Improving Your Bowling Through Self-Reflection

Once a tournament is finished, do you take the time to think about your performance? Not the result, but your performance? Taking the time to reflect on how you executed, your mental game, and your lane play choices can be very helpful. You can improve your bowling game by:

• evaluating what went well so you can repeat it, and;
• evaluating what needs improvement so you can have a purpose to your training.

Depending on the event, I personally take anywhere from five minutes for a small local tournament to a few days for a PWBA major to reflect on my performance. Over the course of this article, I’ll discuss the general principles of doing a reflection (also called a self-debrief) exercise, and review my experience at the 2021 US Women’s Open (USWO) as an example of how to apply these elements.

Objective review

First, there is a lot of value in dividing up your reflection/self-debrief into two categories: objective and subjective measures.

The objective review includes things you can track numerically. It’s not about interpretation. Here is what I track: strike percentage, spare conversions (single-pin and multi-pin), and number of splits. I personally use the PinPal app to track my frames and games, but there are several other apps out there that can do the same thing.

Here’s an example of a table showing this information from my 2021 USWO, which we’ll take a closer look at later in the article.

Day	Strike %	Single-Pins	Multi-Pins	Splits	Average
1	50%	24/24	10/12	1/6	205.5
2	36%	30/31	10/16	1/8	188.1
3	55%	23/24	8/8	0/7	219.0
4.1	34%	24/25	12/18	1/12	179
4.2	53%	20/20	6/9	0/9	213.5
5.1	62%	14/15	5/5	3/11	220.4
5.2	50%	13/14	11/15	2/14	188.8

(Note that 4.1 represents day 4, block 1; 4.2 is day 4, block 2; etc.)

Subjective reflection

It is important to evaluate not only the objective measures mentioned above, but also the subjective measures since a high percentage of our performance is predicated on our mindset, thought process, and ...