The yips are involuntary muscle spasms, jerks, or freezes that disrupt finely tuned motor skills in athletes. They most commonly appear during golf putting as sudden wrist spasms, but they also affect baseball players making routine throws, cricket bowlers, dart players, and athletes in other precision sports. Roughly 20 to 48 percent of elite professional golfers experience the yips at some point in their careers, with one large survey of about 1,300 professional golfers finding that 35 percent had been affected.
What makes the yips so frustrating is that they strike during skills an athlete has performed thousands of times. The body suddenly refuses to do what the brain is asking, and the harder the athlete tries to regain control, the worse it tends to get.
Two Types: Neurological and Psychological
Researchers classify the yips into two subtypes that often overlap. Type I is a form of focal dystonia, a neurological condition where the brain sends faulty signals to specific muscles during a well-practiced movement. In golfers with Type I yips, forearm muscle activity is significantly higher than normal even when there’s no competitive pressure or anxiety involved. The muscles simply misfire during the motion itself.
Type II is rooted in anxiety and is closely related to choking under pressure. The key distinction: athletes who choke can still make correct decisions about what to do, but psychological interference prevents smooth execution. Type II yips look similar on the outside, with jerky or frozen movements, but the root cause is mental rather than neurological. Many athletes experience a combination of both types, making the condition difficult to neatly categorize.
How the Yips Differ From Choking
Choking is typically an isolated incident. An athlete has a bad moment under pressure, then bounces back. The yips are chronic. One theory suggests they may develop as a conditioned reaction to repeated choking experiences, or even a single emotionally intense choking episode. Over time, the anxiety response becomes wired into the movement pattern itself, so the athlete doesn’t just feel nervous but physically can’t execute the skill.
This is why the yips tend to get worse with experience rather than better. The survey of professional golfers found that the odds of developing yips increased proportionally with years of playing. More repetitions of a skill means more opportunities for the anxiety-movement link to form and strengthen, and golfers with yips showed a high predisposition to anxiety overall.
What It Looks Like Across Different Sports
In golf, the classic presentation is a sudden jerk or freeze of the wrists during a putt. The golfer may also experience tremors in the hands or a complete inability to initiate the backstroke. In baseball, it typically shows up as an inability to make accurate short throws, particularly from second base or catcher to pitcher. The arm seems to lock up or release at the wrong moment during a throw the player has made tens of thousands of times before.
In gymnastics, a related phenomenon called “the twisties” gained wide attention when Simone Biles withdrew from events at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Like the yips, the twisties represent a sudden disconnection between brain and body where muscle memory fails mid-skill. The difference is the stakes: losing spatial awareness during an airborne flip or twist carries serious injury risk, which is why Biles’s decision to stop competing was a safety issue, not just a performance one.
Why Diagnosis Is Difficult
There is no simple test for the yips. Diagnosis typically involves a combination of self-reported symptoms, psychological questionnaires measuring traits like anxiety, perfectionism, and obsessional thinking, and lab-based movement analysis. Researchers have identified some clinical signs that point toward the neurological (Type I) version: muscles neighboring the affected area firing when they shouldn’t, the dystonic movement appearing even when the athlete uses the opposite hand, and a temporary improvement when the athlete changes their grip or adds unusual sensory input like wearing gloves.
In laboratory settings, researchers have separated yips-affected golfers from unaffected ones by having them putt under specific conditions: with one arm, under pressure, or with modified equipment. Performance differences and movement irregularities showed up most clearly when athletes putted with only their dominant arm, suggesting the condition is tied to the specific neural pathways used for the practiced skill rather than a general motor problem.
One consistent finding across studies is that affected golfers tend to score higher on measures of obsessional thinking and trait anxiety. But these personality traits alone don’t predict who will develop the yips, which is part of what makes prevention so elusive.
Treatment and Recovery
For the neurological type, injections that temporarily weaken overactive muscles have been the most common medical treatment. The challenge is that reducing the unwanted muscle spasms often comes with residual weakness that impairs normal motor function. It’s a tradeoff between stopping the involuntary movement and maintaining enough strength and control to perform the skill.
A more promising approach combines behavioral therapy with relaxation techniques like hypnosis. In one case series of four elite athletes from different sports who had suspected task-specific dystonia, all four returned to their original high level of performance after eight sessions over 16 weeks. The results held up remarkably well over time. One golfer was almost free of symptoms five years later. A speed skater was still symptom-free at five years, with multiple new personal records. A runner who couldn’t complete a workout was running six kilometers without symptoms within three months.
Many athletes also find relief through equipment changes or technique modifications. Golfers might switch to a different putter grip, use a longer putter, or change their stance entirely. The idea is to disrupt the neural pathway associated with the yips by making the movement feel sufficiently “new” that the conditioned response doesn’t trigger. This works for some athletes but can feel like a workaround rather than a cure, and the yips sometimes return once the new technique becomes equally ingrained.
The mental side of recovery often involves learning to shift attention away from the mechanics of the movement. Because the yips can develop when an athlete begins overthinking a previously automatic skill, training the brain to let go of conscious control is a core part of treatment. Techniques vary from visualization and mindfulness to simply changing pre-shot routines to redirect focus.