my hand now, the ring finger is a lot thinner. So I guess if you want lose some waist lard, it's best to squeeze into an undersize platinum hula hoop and wear it for the next thirteen years.

I'm not trying my watch on the other wrist just in case playground lore is true. It's too late to be gay now. Plus I'd have to move to Brighton and stuff.

[hellymedic]

[OT] I think my male heterosexual Continental relatives wear a wedding band on their right hand.

[Kim]

In my playground, it was earring sides that made you gay ("right ear, right queer").  Watch side was an indicator of left-handedness, with some sort of inconsistent generational side-reversal in the early digital era.

That said, chunky analogue watches on women are up there with carabiners and rainbow Venus symbol jewellery.  I'm not sure that there's a male equivalent.

[Torslanda]

I think my specs have given me grooves on my head, behind the ears...

I just checked!

[ian]

In my playground, it was earring sides that made you gay ("right ear, right queer").  Watch side was an indicator of left-handedness, with some sort of inconsistent generational side-reversal in the early digital era.

That said, chunky analogue watches on women are up there with carabiners and rainbow Venus symbol jewellery.  I'm not sure that there's a male equivalent.

There were fewer earrings back then, watches were a given, but I suspect the same theory would rule. As a boy, pretty much anything could declare your inalienable gayness to the rest of the school. The 80s playground frankly rang with the sound of boys yelling 'gay', 'bender' and 'joey' at each other. Girls, on the other hand, would engage in a quieter campaign of the thorough and methodological psychological destruction of their peers. Kitten abusing Nazis have nothing on the pure unalloyed evil of the average schoolchild. I had both 'gay handwriting' and was (despite not actually being) a 'gyppo.' It's wasn't exactly a hotbed of sophistication and Parker-esque aphorisms.

[Tim Hall]

Is the "non dom" wrist the one that doesn't pay income tax?

[chrisbainbridge]

My experience is that the wrist ratio (depth/width at distal wrist crease) varies quite a lot between the two sides.

[hellymedic]

My left (non-dominant) wrist looks thinner than my right.

It is both narrower and more shallow.

The MS has affected my right hand considerably more than my left, so I type with my left hand but can't really do scissors and knives with it.