Bowling Practice with Purpose: Developing a Plan

Hi, I'm Richard Shockley, USB-C gold level coach in charge of bowler development for the Bowlersmart company. Today, we want to talk about practice. You know this is a very important thing that we have to do to improve. Many ways that you want to go out and practice. You know, it's something that Dan, my students really, really focus on practicing different techniques, what they want to do, or if they practice from lesson to lesson, between lessons. So, you know, over the years, a lot of my students go through the plan of using a worksheet to mark off what their practices are. I know that you are a coach that has a high school bowling team with your girls. Do you have a similar plan that you have for your team practice? You know what we do coach? And when we do our team practice we're kind of limited on time a little bit. So after my girls ,everybody's getting loose, I want them to be loose first, so they can make sure that then they're ready to bowl, they can execute a shot. So once they're loose, we go right into spare shooting and that's part of their practices that they need to do a minimum, again 'cause we're limited on time, half the game throwing at four sevens, and they'll throw half a game at six 10s. And that's part of that to make sure because spares are so important in our game that we spend more time on spare shooting than we do actually trying to throw strikes. Well you know how important spare shooting is. And a lot of times bowlers will come out without a plan and they want to keep score. They want to play one part of the lane and see what their number looks like. A lot of students that I have, we want to go out and play different parts of the lane. And of course use different bowling balls to attack the patterns. All the time that I've seen too many bowlers go out and do that process. And I really think that you need to play in different areas of the lane, different pieces of equipment. You know, and they do. One of the things that we need to make sure is that when we're gonna go do this, is to say we want to play first arrow. And that's gonna be our focus. We can take multiple bowling balls and throw at first arrow, you know, and before we go into second or third or anything else. You really want, if you're gonna practice you wanna focus on maybe one or two things. We don't wanna get into doing four or five things when we're trying to practice. Yeah, you want to isolate the certain technique, what you're looking for. It is important to just go out and practice with a purpose. Have a plan that you want to go out there and see. Just like in any other sports, golfers go out and practice a lot on their driving range. Every sport has to put that practice plan in place but I really really want to focus on practicing really at the right pace, the right part of the lane. I've always said that if you don't practice how are you going to get better? How much time do you put in to get game to another level? Correct. And you do. And you know, the amount of time you put in, it's like anything else, you get out of it, what you put into it. And we want to make sure, like you said before you're gonna practice with a purpose because it is so important to make sure that you have that repeatability on your spare shots or on your strike shots, or playing different parts of the lane with different equipment. But if we can repeat it, we're gonna have a lot better success. Right. You know, a lot of the professional bowlers over the years when I was with Kegel, we would talk to the pros about how do they practice? You know and a lot of great players, They made coach, I got out and practice about 10 or 15 minutes, because I need to work on one isolated thing. They want them on tour. I'm having trouble with. So I don't have to work through a lot of different things. They may be the release. It may be the tempo or the timing or whatever they focus on in their practice sessions. You get out of it, what you put into it. You're right. And that's where we go back to only working on one, maybe two things when you are practicing. Right. So I really think that if you follow your plan, go out with a practice plan of your purpose, you're gonna take your game to another level. Put in the time, watch what you're doing, pay attention to everything you've gotta do for a good practice plan.