Well probably not perfect, but I can’t stress how important it is. There are many products, books, e-books, and equipment that really will help your game. At every level of bowling, there is someone offering bowling tips, but all of this useful knowledge will not do you any good if you do not practice.

 

So now that we have established the need for practice, the tricky question is what constitutes actual practice. The definition of “practice” is to “Perform or exercise repeatedly or regularly in order to improve or maintain one’s proficiency.”

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I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t really clear things up for me. Practice can mean many things to many people. I know many people who average over 200 and their idea of practice is the three games they bowl in league.

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At the other spectrum, I watch collegiate and high school teams practice for several hours at a time shadow bowling and only spare shooting. I am completely jealous of the former, but it is my humble belief that those 200 bowlers who only “practice” three games a week in league play can and probably will maintain their average for a period of time but will not improve their game.

 

Here is why… Like anything, if you want to be successful at something, you need to have a goal, with set perimeters on how to accomplish that. For example, Let’s say your goal is to pick up the 10 pin more often. First, you would want to know on average how often you currently pick up the 10 pin. The great way to do this would be to shoot at the 10 pin 20 times in a row for a week.

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This would give you a pretty accurate percentage. This would be very hard to do during league play (although we have all had those days where it seems like we left 20 ten pins in a row) Then during practice you would try different lines, hand positions, etc to try to pick up the 10 pin. Again you would definitely not want to do this during league.

 

Again, there are many different ways to practice, but you should always have a goal in mind that you are working towards and you should not be taking score or at least not care what your score is.

 

The next dilemma in practicing bowling is when and where to practice. Nowadays, a lot of bowling centers will not let you shadow bowl, and it can get very pricey to practice one or two hours at a time consistently.

 

Here are some tips I have on keeping the price down:

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1) Join a league if you haven’t already. Every center that I know of offers a discount to their league bowlers.

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2) Collect coupons. Some ideas of where to get coupons are the  Entertainment Book, Val-u-Pak, website, business cards, donations, facebook, BPAA and USBC programs, etc.

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3) Get to know the staff, especially the management. I am not saying they will give you free bowling, but they can point you to the best times to bowl and maybe even offer you a bulk practice rate.

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4) The final suggestion is to bowl at non-peak times. For instance, my center offers all you can bowl on Tuesday nights for $10. (I can bowl a lot in 4 hours – or at least I used to be able to)

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They also have 99 cent games on Sunday mornings. The point is not to rip your local bowling center off, but to make it beneficial for everybody. The bowling center has to make a profit to stay in business, but the better you get at bowling, the more you are going to want to come back and bowl. Your bowling center knows this.

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