What are the golf yips? The yips are a psychological
Researchers at the Mayo Clinic found that up to 48 percent of all serious golfers have experienced the yips. Golfers who have played for more than 25 years appear to be most prone to the condition.
Johnny Miller widely regarded as one of the best players in the 1970s, fought a long battle with the yips.
The list of elite golf yippers, includes David Feherty, Long-time sufferer Bernhard Langer was one of the few who found a way to conquer the putting demons. Langer endured, while Feherty succumbed, trading his clubs for a microphone. Other golfers seriously afflicted by the yips include, Ben Hogan, Harry Vardon, and Sam Snead. Ian Baker-Finch caught the yips with his driver, Brett Ogle with his chipping. A recent sighting of Nick Faldo’s putting suggests another victim.
We can also include choking in the yip problem when we understand it more. Greg Norman was a master at it. Adam Scott’s recent blow out at the British open would suggest another victim. Scott squandered a four-stroke lead with four holes to play at the British open.
One of the most frustrating things in golf is watching your performance go downhill on the course when you know what to do, but your body is doing something else entirely. Or you are hitting them all straight in practice but fall apart during the pressure of the game resulting in frustration and anger. It’s all psychological and so the cure must be psychological.
Despite the many ways they manifest themselves the yips remain poorly understood and defined, so let’s define them now.
As with any sport, we train and practice until we can hand over the job to the subconscious mind. It’s a bit like driving a car. We practice driving a car until we can do it automatically, without thinking. Golf is the same. We practice the swing until we can do it automatically. We develop muscle memory. This is all well and good until we engage the conscious mind back into the swing. Try bringing your conscious mind back into steering the car. The action becomes less smooth and jerky. So it is with golf. So what is happening?
When the conscious mind becomes involved in a practiced and trained communication between the subconscious mind and the muscles, it interrupts the electrical signals between the subconscious mind and the muscle memory. The results – the yips or poor performance. The golfer is stuck in the swing – thinking too much.
The role of the conscious mind in golf is to work out strategies, choose the right club, and fix its point of focus on the target through our imagination and with a positive expectation. The trained subconscious mind should be free of thinking, anchored in the moment and free of wanting to hit the right shot, just expecting to.
We start to create problems when we bring negative emotions into our game, and all negative emotions are based in fear. Where does this fear come from? Wanting approval, control or security.
The more you want to hit the right shot the more you create doubt in your mind, because a want is a fear of lacking something. In fear you might not get what you want or you might get what you don’t want. The want creates doubt, this fear interferes with the communication between the subconscious mind and muscle memory and in turn affects the swing. Get this simple understanding and you are half way there.
There are three wants that create the problem in the golf game. The want to control the shot. The want for approval of the people watching. The want for security of the winning prize. The mind turns to wanting to get the prize money.
Walter Hagen said there is no such thing as a perfect game of golf. Walter was realistic about a bad shot. He said that he expected to have around seven bad shots in a game. When he played a bad shot he didn’t worry about it, it was just one of those seven and left it behind.
Ben Hogan, one of the great perfectionists of the game said he never played more than six shots exactly as he had planned them in any one round. The goal is not perfection but the continual narrowing of the margin between a player’s best shots and worst shots.
Using our imagination in a positive way is the key to good golf. The last thing on your mind before hitting the ball should be seeing the shot going where you would like it to go then releasing yourself to the expectation of it going there.
So many people are focused on where they don’t want it to go. It’s like saying, don’t think of pink elephants. What do you think of, pink elephants. How many times have you hit a shot and said, that was exactly what I didn’t want to do. The subconscious doesn’t discern between good and bad, it delivers what you are holding in your mind. It is a perfect servant. Imagine the shot to want to play, not the shot you don’t want to play.
The other thing to be aware of is your negative self-talk. Your negative self-talk goes right through to the subconscious mind as a suggestion and reinforces negative beliefs. The more you criticize yourself the worse you become and the more the wants are reinforced.
Our program is the result of extensive testing over an eight year period and designed from my work in sport psychology, working with Golfers, footballers, basketball players, tennis players and more. The recordings we use are embedded with binaural beat technology using brainwave entrainment to make the recordings more effective. Headphones are required for this to be effective.
Now it’s time to get over the yips or just improve your psychological game because golf is probably more than most games – a mind game.
We offer one on one session’s to improve golf performance coupled with a set of CD’s. It usually takes four to six weeks to change the habit patterns of the mind.
