The Delivery at Lawn Bowls: Add/Subtract Length

Only one of the leads in a bowls match gets to deliver the jack. Rolling the jack is the single biggest aid for getting the weight of your first bowl correct. Ideally, your first bowl should end up a bit further down the rink than the jack. You will then want to reduce your length for subsequent bowls.

Physical Aspects

Experienced lawn bowlers can leave it to their subconscious mind to correct a delivery that is the wrong weight; however, it is my personal experience that if you have played for less than six years, you will need to think about some specific physical change in your delivery to produce a planned as opposed to a random length change. The modification in delivery could be one or more (preferably one) of:

a. Shorten/Lengthen your stare point

 
With the differing ‘run’ of modern bowls, my method to establish line is to pick a point on the aim-line of the bowl to stare at. Only personal experimentation will teach you how far down the rink this stare point is best for you! My choice is a stare on my aim line about 5 meters out from the front mat line. Once I have established a standard stare point distance, it seems that lengthening this distance causes me to subconsciously add weight while bringing my stare point back closer to the mat subconsciously causes me to take off weight. 
When the light is poorer, I choose my initial, standard stare point a meter or two closer (less than five meters). The lengthening or shortening is not changed.  If groundsheets are in use, a point on the front edge of the groundsheet (3 meters) may be an alternative.

b. Lower your body height

The higher you stand the more ‘weight’ is put into the bowl when your body moves forward in the delivery. Since I bowl from a stance with my advancing foot already a half step out from the mat and with my free hand on my knee, lowering my body height is not a possible choice for me but it is reported to work well for others with more flexible stances.

c. Reduce your forward ‘step’

 
This is another way to reduce the amount of body momentum delivered to the bowl. A disadvantage is that changing your step length can make it harder to hold your aim-line.

d. Reduce the arm pendulum amplitude

By lowering the position where you hold the bowl initially, before starting your delivery, you reduce the pendulum swing amplitude. Try to maintain your usual swing tempo. If you are a palm bowler, your thumb will not be gripping the bowl so your backswing must be restricted (or the bowl will drop). Instead of a pendulum swing you need to push the bowl out, so will be forced to control the length with your stride as in (c) above.

Mental Aspects

If you have played for more than six full seasons, you probably don’t need to think about any particular delivery modifications such as I have described above; you just need to ‘see’ more clearly where the target destination is. I am not talking about improved 'eyeball' vision but a feeling for what the distance means for how such a delivery feels. You have bowled this length many, many times before. Your body knows how to do it. As the sporting goods manufacturer, Nike, says in its advertisements, “Just do it!”
 Set up consciously, imagining the path your bowl will follow from release to the head, then concentrate on a deliberate straight backswing then turn the forward push over to your subconscious. When the bowl is on its way be conscious of how close you were to passing over your stare point so you can make a correction, if necessary, on your next bowl. 
One of the mental suggestions is to ’focus’ on the jack as the last-but-one thing to do prior to looking down the line to your aiming point, and, have the jack’s position in your ’mind’s eye’ during delivery (never look at the jack). David Bryant says that before bowling he looks back and forth between his stare point and the jack and he only stares exclusively at his stare point as he begins his bowling action. This helps the ‘hand-eye‘ coordination. Something else that works for many people is to imagine the path of a bowl rolling down the rink and stopping against your target. This will impress upon your subconscious the weight that the path requires.

Lastly, remember that using the subconscious to control your delivery only works when you have had both experience playing on the surface and a history of consistent practice. You cannot, "Just do it!" unless you have already often done it.

Grip, stance and all other aspects of the pre-delivery routine need first to become automatic and entirely replicable.