Natalie Adams – PGA Teaching Pro

Okay, so with this golf swing video tip, we are going to look at how to help you with your chipping yips, if you are struggling with chip and you are finally making an yipping action. So we are going to look at what that actually means, what the cause of the chipping yips are and then how to correct it. So hitting a chipping yip, just basically means that you are finding it very difficult, once you are in a chipping situation, to play the shot with a nice smooth tempo, with a rhythmical tempo to execute and hit a successful shot. You maybe freezing over the ball for a very long time, but finding it very difficult to move. And then when you do move, you are making a very jerky action, but towards the ball, making it really difficult to get the club head to nicely strike the ball and to allow the ball to elevate up into the sky. So now we know what the yip and let's look at what's caused it. Basically, you have learned and you have conditioned yourself into that response.

A good way to liken this, as you may have heard of Pavlov’s dogs, he was doing a study in the 1800s about digestion and was using dogs and feeding dogs to study their digestive system. And what he discovered was, before he started the experiment, he rang a bell. Now initially when he rang the bell, the dogs had no response to this, but the dogs were then presented with food after the bell was rung and they started to salivate as they were eating the food. Now after he had done this during the study for several weeks, the dogs had become conditioned, so that they had this salivating response on hearing the bell. The food no longer needed to be presented to them, so he had conditioned the dogs to respond in a particular way to that sound.

Now all this happened, when you have got the chipping yips, as you have undergone that same process. You are just not aware of it, so you have now conditioned yourself to respond in a particular way, when faced with a particular situation. And this stems from also our caveman days, of a fight or flight response. When we view a situation as threatening to us, back in our caveman days, that would be, there was a threat to our life, our body would get ready to either fight for our life or to run away to save our life.

Now we don’t have that sort of daily threat to our lives anymore, but we do in a modern day society view situations as threatening and it still triggers that inbuilt response of fight or flight. And when we get in that response, the brain’s neurons starts to fire, the heart starting to beat quicker, the breathing is going quicker and shallower, the neurons are firing from your brain, tightening your muscles up, getting you ready to respond. So how we are going to kill the chipping yips, is to work on a four-stage program here. First of all, we’ve got to change our attitude to how you are viewing the situation.

If you are viewing the situation with dread, it’s not, it’s adding to your problems okay, there is a fear of failure here, so what we are going to work on is getting you to change the attitude, start to work on this as a challenge and as an opportunity to uncondition yourself. So once you change your attitude and your approach to chipping, we then need to help you relax, you can do this in any way, be it your breathing, concentrating on relaxing your muscles, singing a song to yourself, any technique and you will find it helps you relax, but you must come into the shot in that relaxed manner. And then work on having a good pre-shot routine, where you can commit to the club, commit to the target, commit to the shot, visualize, what you want to happen.

It really takes some time learning how to visualize well, so you can see a positive outcome rather than a negative. And finally with those three steps in place, I want you to judge yourself on how well, you have executed those three steps, how well your attitude, how good your attitude was, how it’s developing away from one of dread to one of challenge and opportunity, how well you are relaxed and how well, you start your pre-shot routine. If you work on those three areas and then judge yourself on that, rather than on the outcome, then you will start to make a much more smooth rhythmical movement. But in the mean time, if you want something to try to help you and getting to alter your attitude, try doing this.

If you place ten tee pegs into the ground quite low down, what I would do is on the first four tee pegs that we have got them all in a row, and we are going to address the first tee peg ready to move to the next tee peg. The first four or five tee pegs don’t need golf balls on them, but then once we get to tee peg number five and number six, place a golf ball on every alternative tee peg. What I am going to get you to do is set up to your shot, so good set up for the chipping position and then just work on having a nice rhythm and nice tempo to clip that tee peg out of the ground. As soon as you have done that, set it to the next tee peg and copy that rhythm again, clip it out of the ground.

As soon as you have done that set up to the next tee peg, get in rhythm and clip it out of the ground. Once you get to the tee peg with the ball on, don’t stop the rhythm, just set up to it, work on having that really good smooth rhythm, clip the tee peg out of the ground again, and the ball is going to fly up. Then go to the next tee peg, no ball, do the same thing, so you are alternating it. And this will help you really work on your tempo, it will help you relax, help you start to see that you can chip well, you are unconditioning your body’s response and you will have cured your chipping yips.