←EMDR for Sports Performance

The Yips

You know how to do this. So what happened?

The yips can make a movement you’ve performed hundreds or thousands of times suddenly feel unreliable, unfamiliar, or strangely unavailable. A throw that used to happen without thought goes somewhere it shouldn’t. A putting stroke you once mastered now jerks or freezes. The release just won’t come. The harder you try to make the movement happen normally, the less normal it can feel.

Athletes often describe it as though they’ve somehow forgotten how to do something they know they know how to do. But “the yips” is a name for what you’re experiencing, not necessarily an explanation for why it’s happening.

That’s where things get interesting.

What Do the Yips Actually Look Like?

The yips don’t always look dramatic. Sometimes the movement happens, just not the way it normally does. Sometimes it hesitates, jerks, freezes, or seems to fall apart at a particular point. And sometimes the strangest part is simply that a movement that once required almost no conscious attention suddenly requires far too much of it.

What athletes call the yips can show up in several ways:

Freezing

The movement stalls or won’t begin when the athlete intends it to. A golfer may stand over the ball unable to start the stroke. An athlete preparing to throw may feel caught between deciding to move and actually moving.

Jerking or twitching

An involuntary movement interrupts execution. The hands, wrists, arms, or another part of the movement may suddenly behave differently from what the athlete intended.

Hesitation

The movement starts to feel interrupted or uncertain. The athlete may struggle with the release, pull out of the movement, restart it, or feel unable to move through a familiar sequence normally.

Loss of control

The movement happens, but its direction, force, timing, or precision becomes unreliable. The athlete still knows what they intended to do. The body doesn’t reliably produce it.

Loss of automaticity

Something that once seemed to happen on its own becomes something the athlete feels compelled to manage. Pieces of the movement enter conscious awareness. What used to be do it can become how do I do it?

The Yips Don’t Always Look the Same.

One athlete freezes while another jerks. Another player can perform a movement perfectly in one situation and out of what looks like nowhere lose it in another. There are athletes who experience something highly specific to one movement, distance, club, throw, or circumstance while the rest of their performance remains remarkably intact.

That variation matters. Two athletes can both call what they are experiencing “the yips” without having the same problem.

What the Yips Can Look Like in Different Sports

The yips are most commonly associated with golf, but athletes describe them across a much wider range of sports. And because different sports ask the body to perform very different movements, the yips do not always look the way people expect.

Golf

The yips can appear when putting, chipping, pitching, or in the full swing. A golfer may freeze over the ball, jerk through impact, struggle to initiate the stroke, or suddenly lose control of distance and direction.

A golfer may chip beautifully on the practice green and struggle with the same shot on the course. Putting may become unreliable while the rest of the game remains intact. Sometimes the problem seems tied to a particular club, stroke, distance, or situation.

Baseball & Softball

Throwing yips can interfere with pitching, fielding, catching, or making a particular kind of throw. The ball may sail, spike into the ground, stick in the hand, or become difficult to release at all.

Sometimes the contradiction is startling. An athlete may still be able to throw hard or make a difficult long throw while struggling with an easy toss to a nearby teammate. A pitcher can remain perfectly comfortable on the mound yet find catch unexpectedly difficult. The arm still works. And the skill hasn’t simply vanished. Still, something about when or how it becomes available has changed drastically.

And Beyond

Similar disruptions are described in darts, archery, tennis, cricket, disc golf, and other sports where precise, highly practiced movements are part of performance.

The movement may be different. The question is remarkably familiar:

I know how to do this. Why can’t I do it right now?

And that question deserves more attention than simply deciding to call the answer “the yips”.

“I Feel Like I’ve Forgotten How” Does Not Prove the Yips.

For some athletes, that is exactly what the experience feels like, but the feeling that you’ve forgotten how does not tell us why the movement changed. Because a technical problem can also make a familiar movement feel completely foreign. An injury or physical change can alter the way the body performs it. And anxiety or pressure can interfere with performance. Some involuntary or task-specific movement problems may actually call for medical or neurological evaluation. It just depends.

And sometimes several things may be happening at once.

The experience is real. The explanation is still open.

So, Is It Actually the Yips?

That’s a more useful question than it may first appear, as the yips, choking under pressure, performance anxiety, mental blocks, technical problems, and certain movement disorders all can produce experiences that overlap.

While, a golfer who suddenly cannot make a familiar stroke and a baseball player whose hand seems to stop cooperating may both use the word yips, that doesn’t mean the same thing is happening to both of them. The label can help describe the problem. It shouldn’t stop us from investigating it.

Sometimes the Hardest Movement is the One Supposed to Be Easy

The inconsistency can be one of the most useful things about the problem, because instead of asking why a movement should work, we can begin paying attention to when it does work.

What Changes When the Movement Changes?

Pressure may be part of the answer. But it is not the only thing that can change from one situation to another. Because attention, effort, timing and anticipation all change. Consequences change. Situations can acquire history they did not have before.

Inconsistency gives us somewhere to look:

• When does the movement work?
• When does it change?
• What is different between those two moments?

Those questions move us beyond deciding whether the athlete still “knows how.”

What Causes the Yips?

Search long enough and you’ll find plenty of explanations. You’ll find that the yips are caused by anxiety. And by overthinking. Also, by pressure. And some say it is focal dystonia. Another explanation is disrupted motor control. Oh, and let’s not leave out that the yips come from becoming too conscious of a movement that used to happen automatically.

Science Itself Has Not Earned that Sentence

Research has identified psychological, neurological, physiological, and motor characteristics associated with the yips. What it has not established is one cause that accounts for every athlete and every presentation.

That distinction matters because finding something happening in the nervous system is not necessarily the same as finding what started it. The same goes for finding anxiety, conscious monitoring, or an unusual movement pattern.

Is this the cause, or is this what the cause looks like when it reaches movement?

That’s a different question. And it leaves us with a much more useful place to begin:

What happened here?

What was happening around the time the problem began? What happened immediately before the first unusual movement? What changed afterward? Did anxiety come first, or did suddenly losing control of a familiar movement give the athlete something to become anxious about?

Sometimes there may be a clear beginning. Sometimes there won’t be. Either way, cause is something to investigate, not something the word yips has already answered.

The Stages of the Yips

Whatever happened at the beginning, the story doesn’t end there.

01. The Disruption

Something that used to happen normally doesn’t.

Maybe it happens once. Maybe it happens again. At first, it can simply be a strange moment that doesn’t yet have much meaning attached to it.

02. The Interpretation

Now there is something to explain.

The athlete starts forming theories. Mechanics. Pressure. Confidence. Fatigue. Injury. Something mental. Something physical.

The question has changed from “What happened?” to “Why is this happening?”

03. The Attempts

Now comes everything done in response.

More practice. Less practice. Coaching. Technical adjustments. Equipment changes. Mental strategies. New routines. Time away. Workarounds.

Some things may help. Some may not. Some may work beautifully for a while and then stop working.

Each attempt also produces new information: this helped, that didn’t, it disappeared here, it came back there.

04. The Accumulated History

Eventually, the athlete isn’t arriving at the movement with only whatever was present when the problem began.

There is now a history.

The misses. The corrections. The successful attempts. The anticipation. The relief when it works. The moments other people noticed. The situations that have become easier to avoid. The adjustments that make it possible to keep playing.

And that leads to a distinction that can change how we understand the whole problem:

The first yip and the hundredth yip may not have the same cause.

Whatever started the problem, everything that happened afterward becomes part of its history.

Why Isn’t More Practice Fixing It?

Practice changes things. That is its purpose. Practice can help athletes refine technique, build strength, improve timing, create consistency, correct mechanics, and give an athlete thousands of opportunities to make a movement more precise. But sometimes the problem showing up during the movement, durign the game, is not something more reps can reach.

Practice works with the movement. What if the movement is carrying something with it?

A particular failure can become memorable. A situation can acquire anticipation. The body can begin responding before the athlete has consciously decided what to think.

An athlete can understand exactly when the problem started, recognize the conditions that bring it out, and still find the same response waiting for them when the moment arrives. Knowing the history is important, but it is not necessarily the same as changing what that history is doing now.

And this is where an approach like EMDR becomes interesting.

EMDR gives us a way to work with experiences, associations, body responses, expectations, and other information that may have become connected to the movement. The purpose is not to teach the athlete how to throw, swing, putt, release, or perform the skill correctly. They usually already know how.

The question is what becomes possible when the movement no longer has to occur with the same response attached to it.

Practice may still matter afterward. An athlete may need repetitions to integrate a technical change, rebuild timing, test the movement in increasingly demanding situations, or simply return to playing. Or the movement may become available without much deliberate rebuilding at all. But those are different jobs.

Practice can develop the skill. EMDR can work with what has become connected to accessing it.

You Can Get Very Good at Having the Yips

Not every unresolved performance problem looks like falling apart. Athletes adapt. You stop making a certain throw. Change the way you approach a shot. Develop a routine that gets you through it. Lean harder on the parts of your game you still trust.

Eventually, the workaround can become so effective that other people may have no idea there is a problem at all.

Adaptation can keep you competing. It can preserve performance, buy time, and sometimes be exactly what makes sense. But it also creates an important distinction: being able to perform around a problem isn’t necessarily the same as no longer having it.

Sometimes the clearest evidence of how long something has been there is how much you’ve learned to do without.

The Yips Are One Kind of Performance Problem

There are plenty of ways for an athlete to be capable of something and still have trouble accessing that capability when it matters.

Sports performance work gives us room to investigate that gap without assuming every problem has the same explanation or needs the same solution.

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