Cure the Putting Yips- What are the Yips (Video) - Lesson by PGA Pro Pete Styles
Cure the Putting Yips- What are the Yips (Video) - Lesson by PGA Pro Pete Styles

So now you join me down here on the putting green. We’re going to be talking about an area of the game that affects a lot of people during their golfing careers, not always at the same time but at some point or in most golfers’ careers they will encounter something to do with the yips. Either they’ll have the yips or they’ll watch one of their playing partners have the yips. And it can be quite a depressing thing.

You can almost ruin your enjoyment of playing golf. And the yips – they’re not really only associated to the game of golf, we’ll often see other sports players get the yips. It might be someone that plays darts where they stand to the board and they’re trying to throw and they just can’t let go off the dart. When they do it, it doesn’t have the desired effect. We sometimes see in games like snooker or like pool, bringing the club back, bringing the club back – sorry, the cue back, bringing the cue back and again and again, and they just can’t convince themselves to hit the shot. And we see the same sort of thing in golf. And the yips generally relate to putting because it’s that fine motor control. It’s not like big tee shots hitting the ball as hard as you can. It’s the fine motor control associated with tapping something or throwing a dart or potting a snooker ball. And the issue here isn’t just missing putt. Often people miss putts and they say, I’ve got the yips. But actually if that person misses the putt but they made a decent stroke, we wouldn’t necessarily classify that as a yipped putt. A yipped putt is something that doesn’t even feel like a putting stroke and it’s as much a technical as it’s a psychological and a physiological thing where setting up to the ball, there’s no confidence the ball is going to go in. There’s no belief the ball is going to go in but then the putting stroke is not the normal straight back, straight through smooth stroke. It’s a little sort of jerky, can’t bring the club back and then it’s just a little tap that often results in the ball is way short of the hole and curving offline or conversely the golfer is so determined to get the ball to the hole that they line up everything set up but then there’s bit of a flick of it and it just jumps a long way past. And they might look like extreme examples but if you’ve seen someone really suffering from the yips, this is the sort of thing that can happen to them and that’s why it’s so frustrating and damages their enjoyment of the game of golf. So if we look a little bit more in detail now about what the yips are and how they’re going to be – well how hopefully we can improve you and make sure you don’t get the yips and if you have them, how we can cure you from them in this next little mini series of videos. 2015-08-11

So now you join me down here on the putting green. We’re going to be talking about an area of the game that affects a lot of people during their golfing careers, not always at the same time but at some point or in most golfers’ careers they will encounter something to do with the yips. Either they’ll have the yips or they’ll watch one of their playing partners have the yips. And it can be quite a depressing thing.

You can almost ruin your enjoyment of playing golf. And the yips – they’re not really only associated to the game of golf, we’ll often see other sports players get the yips. It might be someone that plays darts where they stand to the board and they’re trying to throw and they just can’t let go off the dart. When they do it, it doesn’t have the desired effect. We sometimes see in games like snooker or like pool, bringing the club back, bringing the club back – sorry, the cue back, bringing the cue back and again and again, and they just can’t convince themselves to hit the shot. And we see the same sort of thing in golf.

And the yips generally relate to putting because it’s that fine motor control. It’s not like big tee shots hitting the ball as hard as you can. It’s the fine motor control associated with tapping something or throwing a dart or potting a snooker ball. And the issue here isn’t just missing putt. Often people miss putts and they say, I’ve got the yips. But actually if that person misses the putt but they made a decent stroke, we wouldn’t necessarily classify that as a yipped putt.

A yipped putt is something that doesn’t even feel like a putting stroke and it’s as much a technical as it’s a psychological and a physiological thing where setting up to the ball, there’s no confidence the ball is going to go in. There’s no belief the ball is going to go in but then the putting stroke is not the normal straight back, straight through smooth stroke. It’s a little sort of jerky, can’t bring the club back and then it’s just a little tap that often results in the ball is way short of the hole and curving offline or conversely the golfer is so determined to get the ball to the hole that they line up everything set up but then there’s bit of a flick of it and it just jumps a long way past.

And they might look like extreme examples but if you’ve seen someone really suffering from the yips, this is the sort of thing that can happen to them and that’s why it’s so frustrating and damages their enjoyment of the game of golf. So if we look a little bit more in detail now about what the yips are and how they’re going to be – well how hopefully we can improve you and make sure you don’t get the yips and if you have them, how we can cure you from them in this next little mini series of videos.