Sport Psychology Tactics - Olympic Weightlifting, The Yips & How Athletes Can Solve This Mental Block
About the Author
Ben Foodman is a licensed psychotherapist & performance specialist. He owns his private practice located in Charlotte North Carolina where he specializes in working with athletes to help them overcome mental blocks (the yips), PTSD, ADD / ADHD and achieve flow states through the techniques of Brainspotting & Neurofeedback. If you are interested in services, use the link here! Enjoy the article below!
Introduction: Olympic-Style Weightlifting Athletes & The Yips (AKA Mental Blocks)
Olympic-style weightlifting may seem like a sport that involves the exclusive use of blunt force. But the Olympic lifts are actually precision-based movements. The snatch and the clean & jerk require near perfect, synchronized movement and a delicate balance between the perfect amount of muscle tension and flexibility. Speaking as both a former competitor and coach, these lifts are as psychologically demanding as any sport.
Because this sport can be so mentally exhausting, it is inevitable that Olympic weightlifting athletes will be at increased risk for developing the Yips (AKA Mental blocks). For this issue of the Training Report, in part I. I want to discuss what the Yips looks like in this sport, for part II. I will explore the neuroscience behind the Yips in Olympic-style weightlifting, and in part III. I will discuss what Olympic weightlifting athletes can do to fix this problem. Let’s first look at how the symptoms of the Yips in Olympic weightlifting express themselves.
Part I. The Yips In Olympic Weightlifting
When Olympic weightlifting athletes experience the yips, there are a variety of ways this can present. However there are common issues that these athletes frequently report or exhibit: being unable to drop underneath the weight, hopping forward or backward on the lift, dropping the weight at abnormal weight levels, experiencing freeze responses or abnormally high levels of anxiety pre-lift. Yes, elite Olympic weightlifters like the one presented in these videos and the title photo have occasional misses, and dropping the weight is an inevitable part of the sport. However, when athletes experience weightlifting Yips, they themselves will report on how ‘abnormal’ the experience of not executing on a lift is due to the Yips versus naturally missing weights due to technical issues.
In my experience as both a former lifter, coach, and having worked with many Olympic weightlifters on the psychological side of performance, what I have found is that a significant portion of Olympic-weightlifting athletes will also experience some form of significant anxiety outside of the sport or will even exhibit symptoms of the yips in different social situations. This could look like social anxiety, or even freezing during very low-pressure events. The reasons of this could vary quite a bit, ranging from the stress of training or an athlete’s interpersonal relationship issues. But in my opinion, like all athletes the first place to start when trying to understand the underlying issue is to examine what is happening in an Olympic lifter’s brain when the yips is occurring.
Part II. The Neuropsychology Behind Olympic Weightlifting Yips
I have written extensively about the Yips in previous Training Reports. While there are a variety of opinions on what the Yips actually is, the truth is that emerging research by medical specialists have finally been able to explain what is actually happening in the brain during an episode of the Yips. The Yips is a trauma-based response that occurs during the high-pressure moments of sports. Essentially, when an athlete recognizes on either a conscious or unconscious level that the environment is stressful, the trauma response of the Yips will occur. The reason for this is because the athlete has either had a previous experience in sport that was traumatic or they have had a traumatic experience that happened to them outside of sport that has not been processed. This unprocessed traumatic memory remains in a dormant state until activated by a high pressure-performance event. Usually athletes that experience the Yips will also have similar high anxiety symptoms outside of sport in social situations.
In the book The Body Keeps The Score, Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk gives us a glimpse into the process that creates the yips: the emotional brain has first dibs on interpreting incoming information. Sensory information about the environment and body state received by the eyes, ears, touch, kinesthetic sense, etc. converges on the thalamus where it is processed and then passed on to the amygdala to interpret its emotional significance. This occurs with lightning speed. If a threat is detected, the amygdala sends messages to the hypothalamus to secrete stress hormones to defend against that threat. The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux calls this the low road. The second neural pathway, the high road, runs from the thalamus via the hippocampus and anterior cingulate, to the prefrontal cortex, the rational brain, for a conscious and much more refined interpretation. This takes several microseconds longer. If the interpretation of threat by the amygdala is too intense, and/or the filtering system from the higher areas of the brain are too weak, as often happens in PTSD, people lose control over automatic emergency response, like prolonged startle or aggressive outbursts. So now that we have a better understanding of the neuropsychology involved with the Yips, what is the best approach that athletes can use to deal with this issue?
Part III. Olympic Weightlifting Athletes, The Yips & Brainspotting
A new revolutionary technique that athletes have been using to help deal with the Yips is Brainspotting. There is a plethora of research that strongly suggests that Brainspotting is highly effective for people who are trying to process trauma. Brainspotting is a brain-based psychotherapy technique that utilizes the client’s field of vision to identify unresolved psychological issues. In Brainspotting we say ‘where you look affects how you feel’ and through this process clients have the ability to access the parts of their brain that traditional psychotherapy approaches such as cognitive behavioral therapy are unable to do. This results in clients being able to directly address the true ‘underlying’ issue (which we refer to as a Brain Spot) that has created conflict allowing individuals to move from needing to constantly cope, to not needing to cope at all. If you would like to learn more, just use this link to get more information!
Note To Reader:
If you are an athlete reading this segment of the TRAINING REPORT, hopefully this content was helpful! I put the Training Report together because I felt like many of the discussions on issues such as the Yips/mental blocks, strength training & other subject matter on athlete performance concepts were really missing the mark on these ideas (e.g. how trauma is the direct cause of the Yips). If you are interested in learning more, make sure to subscribe below for when I put out new content on issues related to sport psychology & athlete performance! Also, if you are looking to work with a mental performance specialist, you are in the right place! USE THIS LINK to reach out to me to see if my services are the right fit for your goals!
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