So what are the golfing yips and how can you fix them? Well the yips are like putting is the equivalent of the shanks. It’s probably the worst thing that anyone could ever have in their game. It’s also probably something that does affect most golfers at some point in their career or they would know someone that has been affected by the yips. So the yips are almost like an involuntary movement during the putting stroke that causes inconsistency to the stroke and therefore massive inconsistency to the result. The form with the yips is that they’re sort of more mantle than they are technical so they’re very difficult to judge when you going to start getting the yips what affect that will have, and how you can defeat them. So we know the putting stroke should be a nice smooth gentle back and throw action with no necessary sort of individual hitting elements. And the yips are like an always involuntary muscle reflex where the muscles just tense up and we have a lot of flick and a little hit.

So we’ve got this nice little shot put, we just want to roll the ball down there gently, we get to the top and we give it a hit and the ball goes shooting off line and way too far and it might happen once around, it might happen on every green. It’s very difficult to judge. Severe cases of the yips have driven a lot of people to give up the game of golf altogether. And like I say it’s often driven not by necessarily a technical fault but almost a mental problem where they get to the top and they just decide that they want to hit the ball. So how can we cure the yips? Well if I knew how to cure the yips I would be retired on a beach in Barbados a long, long time ago I’m sure. My books would be selling like hot cakes to all the golfers that still suffer with the yips. So here’s my best ounce of how you can cure the yips. The one thing I see people do that continually having the yips, too much grip pressure; they often squeeze the golf club too tightly so they have a little bit too much pressure. They often have a dominant hand as well, and the dominant hand fights against the other hand to win what it considers to be a battle.

So the right hand for me is a dominant right hand player thinks that it needs to defeat the left hand. So it whips past the left hand and it knocks the left hand over and knocks the left hand out of sequence. That’s the right hand having too much influence, so too much grip pressure, too much right hand influence. The other thing is probably a poor pre-shot routine. I see a lot of golfers with the yips they’re not confident in their pre-shot routine, they don’t have enough practice strokes in their pre-shot routine and therefore when it comes right to hitting the ball, they’re hitting it when they’re not prepared, they’re not ready and they’re not confident. So I’d like to see maybe practicing with your weaker hand, so the weaker hand becomes more dominant, really relax the grip pressure so it’s nicely relaxed, nice and gentle and have a good couple of practice strokes and then when actually when you get over the ball, don’t dwell too much get over the ball and get it hit fairly quickly. And hopefully if you don’t spend too long looking down at the putt, too long dwelling on the putt, you can get it hit pretty quickly. You’ll get some reasonable results for the balls rolling out nice and smooth rolling up in and around the hole nice and close. If it doesn’t go in like this one, it gives you a really good shot tap in the next one. And hopefully those three techniques will help you defeat the yips.