The man who broke bowling
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Bowling technique is used as an example of something you can abuse in order to get quick wins and easy improvement on bowling ability, yet quickly hit a skill ceiling and you must relearn correct technique from the beginning (actively get worse at bowling) if you wish to reach an advanced level.
From TFA there also seems to be a third path of "this isn't wrong, it's actually a better technique", and the article does outline the whole journey of self-coaching, being called a cheater and ultimately being validated via a string of victories and imitators.
Yeah that's what's happening with me in tennis. As a kid I never really took any formal coaching, just learnt from my brother and started rallying with people.
Recently, I decided to start playing again, so I went to a coach and I am learning the correct technique from the beginning. Have to constantly correct and rewire my automatic reactions.
It feels really good to learn something you're bad at, and then seeing your brain slowly automating the new stuff over time.
It takes a lot of effort to unlearn the improper technique and learn what to do. At the same time, it’s difficult doing longer distances because of muscle memory.
I’m certainly no expert, but I see so many people that swim with their head completely out of the water. It drops the hips and legs, increases drag and expends so much more effort. The result is yolo thrashing through the water. Compare to Olympic swimmers who seem to effortlessly glide through the water.
“Freestyle” is whatever you want, although people generally will choose front crawl for almost every situation*
Edit: to clarify, if you’re not rotating your shoulders and are doing a doggy paddle, you’re going to be moving so inefficiently that you’ll probably drown over a short distance if you cannot rest. That’s barely “swimming”. And is a far cry from amateur bowling and tennis imo.
It's why there are different suits for water polo vs swimming. The water polo ones can be put through a lot more abuse than the swimming ones, which put under the same conditions have a tendency to tear in half, and they have less stretchy waistbands to make grabbing harder (but far from impossible).
I know you mentioned amateurs, but I’m really considering the average person who can “do the thing” (swim, golf, bowl, play tennis) vs someone who has even spent a little time trying to figure out the proper technique.
Hell, Tiger Woods dominated the tour and then spent time trying to work on his swing (before his life spiraled out of control).
Also, re-reading the original comments I was replying to, I wanted to clarify that I fell into the “flail around and try to get across the pool” category. I improved my technique considerably even though it’s not proper. I’m at the point where if I really want to improve, I need to unlearn my “good enough” skills and re-learn it properly. Unfortunately, it’s hard to do 1000+ yds nonstop the “right” way right now, so my warm ups are a lot of 50s and 100s where I go slow and focus. Then I can do maybe 50% of a longer interval “properly”
One example of a reward model that could facilitate this kind of activity would be a universal basic income. We admit we have no idea /where/ value comes from in the first place, we acknowledge that it is not always entirely capturable in the second place. Ergo, a fraction of the stream is rerouted uniformly through all the other actors.
I read your comment, and the linked article, and will enjoy thinking about it all day.
Of course, there’s risk involved in straying off the beaten path and trying new things — not denying that.
If you insist on 100% certainty, nothing.
If you are satisfied with "millions upon millions of people have used this and it has been broadly revealed to be a dead end", then bowling certainly has a known-bad technique that is very appealing to people just picking up the ball for the first time.
But if you really, really want that 100% certainty, then by all means go forth and base your decisions about what to focus on on that.
If you set the bar at anything even remotely less than 100% certainty, though, you'll find there are known-bad techniques. Heck, there are techniques that aren't just known to not work, they are known to lead to injuries with high reliability; see the lifting world, for instance. There's a difference between being an iconoclast and refusing to learn from the experiences of others. From the outside they may look similar but they are not the same.
I was told I'd need to do that with typing.
I started out two-finger hunt-and-peck at age 7 on a TI 99/4A, and gradually added more fingers. Using my pinky for Shift, in particular, was a gateway to using my middle fingers for letters too. I didn't take any speed tests at the time, but retrospectively I'd guess I was around 8-10wpm.
By the time I got to middle school and took a typing class with Mavis Beacon emphasizing home-row and stuff, I was already faster than the kids leaving the class from the previous semester, on the order of 20wpm. I did the exercises but I didn't really change my style much, and left the class typing roughly the way I started, but with more awareness of how I was "supposed" to do it. Feh.
Then in high school, I learned about BBS's and modems, got my own modem, and found a local multi-line BBS with multi-user chat. And that created a heck of an incentive -- the faster I could type, the more I could participate in the present conversation rather than what happened 2 minutes ago.
Social connection was thus linked to typing speed, and for a 9th-grader it's hard to find a more powerful motivator than that. I found myself adding fingers and breaking the 60wpm mark before the summer was out. No more hunting, still basically pecking, but pecking with 3 or 4 fingers on each hand.
These days my typing style superficially resembles a home-row style; my wrists rarely move, but I perch over QWEF/QERG and JIO' rather than ASDF and JKL; like Mavis would've liked. I find the slightly higher perch gives me easier access to the symbols on the number keys and functions in the F-key row. I sit comfortably around 80wpm on plain text, and handily outrace home-row typists on code or anything with a lot of symbols.
Moreover, the division between hands simply isn't. When typing with two hands, the letters in the middle, YGHVBN, are fair game for either hand. But if I have to reach for something, or if my right hand is on the mouse, I'll reposition my left to WRTH or thereabouts, and it feels perfectly natural to roam around the whole keyboard as needed.
Thus my keybindings in games and CAD are probably horrifying to a home-row typist, but since I'm not wasting half my left hand's reach with tab/caps/shift, I have a lot more useful keys available to me in keyboard+mouse mode. I have CAD bindings from QAZ all the way to IKM, with only OPL off-limits. (And frankly, my left hand is on a SpacePilot half the time anyway. When I bounce it back to the keyboard, it's not required to settle into any particular home position, because the whole board "feels like home" for either hand.)
I've never felt a desire to unlearn my evolved style and start over with home-row; I believe it to be demonstrably inferior for the sort of things I actually do.
"As such, Advanced Beginners can break one of two ways: they can move to Competent and start to grasp the big picture and their place in it, or they can ‘graduate’ to Expert Beginner by assuming that they’ve graduated to Expert."
...and then from the OP:
> When Belmonte first joined the PBA, he reveled in his power game: Let’s break some pins, he remembers thinking. But as he watched some of the game’s finest up close, he realized something: “These guys had the ability to make the ball dance. They could make the ball dance to any tune the lane was asking for. And I couldn’t do that.”
> He worked to decrease his rev rate, his velocity, the number of moving parts to his game. And he slowed his approach, eliminating a “kangaroo hop” designed to generate power, and delivering the ball from a position of greater stability and balance. “I noticed my ball was still striking with 20 percent less revolutions, and my ball was still sending messengers. But I was more consistently in the pocket. And I realized, I don’t need to break a pin every round.”
So despite the "expert beginner" article using the author's own bowling experience as an anecdote of what not to do, it's not trying to say you should always follow the crowd and blindly trust the prevailing wisdom; rather, it's saying that you should seek to understand your faults and grasp the bigger picture, and not automatically assume that minor expertise necessarily implies major expertise.
I had to bite the bullet on this a few years ago for my league. I grew up doing 5-pin and when switching to 10-pin the timing of everything was messed up due to how I threw and I didn't want to make the change. Finally someone convinced me to do it a few summers ago and had some bad slumps due to it. The improvements finally really showed this past season with significantly better consistency though.
Having just watched a clip of it, I'm very skeptical of this remark.
Yeah, technically you might still name levels of expertise below "expert" that would clearly see the difference, but that's not how the term is colloquially used. From the baseline perspective, shades of expertise are experts-only. In any field.
Now, I wasn’t an exceptional bowler, and I swore off bowling after that, but this article and YouTube clips bring back memories.
Note: for people with small hands like myself, it’s difficult to thumb a bowling ball in a manner that is conducive to curving the ball. As an adaptation, the “two handed approach” is a side effect of keeping the ball steady before delivery.
https://starrcards.com/cheetah-bear-or-shark-playing-hidden-...
> If you’re not impressed, if you happen to think that because you can fire a 250 at your local Bowlero, you can compete on the PBA Tour, let’s make one thing clear. Your local lanes are oiled in a way that helps turn misses into strikes, and when coupled with recent advances in bowling ball technology, have produced an abundance of 300 games among amateurs. But the oil patterns on the tour, unlike those at your local house, are devilishly difficult: the comparison is akin to logging a hole in one at your local putt-putt course, the contours guiding the ball toward the hole, versus sinking a downhill double breaker at Augusta. In other words, there is no comparison.
>The two-handed approach should not be confused with the two-handed delivery. Just prior to the release of the ball, a bowler using a two-handed approach removes their supporting hand, effectively delivering the ball with only one hand. They are considered a one-handed bowler by governing bodies …
>An actual two-handed delivery involves using both hands simultaneously to give force to the ball and is extremely rare in adult competition; it is mostly seen with young children first learning the game.
> Belmonte’s technique is, technically, a one hander—his left hand leaves the ball a split second before he releases it with his right.
- V-style in ski jumping: when it appeared in professional ski jumping in the 80s it was considered inappropriate by judges, and athletes had to avoid it to not be penalized with low style points. But at some point in the 90s it became so much superior in distances achieved that athletes started winning with that even after penalties, so it became recognized as valid by judges and took over. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ski_jumping_techniques#V-style
- Fosbury flop in high jump: this one didn't receive much push back, it was kind of a Columbus egg, once Dick Fosbury won the gold in the 1968 Mexico Olympics, it spread quickly and in no time all major athletes were using the technique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosbury_flop
- front flip on long jump: this one was quickly banned from competition, due to safety concerns. It is theoretically more mechanically efficient and has potential to produce longer jumps, but since it was never allowed to be perfected in high level competition we will never know how far it could go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_jump#Action_in_the_air_an...
- dunking free throws in basketball: this is other one that was quickly banned. Once a young Wilt Chamberlain demonstrated he could in fact dunk from behind the free throw line in a low league sort-of demonstration game, a rule banning it was created in the low leagues, and when Chamberlain made into the NBA the rule soon followed. https://www.sbnation.com/2022/3/26/22996516/wilt-chamberlain...
It is easy to understand. A LOT of people have invested A LOT of their life into learning something. And now somebody comes and basically says "the thing you were doing is worthless now". And assuming most people identify with what they do, what they are also hearing is "you are worthless now".
There is for example a new theory that the cancer is not, in fact, a genetic disease. That it is actually a metabolic dysfunction of certain cells and the genetic abnormalities are A CONSEQUENCE of the metabolic dysfunction (driven by huge increase in free radicals). Here more information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KusaU2taxow
But a huge number of people have devoted their entire lives to fighting cancer based on assumption that it is a genetic disease. And when you come with a proposition like that, almost all people become deaf to your arguments and the only thing they hear is danger to your identity.
Right now the only “excitement” one get from watching bowling is when one of the player fails at performing a strike.
However the professional bowlers will have the skill, experience and equipment to deal with all the different oil patterns.
(Note: I bowl in leagues in the UK, so definitely not at a competitive level).
Back in August 2020 balance holes were banned by the USBC (and therefore applied internationally), which would have a greater impact on two handed bowlers - as they don't insert a thumb in the ball, it gave them the potential for two balance holes instead of one. Currently every hole drilled into the ball must be used during the release of the ball.
More recently certain competitions (PBA mostly) are restricting the use of urethane balls to ban any balls which don't meet a minimum level of hardness. This hasn't been applied at a wider level yet, although it may have an impact over time.
https://www.pba.com/2023/june/2023-pba-hardness-report
So things are changing, but it's mostly reactionary rule changes as new problems are being discovered.
I think that would decrease even further the popularity of bowling as a spectator sport. It would just be confusing to a casual player why the pros are getting similar scores to a player who bowls once a year.
However, if you think you’d like that, maybe look into candlepin bowling. I think their strike rate is above that, but not far above it. An interesting game, id like to try it. I’ve got a few duckpin lanes near me, but candlepin seems like it is specific to a few locations.
A golfer who does an eagle on a par 4 is a lot more enjoyable to watch than a bowler who doesn't screw up a strike (regardless of oil conditions).
The required construction costs would almost certainly bankrupt 90% of the facilities, and kill the game
Sorry, is this real? I haven't gone bowling since I broke my wrist in an accident 20 years ago. I was never a great bowler before that, but it never crossed my mind that the bowling alley would somehow conspire to help me get a high score. If anything, bad shoes and too much wax would send me sliding. I know most of the good old bowling alleys died, and got replaced by these new urban work/life/bowling/sushi places that charge $50 a game, but are they really putting special grease patterns down to let the sensitive children walk away happy for instafucking more strikes? Is that a real fucking thing?
The pattern thing is a bit more complicated, veritasium has a video on it (and on bowling balls).
Wax was introduced to protect the lanes, however players fairly quickly learned to use the wax, as it allows hooking more easily and severely, which makes hitting the right location at the right angle much easier. Bowling alleys will then use different patterns for different purposes e.g. a local alley will use a more forgiving pattern, while pro alleys will use a “sport pattern” from a variety of standard patterns (or possibly in-house) to tune the difficulty and for more interesting shots.
House patterns are actually a lot simpler than pro patterns, usually it’s a simple sideways gradient (more in the center, less on the sides) going straight down to halfway to 2/3rds the lane. Aside from player satisfaction (it punishes mistakes less), a factor of them was simply saving oil.
This is not new, complex patterns were first experimented with by the PBA in the 90s (spraying lanes by hand) to make shots harder, as the balls had advanced too much. Though it only became an official feature in the 2000s as machines became capable enough to print specific patterns, reliably.
This means reading wax patterns has become an important skill of pro bowl.
In essence it’s the opposite of what you think, sport lanes and events use patterns specifically designed to be more difficult on purpose.
>> The wax is on the lane, only way you’d get it on your shoes is if you walk on the lane which you don’t.
Growing up (shout out to Bayshore, Corbin, and Hollywood Lanes) I twisted my ankle on a lot of stray spots..
One thing I miss about the game. I miss marking on paper like my Dad taught me. I learned to bowl at the UCLA Students Union bowling alley. Adding TVs that did the scoring took away half the fun for me as a nerd.
However every single house has no oil at all on the boards towards the gutter. This allows the balls when thrown with a hook to boomerang back and smash the pins.
I always wanted to make it a PBA shot, but the managers said no absolutely not! Bowlers equate how good a place is with how good they bowl! They get angry and superstitious about everything. Like they would think the head mechanic oiled the lanes better than 19 year old me but it was really done entirely by the machine. So if you gave them a regulation shot, and they started bowling worse, they would go to an easier house.
Edit: It is not just the high end recreational bowling centers serving sushi, it is all of them. They change the pattern if hosting a PBA event.
Fuck man. This like, lifts the veil from my eyes. It almost ruins my life a little.
I was never a good bowler. But there was this one day. See, I had been driving through Mobile, AL, a year earlier, and started talking to the girl at the front desk of the hotel. We were both kids, I was 19, and she was reading Emerson, and we ended up spending the whole night in the park talking about poetry. A year later I flew there and met her again. And I was just absolutely enamored and so in love with her. That first day she picked me up at the airport, we just were so crazy to see each other. The next day we didn't know what the hell to do so we went and had Waffle House for breakfast and passed by the bowling alley, so we went bowling.
It was the only time in my life I ever threw over 200. I think I got close to 250. We only hung out there for that one game, but something went click in my head.
Something went click that, any time since that morning that I've ever needed to just believe in something, or fix something, or make something work, or sink a pool shot, I just close my eyes and think of that feeling I had with her when every ball I threw was a strike and she kept cheering. It surprised me that something so good was even in my own body.
I think that bowling moment became to me the closest to what other people get when they say they feel something when they pray.
And now you're saying it was probably fake... just laid down on the wax. That's fucked up, man. That was like, a peak experience.
I think I need to do some molly.
I imagine the oil/wax makes more of a difference if you’re an amateur who can get close to 300 already.
I ran a couple of decent times at the Philadelphia Marathon in the 1980s. I believe that there was a slight net loss in elevation, for it started in Upper Dublin township then and finished downtown. Have I ever felt bad about claiming an OK time on a slightly downhill course? No.
If you came off the street, picked up a ball of the rack, and bowled a great game it was all you.
Even on an easy house shot you're not automatically have a 200 average. You still need to have a good spare game. I guarantee throwing that one 250 game was more luck than it was the oil pattern especially if you were using a house ball. Going from an easy house shot to a pro sport shot is usually a 20 pin drop on your average if you don't know how to bowl the sport pattern which is only about 1 or 2 extra open frames in a game than normal.
I get that feeling that everything is going right and I can't miss strikes the odd time too but it's always because I'm better focused and not missing my spot. Bowling is more dependent on repetitions and throwing the ball the same way every time before you can even think about averaging 200+.
> Bowlers equate how good a place is with how good they bowl! They get angry and superstitious about everything.
This isn't true and it's not always superstition. Some houses score higher and that's true, but there's factors that go into that like the pins, how well they ricochet, the oil pattern, how well the pattern sticks, etc. there's a million reasons a shot plays different. Even humidity and ambient temperature affects the oil and you have to bowl different in the summer vs winter!
Casual bowlers will 100% rather bowl at a place with a higher score, but sometimes a house is just way too hard. It's frustrating as a bowler if you have a 195 average and another house you can barely carry 180 because it has a harder pattern. It's even more frustrating when they have a harder pattern and don't tell anyone. The pros usually know what pattern they're bowling on and can analyze it beforehand. I quit bowling at a house because my average was consistently 15 pins lower, and I needed a separate set of balls to bowl there to have any chance because they put too flat of a pattern on. It's not fun or helpful to bowl on conditions you won't encounter anywhere else because there's no room to improve. It's like learning custom made in-house programming languages and tools that don't exist outside of your company.
>> I guarantee throwing that one 250 game was more luck than it was the oil pattern especially if you were using a house ball.
I'm not sure it was luck. I'm a much better pool shooter, so I can tie the feeling to that. Sometimes you get a feeling in your bones that you can't miss, and it comes on, and they could blindfold you. And as soon as it comes it goes. It's something in yourself when you take in the whole topography of the thing, see all the shots ahead of you, and you feel like you can't miss. One, two, three, four. Like if you sat there and thought it out, you'd just screw it up. When you're doing something just right, you know you're going to make it, you don't even have to watch after you let go. That's the feeling, and I don't think it's luck. But it does need a pretty girl watching.
If I could control it I'd be a pro bowler.
Two handed bowling isn't unfair and it's not easier than one handed bowling. I've tried it on multiple occasions but it's really hard to generate the speed required to throw 500+ revs.
Furthermore, if it was so easy everyone would switch it to because it's clear that it won't get banned.
I'm happy to have a more knowledgeable person correct me (not having been a player, ever), but AFAIK this is a known-good technique. It's perfectly legal, but players feel it makes them look like a sissy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11da-YAOXBI
the inertia on that curve is crazy
I've had holes drilled into multiple balls which were supposed to allow me to bowl comfortably with thumb inserted. I always ended up taking my thumb out of the ball and palm it instead, with my hand positioned in the opposite direction from normal. My latest ball is a bit lighter than the average one... 13 pounds... and there are only two holes which are drilled slightly deeper than normal. I don't know how many RPMs I'm putting on it, but it's definitely spinning faster than most people I've bowled with. After having watched a video, this guy looks to be doing much the same thing except he's stabilizing the ball with his other hand.
I learned to bowl this way from a friend of mine over 25 years ago and it's been a favorite ever since. My mom was a member of a bowling league at one point and I absolutely wore out her 11 pound ball when she stopped playing competitively.