My cure for the yips

[BogeyNoMore]

Originally Posted by lines

With as much as you typed its no wonder you can't get out of your own head to throw a disc straight.

He's makes a valid point.

[Casey 1988]

Originally Posted by fasteddy8170

First, if you don't know what the yips are, please look them up. I'm not going to explain them here.


The thing about the yips. Once you have them, and beat them, they can always come back. So this is going to be an ongoing process of continued maintenance of your mental game. But this is what worked for me.

I had a prolem for a long time with putting, the problem was the putters I was trying to force into my putting to the disc, the Rubber Putter but it like the Aero has too much glide so I had to use the least power straddle putt to get the disc to work for a putter, Then the Wizard older style of top but it was a mold that would only work when I was putting at 40-50 feet anything closer and the mold faded to much for making putts and too far past ~50 feet and the mold did not fade enough, Then the Soft X Putt'r that the mold in that plastic was so bad for me I had to do a double hand putt standing the way a person is for a basketball free throw that messed me up so bad that when I found the Magnet, I was doing the free throw hand style with a more regular stance that was only just barely working due to my constant practice with that style of putt. Then in 2009 to end of 2014 I stopped playing for a while only to play disc golf after I had finished a 50 mile trail running race as a way to do something when I was not running or very little for 2-3 weeks after the event. It was in 2014 I found the old basketball 0% spin free throw putt I was using was not working for me so I had tried to use a more common putt style with the spinning push I used when I was trying the Wizard as my putter. I eventually added the back leg push off the ground to make the putt easier so I did not have to account for the loft/height I added to the putt to get to the basket the further I got from it, and just add more and more back leg push the way Ricky does/did.

[kfree35]

No hate, but Golf is Not a Game of Perfect does address a lot of what you said about not thinking about mechanics and simply visualizing hitting the target you've picked. It's wrapped in the discussion about what makes a good swing thought and is honestly one of the book's main topics.

[GoobyPls]

That's funny. I went through two different types of yips in the last two years, and both were form problems (caused by getting in my own head).

I posted on here about a year ago or so about putting yips I was going through. I was airballing 15' putts, but only during rated rounds. Played in an off-season putting league last winter and figured it out. I was so scared I was going to miss that I was leaning too far forward over my feet. That was causing follow-on problems when I'd try to correct it in the middle of a round by aiming higher, etc. Once I noticed I was doing it, it was an easy fix. I'm now above-average at putting, at least for my division.

The other problem was spraying drives everywhere, especially during tournaments. Lots of worm burners too. I watched videos, took a paid lesson from a pro, read Zen and the Art of Disc Golf, but nothing helped. Finally figured it out about a month ago, just in time for the off-season. It was a combination of getting my upper body too far in front of my plant foot (which SW22 had warned me about repeatedly), plus something Bradley Williams posted about when he reappeared a year ago. I was moving my upper arm (he called it "flapping"), which was causing late rounding. Tournament pressure caused me to forget my form. Cleaned it up and while I'm not throwing farther, I'm hitting my line probably 80% of the time or more.

[Dr.Smooth]

Nice write up on this discussion. Excuse my ignorance but I would associate yips with the whole spectrum. Like it could be mental, physical or both.

So, fixing this is super complicated.

One thing I heard Ken Climo say is that focusing on your form when you drive helps him with most issues.

But, this doesn't seem to help me with putting.

Definitely an individual thing, might work for you but not someone else.