Originally Posted by
rocdoc
Handedness/dominance applies to lower extremities and to most activities. Ambipedalism (love the term, plan to steal it) can no doubt be trained, if you really feel it's a worthwhile skill, I guess. Your preference is likely a manifestation of your dominant side. I'm curious, are you right handed?
Oh yeah - I'm strongly dominantly right-handed. But somehow I learned to shoot pool left handed (didn't even realize I was doing it until someone pointed it out to me) - and I've taught myself to do some things left handed like baseball batting as a kid (we handicapped ourselves to adjust for the small back yard). But if I try writing left-handed it would be clumsy and barely legible.
That's what it felt like descending with my right forward - it was really surprising how clumsy it felt and how hard it was to learn. I found an MTB forum where a guy said it took him a year and a half (!) to train himself to be comfortable doing it... maybe more useful in MTB'ing.
And as someone who loves words and language, I'll note that ambipedalism just means "both feet" - and ambidexterous means "both right" so it would probably be more descriptive to say pedi-ambidexterous or something.