6 Things I would have told my younger two-handed-bowling self

History

I remember watching Jason Belmonte bowl two-handed for the first time. I was amazed. I had bowled for 30 years since high school and never had that level of hook and power. You could say I’ve bowled pretty much the same way for decades, throwing the ball up 10 to the pocket. 

My first tries were with a 6 lb ball while bowling with my kids. It was fun, even with a plastic house ball. I was getting just as much hook as I did with my one-handed throw even with this plastic low-performance house-ball.

If I could go back into the past, and talk to my younger-two-handed-bowler self

Go all in

Once a year we had church tournaments that I wanted to do well for. But the two-handed bowling average was still 20-30 pins lower than my one-handed. I wanted to do good in these tournaments. Unfortunately, since I was sometimes bowling two-handed, my signals would get crossed and I bowled badly anyways.

I would have told myself just to hang up the one-handed bowling balls. There’s no future in it for you Lou. Time to move on.

Model a professional

There wasn’t quite as much youtube coverage of two-handed bowlers yet when I started. So I didn’t have great bowler footage to model my game after. Just some old memories of what I saw, and trying to Frankenstein together a two-handed game.

Practice your Spares! Get a Spare Ball

I know this is a problem with kids bowling. They don’t practice their spares. They only practice getting strikes! Once you have your fit set, get yourself a spare ball. It’s hard to continue to modify your game and then try to do things at the same time like flattening your hand for a spare. It’s better to just use the same release with the ball that will go straight.

Get two-handed specific Coaching As soon as you can

This goes hand in hand with modeling a professional, and not going totally on your own. If you start with good habits, you won’t have terrible habits to fix down the road. Try to find a coach who either bowls two-handed themselves, or at the very least professes to coach a lot of two-handed bowlers. 

Revs/Hooking the lane isn’t everything!

The power of the hook and movement on the lanes is alluring. But it’s really good to have a game plan where you can throw it in a normal manner. Throwing it Extreme is having to start from game one up against the ball return so you have no more room to move in as the lanes transition.

Take a Video of your Progress

This is sort of just for fun. But you will make tremendous and quick progress if you follow the tips above. It’s great to have footage of your transformation from a straight shooter to that of a two-handed beast. It also makes great youtube content if you ever decide to go that route!