Bowl One Frame At A Time

Written By: bowlingball.com | Written On: Saturday, February 2, 2013 | Updated On: Monday, February 4, 2013

We have all heard the tip to "bowl one good shot at a time". This valuable tip is often recommended by coaches and has been battle tested over the years. It is intended to get you to focus only on what you are doing now and not on what happened earlier or will happen later.

Taking this concept of bowling one good shot at a time to thinking one frame at a time can be useful in placing emphasis on the importance of both your strike delivery and your spare delivery, as needed. Most of us have a tendency to relax our focus on routine spares and on occasion, we will miss a spare we would normally make because of carelessness. Instead, we should always immediately update our thinking to what we must do to adjust for an upcoming spare delivery and to execute a good shot at the spare.

When facing a key shot in competition, many experienced bowlers tend to favor hitting the pocket a little light and not challenging the head pin by jamming the shot into the pocket flush. The reason here is to avoid a nose split and a corresponding open frame. This strategy emanates from the notion of planning your entire frame instead of only one delivery so you reduce the risk of an open frame.

Bowlers sometimes delay updating their thoughts to their next delivery because of emotion. We all get “tapped” from time to time and “taps” seem to come in streaks. When you get “tapped” you should only prepare to shoot the spare and not worry about the bad break you just received from the “bowling heavens".

There is no benefit in allowing frustration and anger to creep into your game while you are in competition. Anger is a detriment to long range, successful shot making. Instead, think of what you must do to successfully complete one frame at a time before updating your thinking to the next frame and in time, your scores will improve as you cut down the number of open frames you encounter.