How to Overcome the Yips in Golf

The feeling is unmistakable. Your hands start to feel disconnected from your brain over a simple three-foot putt, your takeaway becomes a jerky mess on a basic chip shot, and a wave of panic washes over you. This isn't just a bad stroke, this is the yips. This brutally frustrating affliction can make even the most straightforward shots feel impossible, but you are not broken and your golf game is not doomed. This guide will walk you through what the yips are, why they happen, and provide a clear set of physical and mental strategies you can use to get them out of your game for good.

What Exactly Are the Yips? (And Why Do They Happen?)

First, let’s get one thing straight: having the yips does not make you a bad golfer. It doesn't mean you lack talent or nerve. Thinking about them that way only makes them worse. The yips are best understood as an involuntary neurological glitch - a sort of short-circuit between your brain’s intention and your body’s action. It’s almost always triggered by performance anxiety, creating a freeze, jolt, or twitch in the small, fine-motor muscles of your hands and wrists.

This creates a nasty feedback loop. You stand over a putt, and a thought pops into your head: "Don't yip this." That thought introduces fear and tension. Your hands get tight, your heart rate increases, and your nervous system goes into a subtle fight-or-flight mode. This tension makes the involuntary twitch more likely to happen. When it does, your original fear is confirmed, and the cycle gets stronger for the next time.

To overcome the yips, you have to break this cycle. You do that by interrupting the physical pattern that has the "yip" baked into it and by changing the mental script that causes the fear in the first place. Let's look at how to do both.

Part 1: The Physical Fixes - Retraining Your Stroke

Because the yip is an ingrained motor pattern, sometimes the fastest way to get relief is to give your brain a completely new pattern to learn. The goal isn’t to force your old stroke to work, it’s to make your old stroke obsolete by replacing it. The weirdness of these new methods is actually their strength - they bypass the neural pathways where the yip lives.

Change Your Grip

The most common and effective physical change is to alter your grip. Your hands are the epicenter of the yip, so changing how they hold the club can completely disrupt the faulty signal. Here are a few to try on the practice green:

• The Claw Grip: This is a favorite among tour pros for a reason. Keep your top hand (left hand for righties) in a standard position. Your bottom hand, however, turns so your palm faces you and you grip the club between your thumb and index finger, almost like holding a pen or a pencil. This effectively deactivates the twitchy muscles in your dominant hand, forcing your arms and shoulders to control the stroke.
• Left-Hand Low: For a right-handed golfer, this just means placing your left hand below your right hand on the grip. This reverses the roles of your hands, making your non-dominant hand the guiding force and preventing your dominant right hand from getting too "handsy" and yippy through impact.
• The "Prayer" Grip: Place your palms on either side of the grip, pressing them together as if in prayer. This puts your shoulders, arms, and hands into a single, cohesive unit, making it much harder for your wrists to break down.

Experiment with what feels best, but commit to one. It will feel bizarre at first, but that’s the point. You’re learning a new skill from scratch, one that doesn't have the memory of the yip attached to it.

Embrace the Big Muscles

The yips are a small-muscle problem. The solution is to use your big muscles - your shoulders and torso - to power the stroke. For putting and chipping, think of your arms and shoulders forming a solid triangle. The entire putting stroke should be powered by rocking your shoulders back and forth like a pendulum. Your hands and wrists should stay completely passive.

Here’s a great drill: Tuck the handle of your putter or wedge against your lead forearm. Make strokes without letting the handle separate from your arm. If it separates, you’re using your wrists. If it stays connected, you’re using your shoulders and torso. This trains a smoother, more reliable motion that is much more resistant to yips.

Introduce a New Putter

Sometimes the mental association is with the club itself. If you've yipped a thousand putts with your old blade putter, that club is a symbol of failure every time you pull the headcover off. Switching to a completely different style - like a large, high-MOI mallet, a center-shafted putter, or even an arm-lock or broomstick putter - can provide a mental and physical reset. It's permission to let go of the past and start fresh.

Part 2: The Mental Game - Rewiring Your Brain

Physical changes can provide immediate relief, but for long-term freedom from the yips, you must address the mental side. Beating the yips is less about trying hard and more about letting go of fear, control, and outcomes.

Focus on Process, Not Outcome

Thinking "make this putt" is one of the worst things you can do. It focuses you squarely on a future outcome you can't fully control, which heaps on the pressure. To break the cycle, you need to shift your entire focus to a process you can control.

Develop a simple, concrete pre-shot routine and make executing that routine your only goal. For a putt, it might be:

1. Read the line: Pick the exact spot you want the ball to roll over.
2. Take two practice strokes: While looking at the hole, feel the tempo and size of the stroke needed. The one and only goal is to make these strokes feel smooth.
3. Step in: Align the putter face to your spot, take one last look at the hole, look back at the ball, breathe out, and go.

Your "win" is not the ball going in the hole. Your "win" is executing that three-step routine perfectly. If you do that, the results will start to take care of themselves. By focusing on feel and tempo, you occupy your mind with constructive thoughts, leaving no room for the fear of missing to creep in.

Control Your Breathing

This sounds almost too simple, but it's incredibly powerful. The yips are a symptom of anxiety, which causes shallow breathing and a higher heart rate. You can manually reverse this process. Before a nervy shot, perform a "box breath":

• Inhale for 4 seconds.
• Hold for 4 seconds.
• Exhale slowly for 6 to 8 seconds.
• Hold for 4 seconds.

A long, slow exhale is a direct signal to your nervous system to calm down. It reduces your heart rate and releases muscle tension. Making this part of your pre-shot routine can switch your body from a state of "threat" to a state of "calm readiness."

Look at the Hole, Not the Ball

Here's a technique that feels radical but works wonders. On short practice putts, try looking at the hole during the entire stroke. Don't look at your putter, and don't peek at the ball. Just keep your eyes fixed on the cup as you stroke back and through.

This works because it turns a mechanical task into an athletic, reactive one - like throwing a ball to a friend. You don't look at your hand when you throw, you look at your target. This technique gets you out of your overthinking "mechanical brain" and into your intuitive "athletic brain," which is far less susceptible to freezing up. It promotes feel and a commitment to simply getting the ball to the target, which is really all putting is.

Final Thoughts

Breaking free from the yips is a process of systematic interruption. It requires you to consciously replace the faulty physical movements with new ones and override the ingrained mental fear with a committed focus on your process, not your score.

One of the biggest triggers for the anxiety that leads to the yips is on-course uncertainty. That's why we built Caddie AI - to take guesswork and doubt out of your game. When an expert opinion on strategy, club selection, and trouble shots is always available in your pocket, your mind is freed from second-guessing. That allows you to stop worrying about the 'what if' and allows you to put all your mental energy into committing to a smooth, confident swing - your single greatest defense against the yips.