One-Step and Slide Drill

Throughout the approach, the lower body drives the swing, and the upper body comes along for the ride. Hi, I'm Leah Zahner, a contributor with National Bowling Academy. In this premium video, Gold Coach Mike Diaz modifies the traditional one-step drill by adding a slide. You'll see before and after comparisons that will energize you to add this drill to your training sessions. Okay, so here, here we see, here we see John in the first example, and John tends to get a little forward, use a lot of upper body, and that causes him to pull a lot of shots and get a lot of shots offline in the front part of the swing.

So now we're gonna go through a couple of drills and see how that changes his swing. In this first drill I have John hang the ball to his side. He's gonna just gently, very gently bump the ball forward, let the ball fall back on it's own weight from gravity and then as the ball stops going back he's going to go into a slide, and I'm emphasizing very strongly to John, all lower body. It is absolutely no upper body in the swing. You can see it really changes how his swing looks from the start.

Because we're so focused on the lower body we're just gonna let the ball literally drop down to his side, no effort to create any back swing. Just however far it goes back and then again, heavy heavy emphasis on all lower body no upper body muscle whatsoever. And you can see he's starting to get feel for it now. So now we go to full approaches. And we can see a dramatic difference in his swing.

There's a lot more freedom in his swing. Gravity's feeding the swing. His lower body is moving a little faster, it's driving ball speed. You can see at the top of his swing, his elbow still bends which is really not a bad thing. But he's more relaxed coming down.

It unloads a lot better and he feeds the ball into the lane in a much more repeatable way and we saw a lot fewer pulled shots at the end.