How to Overcome the Golf Yips
What in the world is happening to me?
This is a common feeling for golfers who have experienced a performance dip, slumps or yips over the course of a few tournaments.
It is difficult to process this decline in play. Performance dips happen for many reasons.
Performance dips can be the result of technical changes in your swing, recent illness or injury, tiredness or a host of mental reasons that can negatively affect your game.
No matter the cause, slumping performance is a common troubling predicament for golfers.
But is this dip in performance merely a slump or could there be something bigger at play, such as the yips!
While slumping may feel difficult to overcome, the yips feel impossible to beat.
Both slumps and the yips are affected by mental factors, but the yips consume a golfer’s mindset.
A slump feels as if you can’t shoot a low score. The yips feel like you can’t even hit the ball correctly. For that reason, many golfers have tremendous difficulty rebounding from the yips.
The yips affected Danielle Kang’s performance for a long period of time. In 2017, Kang won her first LPGA Tour win at the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship but the yips worked their way into Kang’s game.
It took 15 months before Kang won her second tournament at the 2018 Buick LPGA Shanghai tournament.
Kang believed the yips were the reason for the long gap between wins. Last year, Kang talked about how the yips were affecting her game.
KANG: “I actually can’t pull the trigger I had the swing yips, the putting yips, everything possibly you could think of. If I had a short putt, I just kept doubting myself. I couldn’t putt freely.”
Fast forward to 2019, Kang won the Buick LPGA Shanghai tournament by one stroke, defending her title from the year before.
KANG: “Coming back and playing the practice round [at the Buick LPGA Shanghai tournament] actually showed me a lot that I was in a complete different mindset last year. I feel much more comfortable this year with the way I see the golf course and the way I see my shots.”
The mind more than technique can affect the yips. However, players think the solution is to change their grip, mechanics, and routine.
Working on your swing for hours upon hours doesn’t resolve the mental interference that blocks you from freely striking the ball.
So it only comes to reason that working with a Mental Game Coach is more effective than working with a swing coach on your slump or yips.
Eliminating the Mental Interference:
First, you need to understand that there is nothing wrong with you. You did not catch a disease or a cold.
Mindset and fear of failure are what causes interference on the golf course. Freeing up your swing, not trying harder to make a good swing is the solution.
Instead of standing over the ball, thinking about the mechanics of your swing and wondering if you’re going to freeze, react to the image of the target in your mind.
And outcome thinking is your enemy. Picture the shot you want to hit, not the bad shot.
Related Golf Psychology Articles
- How to Beat the Yips and Putting Anxiety
- How to Manage Driver Yips
- Why the Putting Yips Show Up When It’s Important
- Subscribe to The Golf Psychology Podcast on iTunes
- Subscribe to The Golf Psychology Podcast on Spotify
Discover How to Break the Yips Cycle
know you are frustrated with your putting, chipping, or pitching and have considered giving up the game you once loved to play. But before you make that decision, read what I have to say about how I help golfers overcome the yips….
The first place to begin to break the Yips Cycle is to admit that the yips are a mental issue. Stabbing or flinching at impact are symptoms of bigger issues: fear and over control. Changing your grip, putter, swing, club, or routine are only temporary Band-Aids to a mental game issue.
“Breaking The Yips Cycle” is a complete brain dump of the TOP NINE mental training sessions I do with my personal coaching students to help them overcome the yips and play with freedom again!