The mechanics of a good arm swing

Don’t go to the dark side!

There is a dark side to all this voo doo, however. If you mistime any of the things mentioned earlier in this post, at best you will end up achieving exactly the opposite effect you were after, at worst, you could cause yourself some serious injury.

Cocking your wrist puts more pressure and strain on your wrist. If you mistime the rotation, or forget to uncock your wrist after you rotate through the ball, all that pressure will put stress on your wrist which greatly increases the chances of straining your wrist, or even breaking it I suspect.

If you mistime the release as you straighten your arm, you run a real risk of over-extending your elbow joint. This is something I did recently and believe me, its not pleasant. Much pain will accompany this over-extension not to mention the fact that bowling is very difficult with a damaged arm.

If you can get all of this down pat, you will no doubt see all the benefits that come with it. More accuracy, more power, more strikes, more fun. If you are considering attmpting to learn any of this, I would strongly suggest learning each piece one at a time.  The way I learned it (and I’m still in the process of perfecting all of this) was by starting with uncocking my wrist at release, then adding the wrist rotation (working the inside of the ball), then adding the bent elbow.  I’ve noticed that while I have achieved more power, I tend to leave a lot of solid 9 pins (might be a side effect of a 15 lb ball) and I leave big splits if I miss any component of this whole chain. Another oddity is tend to let the ball go just a little bit late, which increases the odds of tracking over the thumb hole.

I’m still working on all of this, but I believe that the effort will be worth it once I perfect the timing. We all want more revolutions and power at the pins. Now, I don’t want to be one of those bowlers who can only bowl the extreme inside line, but I am happy to bowl from about the middle of the lane, giving me options to move either way as the lanes transition. More options = more ways to win.  Yay!