Learning diabolo, if you are left handed, may be a challenge, as most of the tutorials or explanations you can find (including the ones on this website) are done for righties. However, once you get used to “translating” the tutorials (replacing right with left and left with right), your leftiness is a great asset for diabolo juggling, use the power of your right hemisphere !
- independant and creative mind : this will help you develop your own style and your own tricks
- better, faster hand-eye coordination : so the time you lose translating tutorials for your side dominance, you will make up for by learning and mastering tricks quicker
- better spatial abilities : that means that you better understand and remember the spatial relations between objects. You will understand diabolo (as a discipline) better which will help with both learning and creating.
Why does hand dominance matter ?
Diabolo is a spinning toy, it needs speed (a lot of it, in one direction) to be steady enough to do tricks with.
The majority of diabolo tricks are harder or downright impossible if performed on the “wrong” side, for example if you spin your diabolo like a righty, you will find it nearly impossible to do the 2 diabolo shuffle the left handed way. This has to do with the friction of the string slowing down your diabolo if pulled against the spin.
A lot of tricks give spin to the diabolo, if done in accordance to the way you give speed. They are easier to learn as the diabolo doesn’t lose its stability. These type of tricks can theoretically be done forever without stopping, like the infinite suicide or orbits. But if you try to do one such trick the other way around, your diabolo will lose speed, stability and you will have to stop sooner to accelerate the diabolo again.
For more information about diabolo inertia and angular momentum, you can read The Aerodynamics of a Diabolo by Darren Jia.
Should you learn diabolo the right handed way ?
NO! Don’t force yourself to juggle your diabolo like a righty. Use your strong side.
Retraining left handers to write with their right hand is now proven to be harmful. There haven’t been any studies for diabolo juggling but we can assume that it is the same and it will make your progression slower at best and have significant long-term side effects at worst.
You would think that it would be easier to blindly follow tutorials for right handers. However, the little effort required to translate the tutorials for your side dominance is way easier than to retrain your brain (especially if you use your strong side for everyday tasks like writing or brushing your teeth).
Don’t torture yourself, and mirror the video tutorials you find, and switch right for left and left for right in the explanations. And if you use a bearing diabolo, keep the black hub away from you instead of close to you.
Also, as in any art form or sport, being left handed helps. You use the right part of your brain which helps with creativity, hand-eye coordination and spatial awareness, to name a few.
If you force yourself to learn the right handed way, you will basically shut down your right hemisphere. Don’t go without the abilities it naturally gives you.
Leftynspiration
Here are some left handers with mad skills. They prove that leftiness is awesomeness !
They are the ones that came to my mind immediately but this list is far from exhaustive :
- Arjan
- Susannah
- Vux from The Mad French Posse (didn’t find a video on the internet, but you can see his skills on the DVD Diabology which I highly recommend)
- Koshiro Irie
For more on how to improve at diabolo, you can read this article.
