I'm hearing people say that "that's impossible" or "it's weird", but I've used this method for ~2 years now. It has become muscle memory.
I put a little pad over the Ctrl Keys to press it easily with muy palm.
That way you can press Control or Alt/Meta (or both at the same time) with the thumb of either hand without a lot of movement. C-f and C-b can be done with either left hand only, or left hand for f/b and right thumb on Control (what used to be Alt, on PC keyboards). Rebinding Caps Lock to Backspace also saves a lot of hand movement. Only a handful of small changes and you get a much better keyboard layout.
Looking at the keys below maybe it was for up/down.
I do. With emacs, you usually have a finger near the Ctrl key at all times anyway, so hitting f or b is much more convenient than moving my right hand over to the arrow keys.
I meant to include it in my original post but I can't edit it now.
However as a Vim user (mostly motivated by the fact that I can move around pressing single keys which I find more "wrist-ergonomic" - potential fast navigation is a nice plus), I always wonder how heavy emacs users deal with CTRL-acrobatics and movement - do you use c-f/c-b for going forward/backward or the usual cursor keys?
For vi users it makes sense to set $readline (~/.inputrc) to vi-style, so for completion here the vi-style bindings (although probably obvious if you used to Vim).
Deleting works as usual with `d` combinations. Furthermore it is convenient to search the history via `/`.