How to Achieve a Free Arm Swing with the Swing Trainer

Hi, my name is Richard Shockley, USBC gold level coach, and I'm in charge of bowler development for the BowlersMart Company. Let's talk about an area that I work with when I'm coaching a lot of my students called the free arm swing. So many bowlers, Dan, in their swing, they get muscled and tense and they pull down. The swing goes all over the place. But what we like to see, if you'll grab your bowling ball, Dan, we're gonna show you a free swing motion. This is something we can do in drills to really accentuate what we're after. What I see from a lot of bowlers is when they free swing the ball, you wanna place it out and have a nice pendulum motion. I've always liked the word pendulum. Nice and easy. So, Dan, you're really, really relaxed right here, aren't you? Correct, yes, sir. There's no pulling down. Nice ball placement. By the way, it's also in a good swing direction and when you do this drill, you can see the position that Dan's in with his right foot back, knees are flexed, and a good spine angle to help what the shot's gonna actually look like. So, Dan, do you do some of these drills whenever you're working with your girls and your team with high school? Is this similar to what you'd like to do? Because you have to have a free swing in our game. We do, Coach. We do this and we wanna make sure because a lot of the youth bowlers, and even some adults, but a lot of times, you'll see the bowlers that will push the ball out and gets behind their back. Or opposite, they go this way and that arm still wants to go straight. But unfortunately, it's not gonna go in this proper direction that you want. Right, different swing directions could cause problems with your launch angle, where the ball's heading, and pulling. Correct. So we wanna make sure that when we're doing this, that we're gonna get the ball out and just let it go by itself. What I like to tell the kids is let the ball swing your arm, not your arm swing the ball. Swing the ball, which is tremendous, tremendous. I really like that. That's really a cool deal. So then when we do this, we make sure that they're set up, just like you talked about with the spine tilt. We're just gonna place the ball into the swing and then just let it come back. Place it and let it come back. So I really don't feel any muscle or any tension, is what you're doing. Kind of like a swing set, dropping back and forth, back and forth. Pretty cool and I see so many things. Whenever, like I said earlier, as you pulled down from the top of the backswing, so put your ball down, Dan, and we wanna demonstrate something. Years ago, there's a company called Eileen's Bowling Buddy that came out with some fantastic training tools for the release, rotation drills that you have with a ball bearing device. This is a great tool. There's different bowling pins with different weights. And as you can see, we emulate putting your fingers in the training device and giving it a pre-swing demonstration. So Dan, you've used these before with a lot of your kids. Yes, Coach, we've used them before, yes. So Dan's gonna demonstrate how this particular item works. Great, great training tool. So go on through the deal, Dan. So what I like to do when we're using this is we make sure we get our weight, just like you would on your bowling ball, you got a good distribution of weight. So we're just gonna, same thing, when we place it out. Let it swing and bring it back. So, what does a problem see? What I see from a lot of players is whenever they're free swinging and when they get to the top of the backswing, a lot of pros that I work with, too, say, Coach, when I reached the top of the backswing in here, they will engage their shoulder and pull down from here. And this is something we can't have in our game. You have to have a free, upward back swing. Some bowlers are here. Some are here. Some are even higher. Dan, if you'll demonstrate what the wrong way is at the top of the swing to come in at a pull-down situation. So I'm gonna place the ball out, like I normally would, which would be here. Top swing and then bring it down. Right. And this is where I'm pulling down with the shoulder, which is gonna force the pin to, obviously, break where we don't want it to. So when we go like this, swing, and then you'd pull it down. Right. See, it's not a really good idea that you wanna get to shoulder engaged. Another thing that I like is by having the fingers in the holster, you can have your hand really relaxed. You don't have to squeeze on the ball that much whenever you're pulling and you're swinging the free bowling pin here. So it's a really, really great teaching tool. Do you do anything else with this device, Dan? Pretty much what we see? No, but the big thing, Coach, we wanna do is make sure that we do place it out because what happens is, sometimes, we get here and we bring it down. That's a great, great point. And we don't want this to break this way. We wanna make sure that we're placing it just like a normal shot. We wanna make sure that we're placing it out and just letting it swing. Bring it back. Place it out and swing, bring it back. So what you're saying is when you're in this position, a lot of bowlers are here and they don't really release. Their hand falls off too soon, so it doesn't give you the right placement of the ball. So a lot of bowlers that I have, they'll take their left hand away, for right-handed bowler, and they'll just drop it down, which is not a really a good move at all. Correct. So you gotta be very, very careful to do this. Because we wanna make sure that we are able to be consistent. And again, it's that repeatability that we've talked about before, so we wanna make sure. So that way, when they're getting that ball placed into the swing, again, they're letting, even with this, to letting the pin swing their arm, their arm is not swinging the pin. Right. So as you can see, the training device is terrific. You always have to have a free bowling swing. Don't engage that top of the swing muscle by pulling down. I see that so many times in my lessons. So really, really, if you can invest in an Eileen's bowling buddy, I think it'll help you train and get your name to the next level. Most definitely.