Article Contents

  • 1. Safety concerns
    • 1.1. The importance of your shoes
    • 1.2. Take it slow
    • 1.3. A simple rule of thumb
  • 2. Knowing your trigger point
  • 3. Should the elbow be bent?
  • 4. Spine tilt
  • 5. Conclusion

As we continue on with this series (click here for Part 1 and Part 2), I realized that I, along with many other bowlers, sometimes take the simple subjects for granted. However, we must remind ourselves to always pay close attention to even the small nuances of our wonderful sport of bowling.

The first subject this time around will be safety. Why does our mind want to think, “Boring! I can skip this part?” If you stop and think about it, we can make mistakes with important aspects of our delivery and go on, but if we get lazy and don’t practice proper safety and then get injured, our days of bowling may be disrupted. As far as getting back to more of the common technique-based errors among intermediate-level players, we’ll also be covering the trigger point, elbow bend, and spine tilt.

Safety concerns

These next few items of safety all have the same agenda: to allow the bowler to enjoy our sport of bowling at any level for many years. Not long ago, while I was watching the evening news, there was a segment about a lady enjoying her weekly bowling league even though she is now 103 years old. Wow, that’s pretty special indeed. You can bet that her enjoyment and her safety go hand-in-hand.

The importance of your shoes

A proper slide at the release point helps reduce the chance of injury to the knees. Do some test slides, and use proper shoes. Shoes with the ability to adjust the slide soles can be a huge benefit to help reduce knee injuries and add to a consistent ball motion. Investing in good shoes is especially important and does play a big role in your ability to execute a consistent slide and release of the ball.

Another tip: keep your slide foot pointed down the lane to reduce the chance of injury to the slide leg knee. The ...

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Carl Nichols

About Carl Nichols

Carl Nichols is a USBC Silver coach, PBA member, and IBPSIA member. He has over 40 years of combined experience as a coach and pro shop operator, including over 25 years of collegiate coaching. His interests include sports psychology, kinesiology, biomechanics, and ball motion mechanics. Outside of bowling, Carl enjoys boating, diving, flying, golf, and exploring the beautiful Pacific Northwest.