Starting From the Ground Up – Part 3

The term hand-eye coordination is defined as “the ability to coordinate vision with fine motor skills.” Since bowling is a precision sport, everything a bowler does is to promote successfully knocking down pins by coordinating movements to direct the ball toward a target, or more accurately, along a target path. With the big muscle groupings out of the way in this series in the May and June issues of Bowling This Month, the next areas we want to talk about are the hands and arms. Yes, both hands and both arms.

You don’t need to be a two-handed bowler to be concerned with using both arms and hands effectively. Effective ball motion stems from using the bowling arm and the non-bowling arm correctly. This is definitely a different issue for two-handed bowlers, as they are using their “non-bowling arm” in a totally different way, since both hands are essential
to that delivery.

The non-bowling arm

There’s not much to talk about here, is there? After all, it’s really just used for balance, right? Wrong. The left arm, upper torso, and right arm can and should form part of a continuous and connected system for delivering the ball with the most efficiency. That means you need to use your non-bowling arm for more than just balance.

How to best use your non-bowling arm has evolved over time and can vary from coach to coach. For today’s modern power game, the ideal position of the non-bowling arm is very different from what has traditionally been taught.

Previously, having your non bowling arm come away from the ball very early in the swing and using it for balance by keeping it straight out to the side, particularly at the release, was ideal. For strokers and especially for bowlers with very low backswings, this can work. The issue here is that for bowlers trying to get a higher backswing, this type of use ...

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