Improving Your Bowling Release with "The Feel Trainer"

Welcome to the National Bowling Academy. My name is Dan Triske. I am a USBC Certified Silver Level coach. Along with me today is Doug O'Brien. Doug is also a USBC Certified Silver Level coach. Along we've been on the PBA 50 member or tour and Doug is also a certified ball driller. Today Doug and I are gonna talk about using a tool here from Eileens Bowling Buddies. This is called a Feel Trainer. Doug, would you like to explain what this Feel Trainer does and the purpose behind it? Dan the Feel Trainer is a... just a smaller version of a bowling ball basically with two holes in it. What it live for you is several things. We can use it for release purposes. Whether we wanna try to stay behind the ball whether we wanna try to come around the ball. Different hand positions, but the colors on the ball also tell us how we're releasing the ball and shows is the result of our releases. So there's lots of purpose which we're gonna demonstrate here in a few minutes with this device. So what we're gonna do now is we're gonna go over out on the approach. And Doug is gonna explain this to you when we talk about the different releases that we're gonna use. We're gonna use four of them, correct? Four releases. Yes. So we're gonna use four different releases and with that, we're gonna use Doug's daughter Anelise who is a 2018 Junior Gold U15 Girls champion along with being also a team USA member. Purpose of this trainer is to get the feel of the hand position in releasing the ball. We're gonna first demonstrate, keeping the hand behind the ball. Anelise is gonna toss it to Dan and back and forth demonstrating and you can see the colors on the ball is gonna show you the turn of the ball. But we're wanting to roll the ball with a forward roll. And we're going to demonstrate that now. Okay, Anelise. Hands straight behind the ball. You see the rotations of the ball going forward. And what this gonna do? This is, you know this is when you're playing certain conditions and you don't want the ball to hook a lot and it's a controlled release. Now that we're gonna go to the other extreme where we get around the ball. Anelise gone demonstrate getting the fingers around the side of the ball. Typical grip strike shot here for most people. Okay, Anelise. She rotates her hand around the ball keeping her elbow turned in. A lot of times, bowlers when they try to hook the ball, the more they try the hook the ball, the more the elbow flies to the right. So the trick is to keep the elbow turned in against the body and rotate the hand around the ball. And with the colors of the ball you can see the rotation being close to 90 degrees on this. Now then we're gonna show a weak and strong hand positions. Anelise has the ball with her hand bent backwards. This is a weak position. Now you can use these positions behind the ball or around the ball but the weaker hand position is gonna allow us to throw the ball a much straighter and firmer either on dryer lane conditions or even shooting spares. Okay, Anelise. But you notice her hand is bent backwards. It stays backwards. You see the rotation of the ball is very minimal and basically we're killing the ball. We don't want it to hook at all. And again, we can stay behind it or we can get around it with the weak hand position. Now the strong hand position where our hand is cupped. Again, this is your typical delivery. For most people that want to hook the ball you create a much higher rev rate. You see the rev rate of the ball. The RPM to the ball greatly increased because we strengthen our hand and we roll it off our fingers and uncoil the hand to create a much higher rev rate. And as a person advances with these drills you don't have to stay directly behind or directly around the ball. You've got unlimited feet positions in between and you learn what positions make the ball hook at what point or how much rotation you want. And the cupped hand can be cupped, it can be straight, it can be bent back. Whatever positions you desire. It's what you learned to do for whatever conditions you're bowling on. So if you're looking to get these and you wanna use these tools to improve your game along with other training tools that are available to you at Eileensbowlingbuddy.com go to Eileenbowlingbuddy.com use our promo code from the National Bowling Academy to get yourself a discount.