This is the first in a series of three articles on the yips. This article discusses what causes the yips, explodes some of the myths about the yips, and examines the two kinds of yips. The following two articles will discuss remedies for the two kinds of yips.
Whipping The Yips
What do Tommy Armour, Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, and Tom Watson have in common besides being great golfers? They all had the yips during their careers. In fact, many of golf’s greatest players have had the yips at some point.
So if you have the yips, take heart. You’re not alone. Golf’s most dreaded disease, the yips are tough to cure, but it’s possible to recover from them. You just need the right cure. Applying the right cure can help you beat the yips, which will cut strokes off your golf handicap.
Not A Psychological Issue
One common myth is that the yips are psychological. That’s partly true. The yips often present as a psychological issue. But it’s only a symptom of the cause. In fact, only about 2 percent of all yips cases are psychological. The root cause of the yips is usually bad technique—pure and simple.
If you’re like many students in our golf instruction sessions, you’re putting stroke needs work. Like our students, you lack the time to work on your putting stroke, leaving you with bad technique.
This in turn leads to missing short putts. Enter fear, doubt, and tension. That’s why the case presents as a psychological problem. But it’s really bad technique that’s the root cause of the yips.
Two Kinds Of Yips
One reason why fixing the yips is hard is that there are two kinds of yips—accelerating and rotational. Each requires a different cure.
Accelerating yips is easy to diagnose. If you jab at your putts, your yips could fall under this category. When you jab at a putt, you achieve maximum speed with your putterhead after you’ve struck the ball.
Good putters reach maximum speed with the putterhead about 3 to 4 inches before striking the ball. Then you keep this speed right through the strike. This works both physically and psychologically.
Our minds are geared to strike an object when the thing doing the striking is at top speed. You can’t be at top speed when you strike the ball if your putterhead is still accelerating. Bad technique results in a missed putt.
Curing Rotational Yips
Rotational yips come from a violent strike at the ball. It’s sort of like having the accelerating yips but on steroids. This sends the ball wildly off course, causing you to miss those pesky one-footers.
If you’re a rotational yipper, you’re probably a wristy putter. You tend to manipulate the putterhead with your wrists while stroking the ball. That’s because they see the putterface open at the end of the backstroke and they try to correct it.
But then you compound the problem. Once you close the putter face, you realize your mistake. Then you try to rotate the face open just before impact. This mental shift takes place a split second before impact and you miss the putt.
Once again, bad technique is at fault, causing you to miss even the shortest putts. Miss several short putts in a row and you lose confidence in your putting. Soon it becomes both a physical and psychological issue.
Golfers often come to our golf lessons to cure the yips. So if you have a bad case of the yips, you’re not alone. Many think it’s a mental problem, but most times it’s bad technique that’s the problem.
In the next article we’ll address antidotes for accelerating yips and provide a drill to help you cure yourself of golf’s most dreaded disease.
