How to Lessen the Strain on Your Bowling Hand Due to Ball Weight

How you hold the ball in your stance affects your release. When you’re muscled up or tense, you end up squeezing the bowling ball.

Squeezing the ball throughout the shot leads to more side-roll or spin.

When you put the majority of the bowling ball weight onto your bowling hand in the stance, problems occur, like:

● Swing misalignment
● Timing issues
● Injury (fingers, wrist, hand, shoulder, forearm)
● Inconsistent targeting

When you shift more of the weight of your bowling ball to your non-bowling hand, you reduce your grip pressure.

Less grip pressure when you release the ball helps impart more revolutions on the ball.

You will see less spin and more roll with your ball motion as the ball travels down the lane.

In this article, you’ll learn how to take some of that muscle out of your grip by better distributing the bowling ball weight with better hand positioning.

How to reduce muscle strain in the bowling hand

Where your non-bowling hand is placed in the stance matters. In the example below, you’ll see the non-bowling hand higher on the bowling ball. It’s actually adding weight to your bowling hand.

Inherently, this will create squeezing. There’s a lot of muscle in the forearm being used to hold the bowling ball upright, even the bicep is really tight.

It’s really uncomfortable, so what you want to do is take your non-bowling hand and place it underneath the bowling ball.

Then, cradle it using both hands while distributing more of the weight to the non-bowling hand.

You can see the forearm and bicep are loose now. This reduces grip pressure.

When you cradle the ball with both hands, you’ll notice that your ball starts out of the stance quicker and your swing will be cleaner.

How to reduce muscle strain for two-handed bowlers

Everybody in the bowling world has seen it for themselves by now, two-handed bowlers get a lot of rev’s on the bowling ball.

The majority of two-handed bowlers do not use a thumb hole when they release the ball.

That eliminates grip pressure from the start, but proper ball weight distribution is crucial to get the most revs possible out of your game.

The non-dominant throwing hand should be parallel to the dominant throwing hand in the stance.

If you set up your hands in a non-parallel location, you decrease the energy you can impart on the bowling ball and you lose leverage and hook.

When holding the bowling ball in the stance, it should be in-line with the hip and close to the body.

When the bowling ball is positioned too far inside of the body, leverage and rotation is lost.

Positioning at the peak of the back swing and pivot step needs to be the same as you setup in the stance. This keeps the body stable and aligned to the target.

So, if you want to loosen up your swing, it starts in the stance. Limit grip pressure with good placement of the non-bowling hand and don’t forget to distribute some of the ball weight over there.