Interesting read for those who have the yips
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I had it putting with right hand putter, and that was why I switched to left hand putter. Still uses my dominant hand (right), only I'm stroking to the right instead of to the left. Just like the backhand stroke in tennis.
This sport biomechanics expert below say its because of scar tissue from driving hard...cant be the only cause leh, i drive the ball relax2, i only type on keyboards in the office, dun think my arms have scar tissue
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The Yips, Bane of Golfers, may be muscular.
Among the many embarrassments golf can dole out, missing a short putt may be the worst. The stroke starts with a twitch of the hands and a flip of the wrist, and then the ball lips out of the cup or skitters wide of the hole. And sometimes, with recreational golfers, the ball does not move at all because they have bounced the putter over it.
Known as the yips — but also the jumps, the shakes, the jitters and the flinches — the affliction is often linked to a kind of performance anxiety, reflecting perhaps an erosion of confidence or a weakness of will. Even some of the game’s heavyweights — including Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Lee Trevino, Johnny Miller, Bernhard Langer and, more recently, Tiger Woods — have battled it.
Among the 156 players in the field for the United States Open this week at Congressional Country Club outside Washington, there will be some who once had, now have or will have the yips. And one thing is for sure: the Open, with its super-fast green speeds, along with the pressure of playing for the national championship, will put severe demands on the putter.
For years, the yips were thought to have psychological or neurological roots, ideas supported by two Mayo Clinic studies. But a hypothesis has emerged pointing to a muscular source — the result of a buildup of scar tissue in the forearms — for the involuntary twitch that sets off the yips.
The term yips is thought to have been coined about 50 years ago by the Scottish professional Tommy Armour, who said of them, “Once you’ve had ’em, you’ve got ’em.”
One golfer who had ’em was Tom Watson, who won eight majors and finished second at the British Open in 2009 at age 59.
Watson once estimated that the yips cost him more than a title a year over a decade, but he shunned the usual remedies of a long putter or an unconventional grip. He simply fought through it, relearning to accelerate his stroke into the ball, as he had done naturally in his youth
“I still get nervous before I putt,” he told reporters after overcoming the problem, “but by the time I’m standing over them, I feel confident.”
He looked that way recently when, at 61, he won his second Senior P.G.A. Championship, 10 years after his first, by stroking a 4-footer in the middle of the cup on the first playoff hole.
Another player who has struggled on the greens is Mark Calcavecchia. A senior tour player who was a good putter before he got the yips in the late 1990s, Calcavecchia overcame them by switching to a claw putting grip.
“I was twitchy, I could feel it,” he said, adding: “Anything outside of 18 inches was 50-50. That’s how bad it was.”
The new notion that the yips can be muscular in nature comes from Robert Anthony Prichard, a San Francisco sports biomechanics expert best known for his work in swimming and track and field. Prichard gained some golf credibility recently by analyzing video of the driver swing of a young Arnold Palmer, calling it the most efficient in pro golf history.
“I was impressed by that analysis because I don’t think Arnold Palmer gets nearly enough credit for being as technically good as he was,” said Robby Ware, a PGA Tour rules official. “The powerful coil, his flow through the ball, is overlooked because of his flair and charisma, and because all the photos and films of his swing focused on the swirling finish.”
Prichard said he was analyzing the swings of some of golf’s greatest ball-strikers for his book, “The Efficient Golfer,” when he noticed that Snead, Hogan and Trevino all restrained their driver swing in order to return the club at impact to its original position. A friend, Prichard said, pointed out that they had one other thing in common: the yips.
“They were gripping the driver very hard, so as to limit extension at impact,” Prichard said. “The driver head is going over 100 miles an hour through space and is pulling away from the golfer with 100 pounds of force. Even though this pull only lasts for a fraction of a second, it is repeated over and over again and it results in the tearing of hundreds of the tens of thousands of small individual muscle fibers that make up each muscle in the forearms.”
Over time, Prichard said, the accumulation of scar tissue and the tension in the forearms from fighting centrifugal force causes spasms when a golfer grips the putter lightly, activating the same set of muscles. In other words, what was good for consistent ball-striking was ultimately bad for putting.
“I still get nervous before I putt,” he told reporters after overcoming the problem, “but by the time I’m standing over them, I feel confident.”
He looked that way recently when, at 61, he won his second Senior P.G.A. Championship, 10 years after his first, by stroking a 4-footer in the middle of the cup on the first playoff hole.
Another player who has struggled on the greens is Mark Calcavecchia. A senior tour player who was a good putter before he got the yips in the late 1990s, Calcavecchia overcame them by switching to a claw putting grip.
“I was twitchy, I could feel it,” he said, adding: “Anything outside of 18 inches was 50-50. That’s how bad it was.”
The new notion that the yips can be muscular in nature comes from Robert Anthony Prichard, a San Francisco sports biomechanics expert best known for his work in swimming and track and field. Prichard gained some golf credibility recently by analyzing video of the driver swing of a young Arnold Palmer, calling it the most efficient in pro golf history.
“I was impressed by that analysis because I don’t think Arnold Palmer gets nearly enough credit for being as technically good as he was,” said Robby Ware, a PGA Tour rules official. “The powerful coil, his flow through the ball, is overlooked because of his flair and charisma, and because all the photos and films of his swing focused on the swirling finish.”
Prichard said he was analyzing the swings of some of golf’s greatest ball-strikers for his book, “The Efficient Golfer,” when he noticed that Snead, Hogan and Trevino all restrained their driver swing in order to return the club at impact to its original position. A friend, Prichard said, pointed out that they had one other thing in common: the yips.
“They were gripping the driver very hard, so as to limit extension at impact,” Prichard said. “The driver head is going over 100 miles an hour through space and is pulling away from the golfer with 100 pounds of force. Even though this pull only lasts for a fraction of a second, it is repeated over and over again and it results in the tearing of hundreds of the tens of thousands of small individual muscle fibers that make up each muscle in the forearms.”
Over time, Prichard said, the accumulation of scar tissue and the tension in the forearms from fighting centrifugal force causes spasms when a golfer grips the putter lightly, activating the same set of muscles. In other words, what was good for consistent ball-striking was ultimately bad for putting.
The cure, according to Prichard, is not a visit to a sports psychologist. He recommends two things: when preparing to drive, a golfer should change the position of the hands by raising them higher and moving them a few inches farther from the body; and the golfer should get massage therapy to connective tissue, to release the scar tissue that has accumulated.
“When we see golfers, over and over again, highly skilled golfers who restrain the driver and end up getting the yips, and we know what accounts for it, it makes a pretty good case for changing the way we do it,” he said.
Prichard, who does not play golf, argues that Woods has recently struggled with the yips in part because of his new driver swing.
“Tiger has gone to restraining his driver,” he said. “Back when he wasn’t doing this, he was winning majors by 12 strokes and putting out of this world. He is not doing that now, and I feel it’s a combination of his neck problems and his new driver swing.”
Although some sports psychologists, teachers and players concede that there may be something to Prichard’s analysis, others say his conclusions are a reach.
“No one has proven that the that the yips are not a purely psychological or psychosomatic phenomenon,” said Douglas Baumgarten, a biomechanics expert and the director of SportFit Lab in Herndon, Va. “So Prichard is first assuming that the yips are purely a physical symptom — totally unproven. The fact that some golfers experience the yips and then miraculously recover certainly suggests a strong psychological component.
“My take on the cause of the yips — again, not scientifically proven: a psychological phenomenon in some mostly younger golfers, a neural phenomenon in some mostly older golfers, or a combination of the two.”
Dr. Patrick Cohn, a sports psychologist and founder of Peak Performance Sports in Orlando, Fla., acknowledged that biomechanical issues could exacerbate or even lead to the yips, but he said that they were caused primarily by fear and worry.
“Almost always it’s related to overcontrol, brought about by anxiety about missing a putt or a shot, and fear of the embarrassment that results,” Cohn said. “Overcontrol can happen unconsciously. It’s no longer free flowing or natural or using the player’s motor memory.”
Not exactly, according to Geoff Mangum, an author, putting coach and self-described theorist who runs the Web site PuttingZone.com and works with the PGA Tour player Steve Elkington. Mangum contends that the yips are a neurological disorder. “At bottom, the yips are physical, not mental,” he said in an e-mail.
Citing the second of the Mayo Clinic studies, he likened the yips to similar movement disorders that occur after 20 years or so of other fine-motor hand exercises, like flute playing, guitar playing and calligraphy.
“That all argues strongly that the yips are neurological in the main clinical sense,” he said.
Hank Haney, Woods’s former swing coach, has seen thousands of cases of the yips at his golf academies across the country — from putting to chipping to driver yips — and says he there are many causes and no single cure.
“I’ve seen kids as young as 11 years old who have played very little golf who have the yips,” Haney said. “A woman student of mine, a surgeon, was fine in the operating room but had terrible yips putting, one of the worst I’ve ever seen. I’ve also seen younger players, 14- to 15-year-olds, whose father or mother also had the yips, which suggests an obvious hereditary component to it.
“Nobody can really pinpoint any single cause. The best information is that it’s a neuromuscular problem. There’s not anybody who can cure it. All you can do is find ways to work around it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/sports/golf/the-yips-bane-of-golfers-may-be-muscular.html
Subject: The YIPS! 
Thu Jun 16, 2011 7:13 am
until 
that is why you are our top ranked BB....
