How Can I Stop Chipping Yips? (Video) - by PGA Instructor Dean Butler
How Can I Stop Chipping Yips? (Video) - by PGA Instructor Dean Butler

Okay, so how can I stop the chipping yips? Well, the best thing to do is to by practicing your chipping with one hand. So first of all, what are the yips? Well, the yips is basically when you set up to the ball and you tend to find that we have a jerky sort of reactions with the swing. So as I go back, you tend to, the wrist come on they flick they scoop or sometimes the backswing is little bit too long then we decelerate. It’s a nervous sort of thing where you lack confidence and everything is just short, jerky, wristy, flicky, scoopy, whatever you want to describe it.

So they are – it’s pretty similar to the putting, very, very similar. Now we said, the way to cure it would be to practice with your left arm. If I was to set myself up with my feet apart for a chip, and of course the player chip remember we’re basically setting ourselves up with the feet, the width of the shoulders, weight slightly on the left hand side 60/40, and I’ve got the ball position middle, just slightly ahead all I tend to favor. And you could play it with a 7-8 or 9-9. Put your hands down and from this position here, keep the weight on the left hand side. If I was to take my right hand off, remember the yips is tending to be a bit of a jerky action, and I set to your right, put your hand behind the back and from here, try and keep the club in your left arm with one piece. So let’s start off by keeping it back at three feet, well that was quite simple. Let’s go back and going through, so what we are teaching you here, is what the left arm should be doing. But you might be saying “Well, what about my right?” Let’s not think about the negative, let’s think about the positive, the left hand. Once you’ve got that routine, where you are just fizzing that club, brushing the grass backwards and forwards, then you’re ready to put you right hand back on. You put the right hand back on, do exactly the same setup as before. And concentrate on keeping, this is one unit and keeping the club low. Keeping the club back low to the ground is very simple. If you get out in the morning you’ve got a bit of a morning dew, you put the ball down, you should be able to see you brushing the dew on the backswing away for the first four or five inches. And also as you go through, the actual dew on the grass is removed. So very simple, but of course, you haven’t got the dew all the time so you rely on the feel of the brushing. So from here, let’s keep my left arm straight, keep my weight on the left hand side, keep my arms straight, keep it nice and low, keep it nice and low. And the ball’s just gone nicely. It’s a very short swing, but all of a sudden everything is smooth and that’s the way we want it to be. No more jerking, no more nervousness and from that, it’ll breed confidence. But remember, this isn’t something that you can just do for five minutes on the practice green, go to the golf course and put it in, because on the course, you are back under that pressure, because you are playing a game of golf. If you’ve got the tools in place, which you’ve now got, it’s easy to put the matter right, all it needs is that magic word, practice and commitment. 2014-05-14

Okay, so how can I stop the chipping yips? Well, the best thing to do is to by practicing your chipping with one hand. So first of all, what are the yips? Well, the yips is basically when you set up to the ball and you tend to find that we have a jerky sort of reactions with the swing. So as I go back, you tend to, the wrist come on they flick they scoop or sometimes the backswing is little bit too long then we decelerate. It’s a nervous sort of thing where you lack confidence and everything is just short, jerky, wristy, flicky, scoopy, whatever you want to describe it.

So they are – it’s pretty similar to the putting, very, very similar. Now we said, the way to cure it would be to practice with your left arm. If I was to set myself up with my feet apart for a chip, and of course the player chip remember we’re basically setting ourselves up with the feet, the width of the shoulders, weight slightly on the left hand side 60/40, and I’ve got the ball position middle, just slightly ahead all I tend to favor. And you could play it with a 7-8 or 9-9. Put your hands down and from this position here, keep the weight on the left hand side. If I was to take my right hand off, remember the yips is tending to be a bit of a jerky action, and I set to your right, put your hand behind the back and from here, try and keep the club in your left arm with one piece.

So let’s start off by keeping it back at three feet, well that was quite simple. Let’s go back and going through, so what we are teaching you here, is what the left arm should be doing. But you might be saying “Well, what about my right?” Let’s not think about the negative, let’s think about the positive, the left hand. Once you’ve got that routine, where you are just fizzing that club, brushing the grass backwards and forwards, then you’re ready to put you right hand back on. You put the right hand back on, do exactly the same setup as before. And concentrate on keeping, this is one unit and keeping the club low.

Keeping the club back low to the ground is very simple. If you get out in the morning you’ve got a bit of a morning dew, you put the ball down, you should be able to see you brushing the dew on the backswing away for the first four or five inches. And also as you go through, the actual dew on the grass is removed. So very simple, but of course, you haven’t got the dew all the time so you rely on the feel of the brushing.

So from here, let’s keep my left arm straight, keep my weight on the left hand side, keep my arms straight, keep it nice and low, keep it nice and low. And the ball’s just gone nicely. It’s a very short swing, but all of a sudden everything is smooth and that’s the way we want it to be. No more jerking, no more nervousness and from that, it’ll breed confidence. But remember, this isn’t something that you can just do for five minutes on the practice green, go to the golf course and put it in, because on the course, you are back under that pressure, because you are playing a game of golf.

If you’ve got the tools in place, which you’ve now got, it’s easy to put the matter right, all it needs is that magic word, practice and commitment.