Updating Controlling Weight at Lawn Bowls

About five years ago, at the Turramurra LBC near Sydney Australia, when I sought help to control the weight of my deliveries, Bob Hawtree, one of the coaches, told me to study closely the distance of the jack from the mat and in my head simply ask the question, “What does it feel like to bowl to a jack at this distance? I was told this will elicit a response from my muscle memory. Then, “I should simply bowl with that memory in my mind.”

Essentially this means don’t first try estimating the number of meters from mat to jack and then putting a number on it. Rather, let your internal computer take the data from your eyes and let it control your muscles directly.

I was not spending enough time just looking carefully at the distance of the jack from the mat and letting that feed to my ‘mental computer’.

This advice must, of course, be combined with a  reproducible delivery motion. Bob emphasized three things for me in this area: the position where the bowl is released (about 6 inches in front of the advancing foot; the point in one’s swing where the step out begins (the bottom of my backswing); and the height to which one raises one’s arm in the follow-through (not more than the height of the knee). 

Surprisingly to me, this worked amazingly well for a while! I dramatically upped my game. This was in fact the most significant improvement I had made in years!

 However, because I had not been playing long enough up to that time, my delivery had not been grooved and so the resulting inconsistency muddled the truth in what I had been told. Now years later, I only need add one thing to that wisdom: get your bowl away smoothly without dumping or wobble and the results will prove the intelligence of your subconscious knowledge of the correct weight.

 This extra nugget was reinforced by the words of a former Canadian champion playing with me at Valverde LBC here in Portugal just a couple of weeks ago.