Want More Hook on Your Bowling Ball? Do This!

Alright everyone, welcome back to the channel and today we're going to talk about maximizing your hook and your bowling game standing left if you're a right-hander or standing right if you're a left-hander and shaping that entire lane. Now this is something that I think everyone wants to be able to hook the ball more so let's give them some tips Daniel. If someone comes to you and says hey I want to learn how to get more shape on the lane where do you advise them? Well the first thing we have to do is make sure that we have a little bit more control on slowing down the ball allowing it to hook give it time. The majority of our amateur bowlers throw the ball a little on the harder side and with less revs than you so having that big shape on the lane becomes difficult to do right and trying to incorporate that or trying to do that while having that higher speed lower rev rate potentially becomes difficult. So the first tip I give people is grab a bowling ball go to the foul line and literally don't do a no-step throw and allow the bowling ball to go all the way to the right gutter back all the way left maybe even to the seven pin just watch that shape being created. Okay you want to try it? Yeah grab a ball. Alright so we go to the foul line here you're going to put your left foot forward right foot back right about the on top of left gutter. Okay. Yep and you're just going to give it one swing and let it go and try to make it hook right at board one. So I'm just watching it go all the way out there and all the way back okay we're not trying to we're trying to throw it slow here right we're we're just trying to shape it. Yeah you're doing whatever you can to just shape it as much as try to hook the entire lane. Gotcha. Let's do another one. Okay this time try to get it all the way to board one even if you fall on the gutter. All we're going to do is laugh anyway. Try to get it all the way to board one and have it hook from board one all the way to the seven pin. Seven pin okay. Left foot forward right foot back. For me this means I just got to get my hand. I got to throw it slow and get my hand around it. There you go. Oh I did that that was terrible. That's going to be on the left gutter. I like spun that one. Yeah but you're starting to see how you are now creating that shape. Right. So from there I'd like to recommend let's do a one step throw. Okay. To where on a one step you let the ball swing first when the ball gets to the top of the swing then you step and throw. Okay. When you're doing this at your bowling center and you're doing the one step drills you really don't want to work too hard at making sure you reach your normal swing height because in this case it doesn't matter if you reach your normal swing height or not we're not working on that. Right. We're working on throwing the ball slow and just shaping the whole length. Okay. So same idea we're just adding. Same idea just with the one step. So you're going to step about two and a half three feet before the foul line. Let the ball take a swing and when you reach the back of the top of the backswing take the step. Okay. The slide step. We can do that. Shape the line. That was really good. Yeah now I see that I'm just just trying to keep my tempo slow you know. I think one thing when people try a one and a no step like you said they try to have the same exact backswing and they try to put the same effort into it when we're just having this small little backswing here literally learning how to put no effort into it. And learning how to get around it enough. Right. For that shape of a hook to happen. If you would like to and you want to make this extra hard on yourself we don't have one here but for you viewers if you want to make it a little extra hard on yourself to challenge yourself do it with a plastic ball. Oh yeah absolutely because if you if you gear up on that or you're not getting your hand around it it's never gonna. As soon as you give it a little bit of that business way too long. Right. Never gonna hook. Okay. Once we get to the point where we're shaping it a little bit we're starting with our no step one step maybe even a two or three or four step like we're adding steps and shaping it. Once we get to our full approach what are some things maybe to let's start here. When we get left and we need to shape it a lot of times we need to get our hand a little more around the bowling ball. We got to create a little more axis rotation that's going to make the ball hook a little bit more down lane. What's a way to do that for the folks at home when we're starting to shape the ball more. So there are a couple of tricks that you can do. My favorite way to work on your release and getting around the ball and all those things is simply concentrating on your finish position at the follow-through. Think about it. Your bowling swing is going to have your your release is going to have three parts to it I like to call it. One is at the very top of the swing. Yep. Your hand has to be in the right spot. If we're considering that your hand has to be in a certain spot at the top of the swing so that you can release it well then wouldn't that be part of the release. So I call it a three-step process. Top of the swing, the actual release, and then the position of the follow-through. Okay. If you start working on the position of the follow-through you can easily start making that position bleed into down here where you release the ball. Okay. So if you want to get around the ball a little bit better a little bit more try to make sure your thumb finishes at the 12 o'clock position and your pinky at the six o'clock position. Okay. The tip is don't go past. Don't go this way. Yeah yeah. Don't go this because then instead of rolling the ball you're starting to spin the ball. Spin the ball yeah. Which is produces the opposite you don't hook it. The way I'm interpreting this is like you ever watch Pete Webber? Just do that. He was the master at starting that. At creating rotation without spin. Okay so I want to give that a try here. We're going to stand left we're going to create rotate create more rotation and I'm just going to work on my finish position with my hand thumb up pinky down. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah you can see that. Well you hooked it all right. We hooked it. That hooked a lot. That was actually interesting because that's not exactly how I create rotation. I'm not great at recreating rotation but I've never really tried that before. So when you create that more axis rotation when the ball sees friction it's going to come off of it way harder and you can see by that shot there when it got to the spot I mean it went dead left but that's what we need to do a lot of times when we're standing left and need to create more hook. Yeah absolutely and one of the things that you want to do when you're working on this for your game so you do the no step drill try to hook the whole lane right then you do the one step drill the two and three step drills are actually pretty hard for most people. Yeah. So what I would recommend is whether you do a four or a five step delivery for example in your case you like to start in between the dots between the front dots and the back dots. Let's say you're that kind of where you like to start in between the dots after you do the no step and the one step maybe move your feet about two to three feet up on the approach and throw a shot at 50% power. Yeah. Back off your speed back off your amount of power and throw it really really slow so you can create that shape from that point start bringing it back it up. I'm gonna actually try that because the way it's gonna feel like I normally start back here and when I throw it slower I move about six what I found is I move about six inches up on the approach which is my normal go-to throw it slower that's where I stand however to overemphasize this in order to throw it slower we just want to not create as much potential energy not as much momentum going in line so I'm gonna scoot up quite a bit here even more than I normally do this is gonna force me to take shorter steps and just stay slower with my momentum of my body overall so I'm gonna kind of do what Daniel said we're gonna move up let's just move up quite a bit and I still have to take five steps in this short amount of time which means I just yeah okay oh yeah that was cool because that is you know when we bowl tournaments we have to throw it super slow all the time I understand what that feel is in my game however that feel I don't normally stand that close but that's the feel of slowing everything down it really overemphasized it to where I can pretty much take that feel and start making it a more how would I say like manageable part of my game like all right that's not really what I would do I'd never stand this far up but I understand what it feels like to slow the momentum down keep everything nice and easy and shape that whole line yeah one of the advantages of moving up on the approach two to three feet is that it kind of sort of disconnects the steps with the swing a little bit it does yeah right because you're used to having x amount of swing with x amount of steps in x amount of space and you do that all the time well once you eliminate one of those factors or both and in this case you're eliminating how big the steps are and how much space you take in those steps then the swing can be separate from that and you can start feeling what you need to feel to get around the ball the release point is going to be a little longer because you're swinging slower and it's going to allow you to feel what you need to feel in order to create that big shape that we're talking about in this video yeah absolutely I mean doing that was almost like putting it all together starting at the front slow hooking it maybe working on the release a little bit to get your hand around it and then once you kind of get used to that and the no step in one step scooting way up in the approach still making sure you take all your steps it almost put it all together for me and I'm like okay that's what it feels like to throw it that slow and make the ball shape the entire length especially for you guys out there that have a little bit of speed you're going to have a hard time hooking the ball as much as these guys do so just remember take the no step drill move forward to the one step drill then move forward with uh let's just call it half approach yeah and once you get to the half approach with your total number of steps being the same then start inching back this exercise should take you what I would imagine to be four to six games depending on your ability talent and coordination and all of those factors right but it should be about a pretty nice one one and a half hour practice session at the bowling center and at the end of it you'll be able to hook it a little more well coach I think that was a great process that the folks at home watching this can use utilize and work towards to start shaping that entire lane it's a simple process basically we have to take away all of the stuff you used to do go up to the foul line get used to throwing it slow enough and then start building from there all the way back to your normal and I like that because in a real quick note speed is one thing that I think super underutilized in the game of bowling not at the higher levels but at the beginning levels it's also really hard to change your speed if you've never done it before for instance I've told a lot of people hey let's throw it slower they go to throw it slower and it's like 0.2 miles an hour slower correct so I think getting up to the approach taking the steps out seeing what it looks like to make your ball literally go you know five six miles an hour slower that's huge to just see with the eyes so you can feel it and understand absolutely and the advantage of it is that at the end of the day when you throw the ball hard learning to slow it down is very difficult or trying to slow it down in the middle of a tournament or league it's very difficult but it's always easy to speed up for most of us it's easier to speed up than to slow it down that's true so I hope you guys enjoyed those tips let us know in the comments what you think about that process if that helps with you and if you guys are looking for more coaching we have a membership Brad and Kyle membership this guy right here is an absolute rockstar so if you're interested click the link in the description we always have deals going on thank you for watching the video and we'll see you in the next one