Bowling Grip Pressure Explained

I’d like to share a small but very important part of making good shots. How much grip pressure is enough?

Most people start with house balls, the ones that you’d have to be King Kong for the fingers to fit, with all three holes drilled about the same size. Naturally, we grip this ball very tight just to hang onto it. When we get our first ball drilled for our hand, it takes some time to get used to not continuing that tight grip, and eventually we learn to relax that grip pressure. Upon moving to a fingertip ball, we go through some of the same process, again, as we’re not sure that we can still hold the ball with this grip. This seems like a bit of a trial and error process, and many times it is. Let’s take a look at a simple area of the game which can greatly your consistency – grip pressure.

How Much Grip Pressure is Enough For My Bowling Ball?

We can agree that somewhere between totally relaxed and totally squeezing the ball, there must be some happy medium. The best visual guidelines I’ve heard over the years come from two sources. The USBC tends to use the phrase of “Pretend you have a small bird in your hand – you don’t want to let it get away, but you don’t want to kill it, either.” The other comes from the late Bob Poole, who always said “Pretend that you have a raw egg in your hand – you don’t want to squeeze hard enough to break it.” Both of these phrases suggest less grip pressure is much better than a lot of pressure. I’m an advocate of minimal grip pressure when holding and swinging a bowling ball.

What Points in the Hand Do I Use to Grip the Ball?

Using the gentle pressure described above, you grip the ball gently with your fingertips and the BASE of your thumb.

Grip Pressure in the Stance

You should use the grip pressure described above when you set the ball up in your stance.  Additionally, use your non-bowling hand to hold the weight of the ball as you set up into your stance.  Holding the ball with this hand, put the bowling hand fingers in the ball and then “roll” the ball to place your thumb all the way into the ball.  This will keep that light grip pressure with your bowling hand.  You non bowling hand is holding at least half the weight of the ball..

Grip Pressure During the Swing

If you do this correctly, and you place at least half of the weight of the ball into your opposite hand, your forearm muscle should be relaxed, not tight. The forearm muscle serves no real purpose in the bowling swing, and should not be used. Keep the grip pressure minimal and swing the ball from the shoulder, not by using the forearm. As the ball gets to the top of the backswing, you should be able to maintain a relaxed grip with your hand directly above the ball at the top of your backswing. Just let the ball stop momentarily at the top of the swing.

Grip Pressure on the Downswing and Release

Keep this gentle grip all the way to the bottom of the swing. Only when the swing gets to the bottom, when the path of the ball is parallel to the lane, can you impart some motion with the fingers in an outward motion toward the target. This is much like the letting a yo-yo snap at the bottom of the string – essentially, you let the ball hit your fingers, not the other way around. By keeping the fingers firm (not “lifting”, but merely keeping them firm), you can impart more than enough roll on the ball with minimal effort. Additionally, this technique allows you to control the direction and speed of the ball much more effectively. Like many other parts of the game, this is kind of backwards.