How do you train for Bowling?
One of the most important aspects of bowling is concentration. Without concentration, you won’t be able to improve any other skills and techniques. To become a great bowler, you need to concentrate under pressure. To do this, you need to have distractions while you’re bowling to try and put you off. After a period of practice, you will block out these distractions therefore, improving your concentration. Another way, is the pick an aspect you want to improve on your game when you go to practice. Concentrate precisely on improving that element and if you do improve, then you have improved your concentration as well as the aspect you were working on.
Another important aspect of bowling is strength. Strength helps generate speed and power onto your bowls. To train for this you can simply go to the gym. The main areas you should improve on is arms and legs for power, and core for balance. There are many different exercises that improve these parts of the body for example; split squats, goblet squats, lateral band walks, deadlines, pull ups, bicep curls, triceps contractions and sit ups. Building muscle also minimises the risk of injury and fatigue.
Balance and hand eye coordination go hand in hand for bowling. Hand eye coordination is needed because it helps you stay accurate when bowling. Your eyes will be looking at the target and your hands need to follow the direction you are looking at. Hand eye coordination helps improve concentration as well because a lot of focus is needed to perfect this. There are many activities that help improve hand eye coordination. Some of them are; swimming, juggling, throwing and catching a ball, video games and darts. A specific practice for bowling could be aiming for a certain pin to directly hit with the ball. This will help improve your hand eye coordination which results in improving accuracy and concentration. Balance is interlinked with hand eye coordination because you need good coordination to be able to Balance well. Balance is needed to make sure that your body stays at the centre of gravity so that you can throw the ball accurately. If you have a wavering in your stance, then the trajectory of your throw will be changed making the ball go off target. Without good balance, you won’t be able to improve your technique. To improve Balance, you can do many exercises for example, a one-legged stand, heel to toe walk, yoga and walking across a balance beam.
Lastly, to train for Bowling you can simply just practice more often. Try out different techniques and bowling balls to see if you prefer an alternative style. You may find a style that suits you more than your old one. You set up many practices that help improve different aspects of the game. You could aim to hit one certain pin to improve accuracy, take longer run ups to improve speed and rotate your hand different degrees to improve hook.
How do I make my bowling arm stronger?
Improving your strength in your bowling arm allows you to generate more power. This power creates speed and make the ball have a bigger impact when hitting to pins. The recommended speed for the ball to hit the pins at is 17-18mph. This means you need to release the ball at 20-22mph. To get up to this speed you need to strength your bowling arm.
One way to strengthen your bowling arm is to do stretches. Stretches help improve flexibility and reduce injury when bowling. More flexibility allows you to swing your arm further back to generate a better gravity pull down on the ball. This allows the ball to get more speed before you release it. Some stretches that you can try out to improve your flexibility and strength is; arm circles, wrist flexion and extension, cross stretches and overhead stretch. These stretches will reduce arm injuries allowing you to practice more often and improve your technique and strength. You should stretch every day for around ten minutes and especially before and after bowling.
Another way to strengthen your bowling arm is to use bodyweight or gym weights. Making your arm muscles bigger and stronger will also allow you to generate more power on your swing which will generate more speed onto the ball. It also, reduce the changes of injury because your arm will be able to undergo more stress for longer. There are hundreds of exercises you can do to improve arm strength. Some of the most effective exercises are; push ups, bicep curls, tricep dips, punches, side plank and lateral raise. These exercises will improve strength in your arms allowing you to bowl with heavier balls and or, bowl faster.
How do I train for Bowling at home?
One way to train bowling at home is to do body weight exercises. This will improve your strength. Strength is needed in bowling to generate power and speed onto the ball. There are many exercises you can use for different parts of the body. For your arms you can do; push ups, up and down plank, crap crawl, tricep push ups, inch worms and tricep dips. To Improve strength in your legs you can do; jumping lunges, single leg deadlift, squats, box jump and squat jumps. For your core you can do; a plank, sit ups, side plank, V-ups, leg raises, plank shoulder taps and oblique reaches.
To train bowling at home you can get ten plastic bottles and fill them up with some water. Use a cricket ball to bowl at the bottles and try to knock them down. This allows you to practise at home on a smaller scale. You can also use one bottle if you want to improve accuracy even more. If you have a bowling ball at home, you can always use that and fill the bottles with something heavier like sand to make the game as realistic as you can. Another practice you can do at home is bowling to ball into a coned area. This will improve your accuracy as well as your speed monitoring. Speed monitoring is important because the speed of your bowls has to be changed depending on what lane you are playing on.
There are also many practices you can do at home without using an equipment. You can also practice your run up at home. Give yourself the equivalent distance you would have at a bowling alley and try to improve your run up. You may want to incorporate more steps into your run up as well as improving your speed of the run up. If you have a ball, you can do the exercise while holding it to replicate your swing as well. Balance can also be improved at home by doing, one-legged stands, yoga, hopping on one foot and a heel to toe walk. To challenge yourself, instead of looking at a still object while balancing, look at a moving or spinning object. This will help improve your concentration and balance.
