How often have you come back to the seats after an errant shot and said to yourself: “What was I thinking??!!” If you are like most competitors you’ve had some version of this thought far too often. It is, however, a really great question to ask! In fact, it’s funny that we would ever let ourselves throw a shot without having answered it up front.
Just about everyone agrees that if you were to target an essential mental game attribute that could serve virtually any bowler, concentration would be one of the leading contenders. This quality is so critical that lack of concentration is the favorite whipping boy for everything from missed spares, to nervousness when the lights go on, to anything else that might go wrong for bowlers in competition.
Even though most people know that concentration is crucial, few people can define it, and even fewer athletes know how to teach it to anyone else. For many bowlers rounding up and controlling their attention and concentration is like herding cats, out of control!
What Is Concentration?
Simply put, concentration is the ability to place your attention on anything you choose, and to hold it there for as long as you want. Most of our minds resemble a television viewer with an out of control remote channel changer. We are so used to hopping around with our attention it is sort of funny. We read while we eat. We watch television while we work out at the gym, and some people even bring their music players to the bowling center. We seem to have a really difficult time keeping our attention on just one thing for any period of time.
But bowling is different right? I mean all you have to do is hold your mind on one thing for four to five seconds and then the shot is over! It is probably true that if you take a bowler that already has a good solid physical game, and simply get him/her to maintain peak concentration for five seconds per shot, you would raise their average and tournament results measurably. Five seconds max!! What is really startling is how few bowlers actually do this.
Where Is Your Head?
So how come we trip so much over this important basic athletic concept? For starters, we don’t train our concentration properly, so it fails us routinely when the tournament lights come on. Most bowlers have some kind of swing thought when they are standing on the approach. We coach everything from keeping your eyes on the target, to free arm swing, to hand release position.
Here is the problem with this sort of thinking. The key thoughts that bowlers need to focus on change from day to day, sometimes game to game. What’s more, in the short time from the push away, to the height of the back swing, back down to the delivery point, most bowlers add and subtract other thoughts as they go. The mind works amazingly quickly, and is capable of going through dozens of useful (and interfering) bowling thoughts.
A bowler develops his/her list of key swing thoughts, adds to it, then automatically goes through all kinds of thoughts in the infinity of time after the push-away. Unconsciously competitors learn that with various swing thoughts they are putting their faith and trust into these thoughts. The problem is that they don’t really know if any given thought will hold up for one entire shot cycle, much less for a game, or for tomorrow. Bowlers keep jumping around from thought to thought to thought. This is not what we mean by concentration!
A simple concentration exercise is when spare shooting ask your self to state what you are aiming at, and to report whether or not you hit what you are looking at. That’s it. The exercise is eye opening. The overwhelming majority of players, at virtually all levels of skill, jerk their eyes and head around. They look down the lane as soon as they release the ball, and have to make a good guess at which board they actually hit at the arrows.
It doesn’t really matter which thing I ask players to keep their attention on. Whether it is arm-swing, hand position, or balance at the line, just about everyone’s mind skitters around and touches another idea during actual execution.
The Challenge of Staying Present
Here is a typical sequence of thought focus:
1) Key shot delivery thought.
2) Shift to other physical and performance concerns between push-away, height of the back-swing, and down to delivery.
3) Anticipation at the point of release.
4) Evaluation of how the release felt.
5) Evaluation of the shot.
Notice in all of this that evaluation is part of most bowlers’ shot cycle. We train this way, judging each release, shot, and result as good or bad. This might actually work in practice. But is it any surprise that when competition starts we don’t trust our own powers of competition? You are already waiting to judge what you do as good or bad before the ball is even off of your hand! Practice bowling has so many different variables from competition play that the pattern of mental hop scotch can never lead to a sense of confidence, much less concentration when the heat is on.
Gluing Your Mind Back Together
Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. — G.K. Chesterton
When there is room for your mind to move around you are wide open to fear, doubt, and indecision. If you want to have an all-world game there is a kind of concentration that bowling demands, different from so many other sports, that will have your game elevate based on this alone.
The task is to pick one thing to think about through the entirety of the shot cycle. Here is the exercise:
1) Set up in your starting position with ball in hand.
2) Notice the position of the ball in relation to the target, i.e. where the front of the ball is positioned in your hand.
3) Push away and go through your shot cycle while maintaining your attention to the ball position only. The task is to release the ball in exactly the same position, and in exactly the same relation to the lane, as when you started. Your mind maintains awareness of the ball position in your hand. No thoughts about anything else!
4) You are tasked with maintaining your concentration on just this one thing throughout the 540 degrees of swing (push away, backswing, forward, and follow through)
5) Notice how you did without judging yourself to be good or bad.
6) Pick the next thing to do this with, e.g. totally watching your target throughout the whole shot until the ball passes over it, attention to free swing from the shoulder, or any other physical focus.
Importantly, as you do this you will notice that the rest of your bowling works just fine. You will execute, stay upright, and deliver good shots even when your attention is on just one thing. Your awareness will work for you automatically, just as it does when you are eating, holding a conversation, or running on a treadmill.
This exercise will serve you in three key ways. It will help you really learn about any aspect of the game you really want to either improve on or make sure you execute. It will also teach you to bowl without allowing mental interference no matter what the circumstances. Finally, you will have the fun of being free to bowl that comes with clearing out the clutter.
How Safe Is Your Parachute?
Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps. — David Lloyd George
There is one challenge to total concentration that remains. If you choose to really focus for the full five seconds of your shot cycle, you are going to have to give up all the thoughts, plans, and judgments that have run you during the eternity of each swing. Do not underestimate how difficult this is to do. You may not have cared for all this interference, but it has been your constant companion.
You’d be surprised at what a security blanket all those confounding thoughts have been. They increase anxiety and interfere with the purity of shot-making. But in the end most bowlers are control freaks, they hate to give up the mental chatter of all the stuff they believe they must think about.
Your parachute will catch you if you let go of over-control. You will stay upright, your timing will be what it usually is, the ball will come off your hand, and etc.
Train For Life
It flies in the face of our culture to attend to just one thing at a given moment in time, no music, no gum, no attending to other thoughts. One of the reasons to be a bowler is that it allows you to be great, for just a moment, for ten frames every game. This is a vastly different frame of mind than most people have throughout most of their time on the job and at home. The ability to concentrate fully on one thing for a whole shot is a spectacular tool to have in one’s war chest.
To clear your mind, focus on one thing only. This move allows for greatness, and is critical for world class bowling. This is especially true as the stakes in competition go up. You can extend this skill beyond bowling to virtually any other area of life. You then have a crack at being all-world in relationships, work, and any other sport you may play as well. In short, your bowling mental game training will teach you to be a winner everywhere!
