As golfers, there's nothing more terrifying to us as the yips.
The sudden twitch at the moment of impact feels, to those unfortunate enough to suffer from it, like an electric shock. It can send the ball haywire—making a fun game feel rather horrible.
It's impossible to play good golf with the yips, and so difficult to overcome that it drives too many of us to quit the game altogether. But those who make it through usually come out the other end sporting a strange new technique.
Yani Tseng is the latest example. Playing at the Chevron Championship this week, the five-time major champion is putting left-handed.
Brief yips explainer 😰
Golf Digest has devoted lots of content to the yips over the years, including a multi-part series from Tiger Woods' former coach Hank Haney in 2004 (which you can read in our archive here).
The yips, Haney says, is a kind of spasm in your hands which causes a "breakdown" in your wrists, caused by a nervous anticipation of making impact.
Notice in the graphs below, which measures a yip stroke to a standard one, how the hands and grip twist wildly in the yip stroke compared to a non-yip stroke.
You can't really overcome the yips, but Haney writes that you can work around it. You do this by adopting a technique that is just different enough from the old one that the twitch is subdued.
"The key to beating the yips is finding a different motor process than the one with the yip in it," he says.
That's why you see golfers like O'Meara adopting a claw (or reverse claw) grip, or the long putter, or in Yani's case, going lefty.
But, according to one recent study, an even better way...
A recent study reveals hope 📈
At the World Scientific Congress of Golf last year, researcher Dr. Andy Hoffer looked at the arm-lock method of putting specifically, and how it helped golfers with tremors or yips.
This, of course, was the method Bernhard Langer used to overcome the yips and win the Masters. And in Hoffer's study, the results were categorical:
- Dr. Hoffer found that golfers suffering from tremors or yips averaged substantial improvement.
- "Golfers with tremor or yips gained 2.7 strokes on average against themselves… playing with an arm lock versus playing with a standard putter."
- No improvement was found in golfers adopting arm-lock putting without self-reported tremors or yips.
The study went on to explain that the large portion of golfers' improvement came in the five-to-seven foot range—which makes sense, that's the classic yip range—and that the technique resulted in a shorter backstroke length due to the limited wrist movement.
We break down the study in more detail in our latest episode of Golf IQ, which you can listen to below (or right here). In short, if you're a yipper reading this, try arm-lock before going lefty, and see what happens.