Golf Yips: Putting, Chipping, and What the Research Shows

A yip is a half inch of movement you didn’t ask for, arriving in the last moment before contact. Most golfers meet it on a short putt. Plenty meet it chipping, which gets far less airtime. This guide covers what researchers have measured, how to tell a movement problem from a pressure problem, and the interventions that hold up.

Quick answer

Where the yips show up

Putting gets the attention. Chipping is close behind, and it’s the version golfers rarely hear discussed. PGA professional Gordon Morrison surveyed 417 golfers who identified themselves as yips-affected as part of a decade of PhD research published by the PGA:

Two more numbers from that survey. 76 percent said the disruption arrived just before contact, and the average golfer had played about 23 years before it appeared. Everyone in that sample volunteered because they already knew they had the problem, so it skews, but within it the yips showed up after a long golfing life.

Why the yips happen

There are two mechanisms and they overlap. Mayo Clinic’s page on the yips describes involuntary wrist spasms, with an involuntary muscle jerk as the most common symptom and tremors, twitches, spasms or freezing close behind. In some golfers that reflects focal dystonia, a condition Mayo links to overuse of a specific set of muscles, similar to writer’s cramp. Anxiety makes it worse without being the cause.

In other golfers, the anxiety is the whole story. Mayo lists older age, more years of golf and tournament play as the factors associated with the yips, which is a polite way of saying this happens to committed golfers.

The paper that organized the field is Smith and colleagues at Mayo Clinic, whose review in Sports Medicine framed the yips as a continuum between a focal dystonia and choking. That review reports the cost at 4.9 strokes per 18 holes, and notes that affected golfers still average 75 rounds a year. They keep playing. They just stop enjoying one shot.

How common is it? The earlier Mayo questionnaire went to 2,630 tournament players and 1,031 replied, of whom 541, or 52 percent, said they’d experienced the yips. Prevalence among the serious players in that sample, men under a 10 handicap and women under 12, came out between 32.5 percent and 47.7 percent. That prevalence describes committed tournament players, which is a different population from a weekend 18 handicap.

Type I or type II: telling them apart

The cleanest evidence for two subtypes comes from Stinear and colleagues, who put 15 yips-affected golfers and 9 unaffected golfers through a multimodal study at the University of Auckland. Type I golfers, the ones reporting movement symptoms, showed greater muscle activity while putting and less ability to inhibit an anticipated response. Type II golfers, the ones reporting anxiety symptoms, showed larger swings in cognitive anxiety and performed the inhibition task normally.

You can get a rough read on yourself without a lab:

• Leaning type I: the jerk shows up alone on the practice green with nothing at stake, it looks the same every time, and it’s been getting worse over years.
• Leaning type II: the stroke is fine in your back garden and ugly with a card in your pocket, and the tightness arrives with the consequence.
• Both: common, and it means you work the pressure side while ruling out the medical side.

The distinction is worth making because it changes what you try first. The attention work below is aimed at the pressure end. If the symptoms look movement-led, get a doctor into the conversation early.

The shots that break, and what they cost

Affected golfers in the Mayo questionnaire named their worst putts precisely: 3 feet, 4 feet and 2 feet, plus fast downhill putts breaking left to right. Those are the putts you get no credit for making.

For context on what short putts are worth, Shot Scope’s make percentages by handicap show scratch golfers holing 92.8 percent from inside 6 feet against 82.5 percent for a 25 handicap. Their three-putt data shows a 5 handicap going 16.7 holes between three-putts while a 25 handicap goes 7.6.

Those gaps are skill rather than yips. They sit alongside the yips number as context: at 82.5 percent from inside 6 feet, a 25 handicap already misses more short putts than they’d like, and a yip on top of that turns a tap-in into a bogey.

Give your attention a different job

The most direct evidence for a fix comes from Morrison’s dual-task study. Golfers performed a second task while chipping: humming a steady note, an idea borrowed from Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Golf, or repeating a phrase, which demands more mental work. 3D motion analysis found improvements in hand position and shot accuracy for 7 of 9 participants, with smoother movement patterns and better striking.

Two participants got worse. They struggled to run two tasks at once and would have needed longer to learn the technique. Nine participants is a small study, and it reports the golfers it failed, which is worth knowing before you try it.

The mechanism is the same one behind the whole mental game: a skilled stroke breaks when you supervise it. Our golf mental game guide covers the putting-lab research on self-monitoring in more depth. Humming plausibly works by occupying the attention that would otherwise supervise the stroke, which is the explanation Morrison offers.

Quiet eye: the putting version of the same idea

Gaze training does the same job through the eyes. In a Frontiers in Psychology study by Vine, Moore and Wilson, 22 elite male golfers were randomly assigned to gaze training or a control group. The trained golfers learned to hold a steady final fixation on the ball and stop checking the putter mid-stroke.

Across 10 competitive rounds afterwards, the trained group averaged 1.92 fewer putts per round than before, while the control group showed no change. Quiet eye duration explained 43 percent of the variance in performance error during the lab test.

One caveat: those were elite golfers under pressure rather than golfers with diagnosed yips. The finding supports gaze control as a stroke-protecting habit. It isn’t proof that staring at the ball cures a movement disorder.

The five-step routine that ties it together

Morrison’s fourth study wrapped the dual task inside a full pre-shot routine, built on Singer’s five-step model for self-paced skills. Five yips-affected golfers were coached with monthly sessions over six months. Reported results were reduced frequency and severity of the yips, better movement quality and shot accuracy, and lower cognitive anxiety.

The shape of it, which works on a chip or a short putt:

1. Ready. Stand behind the ball and drop the tension first. Two slow breaths with a longer exhale than inhale.
2. Image. See the shot at real speed: strike, flight, roll, finish. Not in slow motion.
3. Focus. Set up, then take one or two rehearsal swings that copy the real one, eyes on the target rather than your hands.
4. Execute with a dual task. Hum a note or count backwards from 10 as you swing, and keep it going until the ball stops.
5. Reflect. One plain sentence about the shot, then walk.

Every step exists to keep your attention outside the stroke, and the dual task is the piece that covers the moment the yip would normally land. Morrison tailored the routine to each golfer, so treat the wording as a frame and fill it with cues that suit you.

Equipment changes usually buy temporary relief

Mayo Clinic’s practical advice is to change how you perform the affected task, and it offers real options: a different grip, a different putter, looking at the hole instead of the ball, or a right-handed golfer putting left-handed. Cross-handed grips, the claw and longer putters are the popular versions of that idea among golfers, though Mayo doesn’t rank them.

Morrison’s coaching takeaway after a decade on this: sensory tricks such as a grip or stance change may provide temporary relief, while addressing the underlying psychological factors tends to yield more lasting results. Both are worth trying. Change one variable at a time, or you won’t know which one helped.

The mistakes that make it worse

• Grinding on the yipped shot for an hour. Morrison’s motor-learning advice runs the other way: start with easy shots and blocked practice, in situations the golfer is comfortable in, then raise difficulty slowly. Hammering the hardest version first works against that.
• Adding swing thoughts. “Keep the wrists quiet” is an instruction to supervise the exact motion that’s breaking. Give your attention an outside job instead.
• Avoiding the shot. In Morrison’s interviews, 5 of 10 golfers had started avoiding chipping altogether. Avoidance protects the score for a round and costs you the skill.
• Changing grip, putter, stance and ball position in one session. Now nothing is measurable.
• Treating it as a character flaw. Mayo lists more golfing experience and tournament play as risk factors. This lands on people who care.

When this fix isn’t your fix

If the involuntary movement turns up away from the golf course, in your handwriting or holding a coffee cup, stop reading golf articles and see a doctor. Mayo Clinic’s diagnosis and treatment page notes there’s no standard test for the yips, so diagnosis rests on your description, a neurological exam, and sometimes video. Focal dystonia has medical options that no routine replaces.

If your chipping breaks down because your technique breaks down, that’s a practice problem rather than an attention problem, and a structured golf practice plan is the right tool. PracticeCaddie is ours too. And one bad chip under pressure is just a bad chip.

The next step

Pick one shot, build the five-step routine around it, and run the dual task on every rehearsal until it feels automatic. If the hard part is the pressure that arrives with it, that’s the job ZenCaddie does: a guided pre-round routine, a 30-second Quick Reset for the walk, and situation-specific flows for the moments that wreck a round, on web, iPhone and Apple Watch for $9.99 a year after a free 3-day trial, or $49.99 once for the lifetime Founding Golfer plan, limited to 100. Start your free 3-day trial and bring the routine to the course. ZenCaddie is ours, so weigh that recommendation accordingly.

For deeper dives

• Golf mental game: stop one bad hole from costing you four: the pillar guide, including the self-monitoring research behind the dual task
• Golf breathing exercises that work under pressure: what the long exhale does to arousal, and where it stops helping
• Golf visualization: how to picture a shot you can hit: the imaging step in the routine above, done properly
• First tee nerves: why they hit and what calms them: the other shot where the consequence arrives before the swing
• Best golf mental game apps: the field compared, disclosure included

Key takeaways

• The yips cost about 4.9 strokes per 18 holes, per Mayo Clinic’s review, and affected golfers keep playing about 75 rounds a year anyway.
• Chipping yips are common: 51 percent of yips-affected golfers in Morrison’s survey reported them, and 19 percent yip only when chipping.
• Type I is movement-led and type II is anxiety-led, plenty of golfers show both, and the lean decides whether you start with a routine or with a doctor.
• A dual task during the stroke, humming or counting backwards, improved hand movement and accuracy for 7 of 9 chippers in 3D analysis.
• Quiet eye training cut 1.92 putts per round for elite golfers across 10 competitive rounds, though not in golfers with diagnosed yips.
• Grip and putter changes may buy temporary relief, and Morrison’s read after a decade is that the attention work tends to hold up longer. Try both, one at a time.