How Hypnosis Can Help Athletes Overcome the Yips
Craig Buboltz is a leading voice in sports hypnotherapy and mental performance coaching for athletes. He is the founder of Top Sport Hypnosis, helping athletes worldwide break through mental barriers to find their flow state.
Have you or someone you’ve known experienced a sudden loss of fine motor skills during competition or practice? This sudden and dramatic shift in performance may come from the subconscious mind, where negative physical or emotional experiences interfere with sports performance. Discover how hypnosis can break many of the mental barriers that have eluded traditional sports psychology.
What are the yips?
The yips are a mental performance block driven by anxiety, overthinking, and a breakdown in trust experienced by athletes who have executed the movement multiple times, such as a putt or a throw, but suddenly can’t perform.
What are the symptoms of the yips and how do they feel?
The physical feeling associated with the yips is an involuntary muscle jerk or twitch in the muscle, which stops the movement necessary to execute. Many people also report tremors or spasms during competition, which impede peak performance because these unexpected muscle movements stop their natural flow.
The yips can also be connected to the feeling of a complete mental and physical freeze, where athletes almost feel like they forgot how to play their position or sport. The feeling of not being able to perform and play at your level can be overwhelming for athletes, as self-doubt and loss of confidence creep in, especially as some have been playing the game their entire lives.
This is why it is so reassuring to research and discover that you are not alone, and that the yips are a common mental barrier for many athletes.
What type of athletes suffer from the yips?
While almost any athlete could experience the yips during their career, there is definitely a list of athletes who experience the yips more than others. These athletes have the common factor that there is time to think during competition. The long walk between shots for a golfer, the pause between each point during a tennis match, or the slower pace of a baseball game between each pitch.
There is a long list of professional and elite athletes who have struggled mentally with the yips, such as Tommy Armour in golf in the 1930s, Chuck Knoblauch, who had to leave baseball because of the yips in the late 1990s, and Aryna Sabalenka, who struggled with her tennis serve and mental game to the point where she wanted to quit the game completely.
That is how frustrating the yips can be for anyone.
I've also worked with lots of precision or shooting performance athletes for competitive games like bowling, darts, archery, and even cornhole. The yips in darts are so common that they gave it their own special name, Dartitis. In gymnastics, competitive cheerleading, and diving, they are called balking.
For baseball, you may have heard of Steve Blass disease, named after a Major League Baseball (MLB) pitcher from the 1970s. Whatever the sport, there is likely a story of an athlete whose performance unexpectedly dropped to unexplainable levels.
What really causes the yips?
Traditional sports psychologists and mental coaches have typically focused on the conscious mind when looking for the cause of the yips. They say there is no single cause of the yips, and to add to the level of complexity, the yips can be neurological, psychological, or a combination of both.
It can be classified as a neurological disorder involving involuntary spasms in the body’s small muscles, called focal dystonia. It can also be caused by performance anxiety, which, in different ways, is experienced by all athletes.
The reality is that research, literature, and case studies on the topic are limited, as reported by the Mayo Clinic in a report titled "Are yips just nerves or something more?"
When a top neurologist, Dr. Adler, says we need more research on the topic, where do elite athletes turn for answers?
Mackey Sasser, a Major League Baseball player for the Mets, found his answer following years of struggles with the yips. Dr. Dave Grand and Alan Goldberg, in their book This Is Your Brain on Sports, started their journey by looking into the subconscious mind when they understood the cause was found below the surface.
The book is full of case studies that highlight Sasser’s struggles and concludes that the root cause of the yips is found in the physical and emotional traumas experienced in sports, such as injuries or negative performance experiences.
When we start to connect the cause of the yips beyond the conscious mind and into the primitive mind, we take it even a step further, to where an athlete perceives an event or competition as a threat.
The fight, flight, or freeze physical response overrides any conscious training or mental preparation, which may explain some of the symptoms we associate with the yips.
What makes an athlete vulnerable to the yips?
Single identity
Athletes who tie their entire sense of self to their performance, called a single athletic identity, are especially vulnerable. When identity and performance become inseparable, a single mistake doesn’t feel like an error, it feels like a threat to who you are, which is exactly the kind of pressure that can trigger the yips.
Setbacks and injury
Confidence, trust, and belief in yourself are built around the experiences of an athlete. When an athlete begins to associate a poor performance with themselves, especially during a major event, that link creates self-doubt and the fear that it will happen again.
If an injury occurred during an event, the athlete wonders if it could happen again. In these moments, the athlete is no longer present, their mind has entered a state that has nothing to do with the task at hand.
When this connection sinks into the subconscious, simply walking onto the field or court can trigger performance anxiety.
External pressure
The life of a professional athlete involves significant outside mental interference, including paychecks, contracts, fans, television, and media, which often leads to performance anxiety.
However, even amateur and young athletes who started playing for enjoyment eventually reach a level where they feel pressure from parents and coaches.
Focused on results
The great paradox in mental performance training is the concept of focusing on the process over the results, as almost every team is judged by wins and losses, and players are judged by how they contributed to those results.
When a player comes to me for help, they want to get better based on the results, but when this starts to consume the mind, it turns into mental interference because, undoubtedly, the player starts to think about the results while they are playing.
Perfectionism
The expectations placed on an athlete can raise performance anxiety to new levels, specifically the idea of being perfect. There are certain sports, such as figure skating, gymnastics, diving, and competitive cheerleading, where the athlete is literally being judged.
Finding the mental fortitude to tune out these expectations and simply perform at their best is difficult, primarily because many athletes become their own harshest critics.
The complexity and wide scope of performance anxiety and the connection to the yips go well beyond these examples. This highlights the importance of working with a mental performance coach or hypnotherapist, as it is crucial to identify each athlete’s possible triggers and causes. Many times, it is not just one of these examples, but a mix of some or all of them.
Why do the yips get worse under pressure?
Many athletes have limited mental training and knowledge about how the mind works, leaving them lacking the mental tools to deal with the yips or pressure in general. To make matters worse, they may have a coach who lacks this knowledge and training, focusing solely on results rather than a player's well-being.
Then, the athletes may have to deal with teammates, fans, media, and the press, which leads to performance anxiety, the main psychological cause of the yips.
How does hypnotherapy help athletes overcome the yips?
The yips are not a mechanical failure. They often live in the gap between intention and execution, where the conscious mind knows what to do, but something deeper interferes.
If negative physical or emotional experiences are present, hypnotherapy can rewire and reframe these associations. This is why hypnotherapy is used by elite athletes, it offers something different from traditional mental coaching.
Working with a certified hypnotherapist, the athlete finds the root cause. Over repeated sessions, the old, fear-based reflex fades, and the clean, automatic execution the athlete always had takes its place.
How many sessions are needed for positive results?
This depends on the athlete's presenting issues, sport, and time spent dealing with the problem. Some athletes see significant improvement after just one session, while others benefit from multiple sessions to pinpoint and discover the one or more root causes affecting performance.
The goal here is to help athletes learn to control their mental state and how to get into a flow state when it matters most.
Ready to eliminate the yips?
As a certified hypnotherapist and mental sports performance coach, I blend traditional sports psychology and hypnotherapy to address both the conscious and subconscious factors that may contribute to the mental blocks interfering with sports performance.
If the yips are affecting your game, book a free 20-minute consultation call to get started. Together, we can talk over what is going on and whether Top Sport Hypnosis is the right fit for you.
Read more from Craig Buboltz
Craig Buboltz, Sports Hypnotherapist & Mental Performance Coach
Craig Buboltz is a certified hypnotherapist specializing in mental performance for athletes, with over 25 years of experience in education and coaching. He is the founder of Top Sport Hypnosis, integrating hypnosis with sports psychology to help athletes overcome mental blocks and unlock their flow states. This combination draws on the subconscious focus of hypnosis and proven sports psychology principles to help athletes build lasting mental resilience and perform under pressure.
