
Updated February 28, 2024
Beacon Health Systems: The yips are involuntary wrist spasms that occur most commonly when golfers are trying to putt. However, the yips also can affect people who play other sports — such as cricket, darts and baseball.
It was once thought that the yips were always associated with performance anxiety. However, it now appears that some people have the yips due to a neurological condition affecting specific muscles. This condition is known as focal dystonia.
Changing the way you perform the affected task might help you find relief from the yips. For example, a right-handed golfer might try putting left-handed. Continue reading
On Thursday, after Ernie Els tried to explain how he had six-putted from three feet on one hole and then missed a series of mind-boggling short putts on others, he described his condition as if there was some kind of “short” in his brain.
“I can go to that putting green now and make 20 straight 3‑footers,” Els said after the round. “And then you get on the course and you feel a little different and you can’t do what you normally do. So it’s pretty difficult.”
It was apparent to anyone watching that Els is in the midst of an acute battle with the “yips” (and it’s continuing on Friday, where Els missed a short putt on the first hole). It is a dreaded condition to golfers because even at Golf Digest, where we devote pages each month to fixing this flaw or that in your game, there is no known fix, and even worse, there is rarely a positive outcome.
What are the yips? That’s something David Owen, a Golf Digest contributing editor and also a staff writer for the New Yorker, tried to tackle in a feature story for the latter magazine in 2014. In the story, Owen addressed many misconceptions about the yips, the biggest perhaps being that the yips is some variation of choking under pressure.
In fact it’s not. Although anxiety can heighten the condition, it can afflict golfers under any circumstance. “Anxiety can exacerbate the yips—just as it exacerbates the tremors in Parkinson’s disease—but it’s not the cause, since the yips are usually present whether the yipper is nervous or not, and even when the yipper can’t feel them,” Owen writes. It’s worth noting, however, that Els says he does not have this problem on the practice green, yet endures it during competition.
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