How to Grip a Bowling Ball

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Jim DeYoung. I'm with Fat Cats Family Bowling Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. You can reach us on the web at FatCatsFun.com. I'm also here on behalf of ExpertVillage.com. We are going to be talking about fitting for gloves, the reason to get gloves, and the equipment that you use. Right now I've just got a little forearm band on. It keeps my forearm tight so end up trying to grip the ball too hard and causing me to tug the ball. We'll talk about tugging in a little bit. Gloves, people use gloves mostly to have more of a grip on the bowling ball. Some gloves come with a wrist guard so it keeps your wrist straight so when you come through the ball it keeps your wrist straight the entire time. But me, I've learned how to overcome that so I don't use any gloves. Some people use the gloves because the bowling ball actually will cause calluses? to your hands and make your skin nice and rough. So they wear the glove so the glove is all rough on the ball instead of their hands. Like I was just saying about this forearm guard, it keeps my grip from getting too strong. So if you end up gripping the ball too hard it caused you to follow through awkwardly so you won't get the correct follow through the ball. I'm going to throw one really quick to show you what I mean about that. I'm going to grip the ball really really hard and I'll show you what happens when that happens. I ended up going to the left side of the head pin instead of staying on the right side. For right handers the pocket is the right side of the head pin. For left hander?s it?s the left side of the head pin. So basically what ended up happening is I actually ended up missing my mark out here by two or three boards to the left which caused it to hook over to the left side."