Bowling Tricks & Traps - Extending Your Skid Length

If you average 180 or better and have trouble with your bowling ball hooking too soon, there are several adjustments you can use.

Popular and proven adjustments for an early hook ball reaction are moving your feet positioning on the approach to use heaviest concentration of lane oil, moving your spot on the lane laterally, changing your ball speed, changing your loft distance, changing your release technique, and changing bowling balls.

Another proven adjustment to extend your ball skid distance top tier players use is to sight at your spot on the lane and then look perhaps 12 to 24 inches further down the lane.

By sighting at a mark further down the lane than your usual sighting distance will help you increase your ball skid distance and reduce the early bowling ball hook reaction.

Sighting further down the lane than normal can help you slightly increase your ball speed, make a full and accelerated follow through motion, and project the ball down the lane before the ball picks up its hooking point in the mid-lane.

On several lane conditions, such as a wet/dry block pattern, your ball will react early when your delivery path takes the ball into the dry boards too quickly and you risk the ball hooking so early that you hit the “nose” or worse, cross over the pocket completely.

On this same example lane condition, if you align too much in the build up of lane oil, your ball will skid too far before exiting the heavy oil and miss the pocket toward the outside edge of the lane.

The trick on this condition is to neutralize the “over/under” ball reaction by sighting further down the lane and then adjusting your alignment with your feet and sighting spot accordingly.

There are simply times on given lane patterns when normal adjustments mentioned above cause your ball to continue over-reacting (hook early) to the pocket.

Experimentation and practicing this sighting adjustment to extend your ball skid length has it’s challenges, however.

The trap you can fall into is making poor deliveries by changing your delivery angle caused by a poor re-alignment of your swing path leading into the delivery.

Looking further down the lane may cause you to over-accelerate your follow through motion and force your delivery down the lane.



Forced deliveries may cause an overturning motion on the bowling ball where your hand produces a pulled shot inside your intended swing path.

The trick on a wet/dry block pattern is to sight further down the lane than usual if other simple adjustments do not produce the result you seek.

The trap is pulling your ball off of your intended swing path.

Practice is important so you become familiar with every adjustment in your “bag of tricks.”

When you are well practiced, you tend to trust your adjustment decisions in competition.