Making the Most of Your Practice

Back in 2015, the PBA’s Xtra Frame asked various professional bowlers about their practice habits. While some made light of the question initially, we can see from the answers that most elite pros tend to increase their practice sessions in preparation for a tournament, but they also spoke to the need for downtime, since bowling is their profession. So, where does that leave you, the league bowler? Should you practice? How often? What exactly does “practice” even mean? How should you practice?

To get started, our friend Google provides us with an excellent working definition of practice: to “perform (an activity) or exercise (a skill) repeatedly or regularly in order to improve or maintain one’s proficiency.”

As we know, bowling is a sport of repetition and consistency, so this definition is aptly suited. There are several crucial points to highlight in this definition, once we accept it as true: first, that practice is necessary to “improve or maintain one’s proficiency” and second, that practice cannot be a one-time deal, that it must occur “repeatedly or regularly.”

If you are reading this article, I do not need to convince you that bowling requires skill. What I would like to point out, however, is that skill is a matter of perspective. If you bowl one mixed or fun league and have one of the higher averages, do you feel the need to practice to maintain that average? If you bowl several leagues of the more competitive sort, are you content with your skills, or are there aspects of your game that clearly need work? And if you bowl tournaments, especially if they are held on anything other than house shot patterns, ...

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