Saturday, December 13, 2014

Bowling the Flipper - drills pre-season.

Not a lot of activity of late - busy at work, no time!

I'm kind of getting excited by the prospect of Dec 21st drawing nearer, shortest day of the year and the point when we start to head back into summer. It'll also be the Christmas holiday and time to start  thinking about pre-nets fitness and training. I'm still on the Bigcricket forum  a fair bit, so a lot of my activities are on there. I'm also quite comfortable with my bowling at the moment so less inclined to blog I guess, but last night I had some thoughts on the Flipper.

Drift still alludes me for the most part, but I have been spinning the ball harder and bowling better generally, but without the drift and having given up on bowling Googlies because of Googly Syndrome, I'm still on the look-out for a good variation. So that brings me to the Flipper once again.

Last season I focused on improving my leg break and maintaining the momentum I had there, I occasionally practiced with the Flipper and bowled it once or twice in games, but was really nervous about doing so, but the few balls I did bowl, they worked okay.

So this coming season with my leg break potentially working well from the outset, I can and hope to be working with the flipper a lot more? That work starts now.

What I'm doing now 5 months before the first game...

Starting soon I'll be doing general fitness and flexibility drills, upper body and cardio stuff, but on a more Flipper specific level I'm now starting 'Click' the ball out of my hand. The variation I'm looking at using the most is the out of the front of the hand off-spinner version.

So around the house I have a number of balls situated here and there (Wife loves the fact that I do this) and I pick them up and spend some time clicking the ball out of the hand developing the strength in my fingers and wrist. The other thing I'm doing when I do this is that I'm doing that muscle memory thing where you train your brain to remember the feeling in order to be able to replicate it when you bowl. Reason for this is, it is an awkward position to hold the wrist in when clicking the fingers in this manner.

What I would suggest is that you hold your arm straight out in front of you when you do this so that the click happens with a straight arm.