Troubleshooting Finger Pain

Like any sport, bowling can sometimes hurt a little, but it shouldn’t hurt your hand—especially when you get out of bed the next morning.

You know that feeling when your pro shop guru hands you a new ball for the first time, and you slide your fingers and thumb in and feel all tingly from head to toe? It’s that moment when you and the ball become one, like you were destined for one another. That feeling should still be there after league, but too many times it isn’t. Bowling shouldn’t hurt!

In Troubleshooting and Fixing Thumb Exit Problems, Coach Tyrel Rose goes into great detail about one of the hardest variables for a traditional one-handed player to deal with: clearing the thumb hole. Getting your thumb out smoothly every single shot, with little to no squeeze, at the proper zeptosecond (trillionth of a billionth of a second) is, well, almost impossible. If it weren’t, we would all average just a little bit higher.

But what happens after our thumb exits the bowling ball? This is where all the fun stuff happens: revolutions and rotation. Nothing in life is more gratifying than the feeling of a shot rolling off the pads of your fingers and just knowing that no amount of oil can keep that ball from screaming back and shredding the rack. Unfortunately, this feeling doesn’t come as often as it should because too many bowlers are dealing with finger-related issues. Things like burn marks, torn calluses, hangnails, bruises, blood blisters, etc. These are injuries that simply should not happen with a proper fit.

The good news is that a majority of the time, these are things that are extremely easy to fix. Most of the fixes will require the assistance of your pro shop operator, so be sure to tip them well!

The role your fingers play

Before we dive into pain issues and how to fix them, let’s talk a little bit more about the role of the fingers throughout the delivery. From the time we pick up the ball off the return (always ...

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