Yips
The yips are involuntary muscle jerks, twitches, or freezes that interrupt a golfer’s stroke, most often on short putts. They cause missed shots that have little to do with a player’s actual skill.
What are the yips?
Few problems in golf are as feared, or as misunderstood, as the yips. Picture a player who has sunk thousands of three-foot putts, then one day cannot draw the putter back smoothly. The hands jerk or the wrists twitch, and the stroke locks up for a moment. The ball misses.
The term is usually credited to Tommy Armour, a Scottish-born champion of the 1920s and 30s who described the condition as a brain spasm that wrecks the short game. Over the years, golfers have called the same thing the staggers, the jerks, the waggles, and the whiskey fingers, but yips is the word that stuck.
What makes the yips so unsettling is that they show up without warning and resist the usual fixes. A golfer can putt flawlessly on the practice green, then fall apart over the same putt during a round. The shot itself is simple. The breakdown is in the connection between the brain and the muscles that control the stroke.
Common symptoms of the yips
Symptoms vary from one golfer to the next. According to MedicineNet, the most common signs are:
- A sudden jerk or flinch of the hands and wrists just before or during impact
- Tremors or shaking through the forearms
- Twitching in the small muscles that control the clubface
- A freeze, where the golfer hesitates over the ball and struggles to start the stroke at all
These movements are involuntary. The golfer is not choosing to flinch, and trying harder to hold the club steady often makes the twitch worse.
What causes the yips?
For a long time, the yips were dismissed as pure nerves, a polite way of saying a player had choked. Research has complicated that picture. The condition sits on a spectrum, with two main causes anchoring opposite ends.
At one end is focal dystonia, a neurological condition in which the brain sends faulty signals to a specific set of muscles. In golfers, this shows up as a co-contraction that Mayo Clinic researcher Aynsley Smith described as a double pull: one muscle group tries to extend the wrist while another flexes it at the same instant, producing the telltale jerk. The same task-specific dystonia affects musicians, writers, and surgeons.
At the other end is performance anxiety. Stress raises arousal, tightens the hands, and floods the stroke with conscious thought, which interrupts a motion that should run on autopilot. Sport psychologist Debbie Crews of Arizona State University has found that only a small share of yips cases, roughly 7 percent, appear to be purely dystonic in origin. Many golfers fall somewhere in between, where a mild neurological glitch is worsened by anxiety. Smith and her colleagues summarized this in the journal Sports Medicine as a psychoneuromuscular problem rather than a simple case of bad nerves.
Types of yips
Most people associate the yips with putting, but the problem can attach itself to almost any short, precise stroke. The table below outlines where golfers most often run into it.
| Type | Where it shows up | What it looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Putting yips | Short putts, especially inside five feet | A jerk or freeze that pushes or pulls the ball offline |
| Chipping yips | Delicate chips and pitches around the green | A stab or flinch at impact, often producing a fat or thin shot |
| Full-swing yips | Tee shots and full swings, less common | A hit impulse or freeze that disrupts the takeaway or strike |
Putting draws the most attention because the stroke is small and the margin for error is tiny. A flinch barely visible to the eye sends a short putt past the hole. Chipping yips are common enough to have ended the short games of capable players, and the rarer full-swing version can affect even the drive.
Yips vs. choking
Because both wreck a golfer’s score under pressure, the yips and choking get lumped together. They are not the same thing, and the distinction matters for anyone trying to understand the condition.
| Yips | Choking | |
|---|---|---|
| Root cause | Often neurological, involving involuntary muscle activity | Psychological, driven by pressure and anxiety |
| When it appears | Can happen anytime, even with no nerves and no audience | Tends to appear in high-pressure moments |
| The movement | An involuntary, physical jerk or freeze the golfer cannot stop | A general performance drop from tension and overthinking |
| Anxiety’s role | Can worsen the symptoms, but is not always the cause | Is the cause |
As golf writer David Owen noted in his reporting for The New Yorker, anxiety can aggravate the yips the way it aggravates the tremors of Parkinson’s disease, yet the yips are often present whether the golfer feels nervous or not. A choke fades once the pressure lifts. The yips can persist on an empty practice green.
How common are the yips?
The yips are far more widespread than most casual players assume. Mayo Clinic research led by Aynsley Smith found that between 33 and 48 percent of serious golfers have experienced the condition at some point. Affected players add roughly 4.7 strokes to an 18-hole score, a penalty that can quietly ruin a career.
Experience appears to raise the risk rather than lower it. Golfers who have played for more than 25 years are among the most prone, and an early study by McDaniel and colleagues, published in the journal Neurology in 1989, found that about 28 percent of male golfers surveyed reported yips symptoms. Tournament play, advancing age, and perfectionist tendencies all show up as risk factors in the research. The yips spare no level of talent, and several major champions have battled them in full public view.
The condition is not unique to golf, either. The same loss of fine motor control turns up well beyond the course. Baseball pitchers know a version of it as the throwing yips, and it appears in darts and archery as well.
Can the yips be cured?
There is no universally accepted cure, and that reality is part of what makes the yips so dreaded. Most golfers learn to manage the condition rather than erase it.
The common starting point is to disrupt the pattern the brain has learned. Changing the grip, switching to a longer or counterbalanced putter, or moving to a cross-handed or claw hold can recruit different muscles and break the cycle, at least for a while. Bernhard Langer famously kept his career alive through repeated bouts of the putting yips by reinventing his grip more than once. For cases that lean neurological, treatments such as botulinum toxin injections have been studied, while anxiety-driven cases tend to respond better to relaxation and routine changes.
None of these is a guaranteed fix, and symptoms often return. Golfers serious about working on the problem usually combine a mechanical change with mental strategies, and many find it helps to work with a coach. For practical drills and step-by-step approaches, see a dedicated guide on managing the yips.
Related Golf Terms
- Worm burner — A shot hit extremely low along the ground.
- Wood — A type of club with a large head, used for long-distance shots.
- Wrist hinge — The cocking of the wrists during the backswing to create power.
- Yardage marker — Posts or markers indicating distance to the green.
- Wolf — A popular golf betting game where one player (the wolf) chooses a partner each hole.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are the yips permanent?
Not necessarily, but they can be stubborn. Some golfers shake them within weeks by changing their grip or routine, while others manage recurring symptoms for years. There is no guaranteed cure.
Are the yips mental or physical?
Both. Research places them on a continuum from focal dystonia, a neurological condition, to performance anxiety, with many golfers experiencing a mix of the two.
Do the yips only affect putting?
No. Putting is the most common, but the yips also reach chipping, pitching, and the full swing.
Who coined the term yips?
The word is generally credited to Tommy Armour, a champion golfer of the 1920s and 30s, who used it to describe the brain spasm that destroyed his own short game.
Sources
- Golf Digest. “What are the yips?” by Sam Weinman. Accessed June 2026.
https://www.golfdigest.com/story/what-are-the-yips-experts-say-its-not-just-in-your-head - MedicineNet. “Why Is It Called the Yips? Yips Meaning, Symptoms & Causes.” Accessed June 2026.
https://www.medicinenet.com/why_is_it_called_the_yips/article.htm - Smith, A.M., et al. “A Multidisciplinary Study of the ‘Yips’ Phenomenon in Golf.” Sports Medicine, 2000. Accessed June 2026.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.2165/00007256-200030060-00004 - Mayo Clinic News Network. “Mayo Clinic researchers uncover methods to quantify the yips and golfer’s cramp.” Accessed June 2026.
https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/mayo-clinic-researchers-uncover-methods-to-quantify-the-yips-and-golfers-cramp/ - McDaniel, K.D., Cummings, J.L., Shain, S. “The yips: a focal dystonia of golfers.” Neurology, 1989;39:192–195.
- ScienceDaily. “‘Yips’ Problem In Golf May Have Physical, Psychological Causes.” Accessed June 2026.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/01/010101102920.htm
