Can You Really Become Ambidextrous? An Honest Answer

The short answer

Yes, you can train your non-dominant hand to a genuinely useful level of skill. What you cannot do is rewire which hand your brain treats as dominant, and you will not wake up one day equally good at everything with both hands. Trained ambidexterity is task-specific: you get what you practise, and only what you practise.

That is a less exciting answer than most pages on this topic will give you. It is also the reason the whole thing works — once you stop chasing a total transformation and start training specific skills, the progress becomes measurable.

Born ambidextrous is not the same as becoming ambidextrous

Two very different things get filed under the same word, and separating them clears up most of the confusion.

Innate ambidexterity — equal, spontaneous skill at essentially everything — is vanishingly rare. The largest meta-analysis of handedness, covering hundreds of studies, puts left-handedness at around 10.6% and mixed-handedness at about 9.3%[1]. True ambidexterity, strictly defined, sits far below that — most estimates land somewhere under 1%, and some laterality researchers put it nearer one in a thousand.

Trained ambidexterity is what you are actually asking about, and it is a completely different proposition. It is a motor skill, like playing an instrument or learning to type. Nobody is born able to touch-type. That does not make typing impossible.

So when you ask "can I become ambidextrous", the honest translation is: can I build real competence in my other hand on the tasks I care about? And that answer is an unambiguous yes.

What the research actually supports

I want to be careful here, because this is exactly where most articles on ambidexterity start overselling.

What is well established is that the non-dominant hand improves substantially with practice, and that some of that improvement arrives free. Train a movement with one hand and the untrained hand on the other side gets measurably better at it too — an effect called intermanual transfer, documented across decades of motor-learning research[2]. Your brain is not storing the skill purely in one arm; a good part of it is stored abstractly, and both hands can draw on it.

Brain imaging backs this up. In one study, participants trained a sequential hand task five days a week for two weeks; the pattern of brain activity shifted over that period from effortful, explicit motor control toward the deeper circuits that handle automatic, procedural movement[3]. That is what "it started feeling natural" looks like from the outside.

What is not established is that any of this makes you smarter. There is no good evidence that training ambidexterity raises general cognitive ability, and I would be suspicious of anyone who tells you otherwise. I have written about that claim in detail elsewhere, because it deserves taking apart properly rather than repeating.

There is also a genuine asymmetry worth knowing: your two hands are specialised, not interchangeable. Research on interlimb control suggests the dominant hand is better tuned for trajectory — smooth, accurate movement through space — while the non-dominant hand is better at stabilising and holding a final position[2]. They are not two copies of the same tool. They are a specialist pair, and training narrows the gap without erasing the division of labour.

Even the order you practise in seems to matter. In one study of throwing skills, people who practised an accuracy-based throw with their non-dominant hand first went on to learn it better than those who started with their dominant hand — while for a power-based throw, the opposite was true[4]. Precision tasks appear to benefit from starting on the weaker side.

How long does it actually take

This is the question behind the question, so here is a straight answer based on my own training and on what the motor-learning literature would predict.

Two caveats I want to be honest about. These ranges are indicative, not guaranteed — individual variation in motor learning is large, and nobody has run a controlled study on adults deliberately training ambidexterity over a year. And the ranges assume consistency: fifteen minutes daily beats three hours on a Sunday, by a wide margin.

Ambidextrous at what, exactly

The single most useful reframe I can offer: stop asking whether you are ambidextrous, and start asking which tasks you are ambidextrous at.

I can write legibly with either hand. I can brush my teeth, use a mouse and eat without thinking about it. I am still noticeably worse left-handed at anything requiring fast, fine precision, and I expect I always will be.

That is not a failure of the training. That is what the training produces. Skill transfers somewhat between related movements and barely at all between unrelated ones, so the shape of your ambidexterity ends up mirroring the shape of your practice.

Which makes the first practical step obvious: find out where you are actually starting from. The ambidextrous test takes a couple of minutes and gives you a baseline to measure against — and a baseline matters more than you would think, because progress in this is slow enough to be invisible without one.

Who finds it easier

Some people have a head start, and it is worth knowing whether you are one of them.

Left-handers almost always do. Living in a right-handed world means a lifetime of forced practice — scissors, desks, tin openers — so most left-handers arrive with a more capable non-dominant hand than they realise.

Mixed-handed people — the roughly 9% who already write with one hand and throw with the other[1] — are effectively partway there.

Musicians, gamers, touch typists and surgeons have all trained bilateral coordination for years without calling it that.

Age matters less than the internet suggests. Motor learning genuinely does slow with age, but adult neuroplasticity is real and the ceiling for a task like handwriting is nowhere near as low as people assume. I started as an adult. The main disadvantage of starting later is not your brain — it is that you have had more decades to build the habit of reaching with the same hand every single time.

The part nobody mentions

There is a cost, and it is not the one people expect.

It is not difficulty. The movements are simple. It is that progress is genuinely slow and almost entirely invisible day to day. You will practise for three weeks and feel that nothing has changed, because the change between Tuesday and Wednesday is below the threshold of what you can notice.

You will also plateau. Somewhere around month two, improvement flattens out and stays flat for a while — this is normal in motor learning, and it is the second place people quit.

The two things that solve both problems are a written baseline you can compare against, and a structure that tells you what to do on the days you cannot be bothered to decide.

Have you tried training your other hand? Tell me in the comments how far you got, and where you got stuck — I am genuinely curious whether the plateau hits other people at the same point.

If you want the structured version

Everything above is the honest answer to "is this possible". The separate question — how — is the one I spent a couple of years working out for myself, mostly by getting it wrong first.

If you want the method, I have written two things that will help. There is my guide on how to become ambidextrous, which covers the approach, and a practical collection of exercises to become ambidextrous if you would rather just start moving.

And in my book "How to Become Ambidextrous" I have put the whole thing in order: a proper baseline assessment, graded exercises for writing, drawing and coordination, and a day-by-day programme built around exactly the timeline above — including what to do during the plateau, which is the part that actually decides whether you finish.

It is the book I wanted when I started, and could not find.

Get it on Amazon and give yourself a real plan!