Putting Yips: Lose the Yip, keep the grip

Putting yips are a dangerous situation on the golf course. Like shanks or a simple, inexplicable ball-striking ability, putting yips will send your scores and handicap skyrocketing, and you may find yourself struggling, breathlessly, in an attempt to get your game back.

Yips have been a problem for golfers at the top levels of the sport, even affecting pros like Bernhard Langer and Ben Hogan. Both Masters winners, these golfers found their game unraveling from the high point to the low point, and these conditions can happen to the best amateur and highest handicapper, and they can be devastating.

Putting bumps can manifest in your inability to move the putter, or they can be as simple as losing line or speed at all. Any one of these conditions, some worse than others, will force you to lose your love for a game that probably meant a lot to you.

You may now feel confident with the ball. You like it, you won’t be able to make the kind of swing you always have. You won’t be able to bring the club back without jerking it, and then you won’t be able to bring it back down, at all.

Your brain will tell you to freeze every time you try to hit the ball. Either known as yips or shanks, the condition is a nerve affliction that prevented you from hitting the ball like you knew you could.

You will no longer have confidence in a putt, and you simply will not dare to hit the ball. It will be like you are afraid to swing the ball. Golf swing shanks will prevent him from playing his game, and he’ll be swinging and stabbing the ball.

So nervous about the ball that the strokes of the putt will not allow you to make a normal putt. You will try to change your swing to stop the problem, but the yips will remain.

The new swing, the new path of the club, will keep you from thinking about yips, but it will only confuse your game with new fundamentals and mechanics. The putting yips will still be under the new swing.

Trying to fix it by changing my mechanics will be like trying to clean your bathroom after your sink has leaked, without turning the water off first. Cleaning up the water with a mop, with the water still running, will allow you to clean up the mess, but you’ll just have more standing water. You need to turn off the water first, and get rid of your golf yips, before cleaning up the mess.

This can be done with the right practices and you will be able to address the problem from the root of the nervous system. You’ll get back to playing your game with confidence and hitting the shots you’ve always had in your bag.