Sport Psychology Tactics - The Golf Yips
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!
Table Of Contents
Introduction: Athletes Psychology, Golfers & The The Yips Meaning
Part I. How Golf Sets Up Athletes For The Yips & Why Sport Psychologists Don’t Understand This
Part II. What The Yips Feel Like & How Professionals Incorrectly Try To ‘Cure’ The Yips
Part III. A Deep Dive Into the Neuroscience Of The Golf Yips
Introduction: Athletes Psychology, Golfers & The The Yips Meaning
If you go on any of the social media platforms and search for the Yips in golf, you will find no shortage of coaches that talk about ‘curing’ the yips. Golf instructors will claim to provide strategies that can help athletes move on from this issue with approaches ranging from gripping the club a certain way, to completely changing an approach process. I am not an expert on golf strategies or tactics, but I my background in psychotherapy and sport psychology has put me in frequent contact with various athlete populations that deal with the issue of the Yips. As such, through both my failures and successes I have finally arrived at a place where I have developed a solid understanding of the Yips.
The truth is that there is no ‘cure’ for the Yips, because the Yips is a built in psychological defense mechanism. However, there are interventions athletes can use to stop the Yips from happening. Because this can be confusing I want to use this issue of the Training Report to review the following. In part I. I want to review why there is so much misinformation on how to approach the Yips. In part II. I will explain what the Yips feels like per the reports of golfers I have worked with. In part III. I will go into the neuroscience behind the yips, and in part IV. I will review strategies that can help get rid of current Yips symptoms and stop the Yips from happening again. Let’s dive in!
Part I. How Golf Sets Up Athletes For The Yips & Why Sport Psychologists Don’t Understand This
Golf is one of the most brutal psychological sports that athletes can compete in. To successfully execute a golf swing, the golf athlete needs to have perfect control of their body. Like a symphony, everything needs to move in perfect synchronization and if one note is off, the whole symphony will be too. The time to ‘overthink’ in between shots creates added pressure, the large crowds eerily silent during swings, and the knowledge that golf athletes possess when they know down to the shot how close they are to either securing a win or falling out of a respectable finish adds up and takes a brutal toll on one’s psyche no matter how you look at it.
Which leads me to my main point of emphasis. No matter how hard you train mentally or physically, you never ‘permanently’ stay in a peak performance state. The stress test of sports will always extract excessive amounts of energy from an athlete’s body and as such will always leave athletes in a vulnerable state. Abraham Maslow sad it best ‘One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again’. This is tough for many athletes to both accept and understand. Let’s dive deeper into the experience of the Yips, how Maslow’s statement connects to stopping the Yips and how most sport psychologists incorrectly try to help athletes with this issue.
Part II. What The Yips Feel Like & How Professionals Incorrectly Try To ‘Cure’ The Yips
In my experience working with golf athletes, there are common symptoms that they will describe when they are ‘yipping’. Some of these symptoms include but are not limited to involuntary spasms of the hand, excessive muscle tension in very specific areas of the body, a very intense temperature change felt in certain areas of the body, temperature changes that come in ‘waves’ such as increase of heat in the head or even the elbows, hyper focusing on a very small area of the ball, a quick and unexpected muscle spasm in random parts of the body during golf swings, etc.
Unfortunately, most sport psychologists and even neuroscientists are so far away in their understanding of what this problem actually is. Most of these professionals spend their time focusing on the symptoms I previously mentioned by providing ‘coping’ strategies that just help athletes ‘manage’ these symptoms. The truth is that these professionals should not be focusing on the symptoms, but rather using the information of the symptoms to try and understand what the true, underlying issue is that is creating these symptoms. The best way to understand that is by exploring the neuroscience of trauma, and expanding our knowledge of how trauma creates these issues.
Part III. A Deep Dive Into the Neuroscience Of The Golf Yips
In the book This Is Your Brain On Sports by David Grand, the author goes into detail explaining what happens in the brain that causes the Yips. Per the author ‘In parallel fashion, the brain attempts to always move toward a state of psychological equilibrium. Over the course of our lives, we are exposed to a variety of life experiences, some positive, some neutral, and some negative. Through a natural assimilation process, the brain adaptively processes these experiences so they are constructively integrated. What is useful from the experience is learned and stored in the brain with the appropriate emotion and is available for future use. When an experience is successfully assimilated or digested it is stored in the brain with little attached intense emotion or physical sensation. When we recall such an incident, we don’t reexperience the old emotion or sensation with it. In this way we are informed by our past experiences and memories but not controlled by them and with sports our present athletic performances are not burdened by emotional or physical baggage from the past, only learned experience. By contrast, trauma or any strongly negatively charged experience isn’t adequately assimilated or processed. Instead, the upsetting incident remains stuck in the system in broken pieces’.
The author continues, ‘ The body instantly memorizes the physical experience of the trauma in exquisite detail, including the body sensations of the impact and pain, along with the associated sights, sounds, smells and tastes. The attached emotions and where they are felt in the body are frozen as well. The brain is overwhelmed and instead of getting digested, all of the information attached to the injury, including the negative thoughts is stored in the brain in exactly the same form it was initially experienced. Days, week, months or even years later when the athlete is in a situation reminiscent of the original trauma or experiences prolonged stress, the upsetting experience may be unconsciously activated, thus interfering with the performance of the moment. These components represent all of the sensory details from the earlier event that were frozen in the brain and body in their original disturbing state: the images, lighting, emotions, physical movements, sounds, or smells. The unique sensory details later returning to consciousness cause the performance disrupting symptoms so common in mental blocks.’
In the book The Body Keeps The Score, Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk goes even deeper explaining how the mechanisms of the brain respond to stress, which in turn create the symptoms of 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.
In summary, to permanently arrive at a place where an athlete is never vulnerable to experiencing the yips would mean the athlete has transcended their subcortical brain’s built in defense mechanisms…this is impossible. A human’s brain is wired as it is wired. Athletes can beat ‘episodes’ of the Yips, but because the nature of sports is so brutal, there is a high likelihood that athletes will be vulnerable to more traumatic experiences and therefore vulnerable to experiencing the yips. We can stop episodes of the Yips, but if athletes experience things such as sports humiliations, sports trauma, injuries, car accidents, medical issues, interpersonal relationship issues, then we have to live with the possibility that we may experience some version of the yips if we go through these events. So what can athletes do about this?
Part IV. The Yips Meaning & Sports Therapist Mental Health
The first thing athletes can do is regularly engage with a sport psychologist, licensed psychotherapist or a Certified Mental Performance Consultant (CMPC). By regularly engaging with a professional that specializes in trauma or sports-performance work, athletes can stay ahead of the inevitable stress that sports experiences will exact upon them. In the same way athletes regularly use strength training to reduce the likelihood of injuries, having a space to routinely process the stress and trauma of sports will help athletes avoid or reduce the intensity of the yips. This should not be viewed by athletes as a sign that they are ‘broken’ or have failed, but just a natural part of the experience of training for sport performance situations. Sport psychologists with the right type of training can help athletes get to a point where they do not need to constantly cope with the yips DURING sports competition.
Secondly, if athletes are looking for specific interventions that will help them there are several that come to mind for me. Athletes should seek to work with someone that has training AND certification in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing) and/or Brainspotting. These therapy interventions require the professional to have advanced training on the neuroscience of how the brain responds to stress which is critical for athlete development. Another intervention that athletes can regularly engage in is traditional talk therapy. While I believe that modalities like EMDR or Brainspotting are best suited to ameliorate the Yips, traditional talk therapy will provide the athlete to process regular stressors in their life in a safe and therapeutic environment, which is better than suppressing one’s emotions.
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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