May 4, 2022 • 37 mins
The yips is not only present in a sport like gymnastics, which requires an almost unparalleled degree of athleticism, but also in sports like archery and golf, which demand extraordinary mental fitness. In archery, it’s known as target panic, and in this episode of Losing Control, we explore the mental game of one of the world’s top archers, Paige Pearce, who has battled–and is currently managing–target panic. But it’s in golf that the term yips, used to describe an involuntary movement that interrupts a golfer’s putt, chip, or swing, is believed to have originated. Arguably, golf is also the sport in which the yips have been the most widely studied, and Justin talks it over with David Owen, who has been writing about golf for decades, and who has spent time with some of the top pros in the game, including none other than Tiger Woods.
- Paige Pearce, a world champion, record-breaking professional archer and one of the top-ranked compound archers in the world
- David Owen, a staff writer at The New Yorker, contributing editor at both Golf Digest and Popular Mechanics, and author of more than a dozen books, including four books about golf
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Losing Control is a podcast from Sports Illustrated Studios and
I Heart Radio. I'm justin Suah and this is Losing Control,
a podcast about one of the strangest phenomenon sports, the yips,
or when an athlete or elite performer suddenly finds themselves
unable to do the thing that they do better than
almost everyone else on the planet. If you're listening for
(00:22):
the first time, welcome, but if you want the full experience,
head back to episode one. Losing Control is a podcast
told through conversations with athletes, coaches, neuroscientists, and more, and
it's in order. Each episode features a first hand perspective
that contributes a piece to the puzzle that is the yips.
Along the way, you'll learn about some of the challenges
(00:43):
that high performers face and the mental work that enables
them to do what they do. Not only that, you'll
hear how you can incorporate these tools, strategies, and mindsets
into your own life, because it's not just about losing control,
it's about getting it back. So it's gets darted now.
Even though it might seem like sports are solely physical
(01:04):
in nature, all sports have a mental component to them,
and today we're looking at two sports where the mental
side of the game plays a huge role, archery and golf.
Archery and golf are also two sports where the yips
are fairly common. In archery, it's known as target panic,
and in golf, the yips are simply the yips. In
(01:25):
the first half of this episode, you'll meet one of
the world's top archers, Page Pierce, and in the second
half i'll introduce you to David Owen, who has been
playing and writing about golf for decades. We're starting with archery,
a sport you might not be very familiar with. Here's
Page Pierce. There are many different types of archery, but
(01:46):
all of them involved the person shooting a bow and
arrow at some form of target bag. Go back Page
Piers with a ten. My name is Page Pierce. I
am a world champion professional archer. I'm also a member
of the United States Archery Team, so now I travel
the world um competing all year long, and that's what
(02:07):
I do for a full time job. If you've never
seen professional archery, I highly recommend you watch a few
videos of Page. She's incredible, she is poised, she is focused,
her eyes are still, her breathing is consistent, her routine
is on point. She looks like she's been doing this
for a long time. When did Page first pick up
(02:30):
a bow? So I actually started shooting around the age
of two, which I know sounds totally crazy, but both
my parents shot, um, I would say, semi professionally. They
had some sponsors, but always had other full time jobs,
and so when they had kids, my younger brother and I,
they were always out on the range shooting, and so
they just took us with them and we started shooting
(02:52):
as soon as we could, you know, remotely attempt that.
They would actually push us around in a stroller and
then stand us up, have a shoot the tar it,
put us back in the stroller, and then push us
to the next one. So it's pretty crazy. I've literally
been shooting longer than I even remember doing it. Page
was breaking archery records before she was even a teenager.
When I was ten years old, I was shooting a
(03:14):
state tournament and I broke a record, and um by twelve,
everyone was saying, hey, you're pretty good at this. You
should um go and try for the US team. We
have a Junior World Championships coming up. It's kind of
a big deal, and so when I was thirteen the
following year, I actually tried out for the team and
I qualified for that and at the time, I was
actually the youngest person to ever do that, which was
(03:36):
pretty exciting. And then we went on to win a
team gold medal there at that Junior World Championships. That
was pretty exciting. When I was fifteen years old, I
decided I wanted to go pro. I applied, got my
official pro card and then I've been traveling around on
the pro circuit since I was fifteen in page during
earlier this year. So let's get into it. What does
the mental side of pages shot actually look like? I
(03:59):
was say that archery is about mental and about ten physical,
and what I mean by that is, once you're at
that top level, so much of what we do is mental,
and so with that, so much of that shot process
is part of a subconscious process. In other words, I'm
not thinking about it. I've done it so many times
over the years that it just happens naturally. I let
(04:22):
my subconscious process run my body. My mind just knows
what it's doing and it does that and I don't
really have to think about it. Thanks for talking about
the mental side of archery, because that's a topic we
want to double click on a little bit and peer
into what does mental toughness look like in the sport
of archery. Well, to be honest, mental toughness in the
(04:43):
sport of archery shows up in the form of consistency
and repeatability. So what's hard about archery is it's not
a sport where if you get really excited or really
jacked up and you know that you're maybe run faster
or jump higher. It's all about staying calm, keeping your
body and a consistent state, keeping your heart rate low,
keeping your breathing even so under pressure, those can be very,
(05:07):
very difficult things to do, and through mental training you
can teach yourself to stay more calm in those situations.
And so someone with a very solid mental game will
look very calm and very relaxed in high pressure situations.
And so our mental training is a little bit different
than other sports. In the aspect of ours is just
remain calm, stay steady, keep everything consistent. And we have
(05:30):
to do that all the time, from beginning to end.
During a scoring round, can you talk to us about
how you mentally prepare for a competition, So when I
was younger. My very first mental health technique was when
I'm at full draw sing a song, and my thought
process was, you can't think two thoughts at once. So
if I'm singing a song, I can't be thinking negative thoughts.
(05:52):
I can't be fretting over, you know, anything that I'm
worried about. I'm just going to be focused on those
song lyrics. That's going to distract my conscious mind enough
that my subconscious mind can do what it knows how
to do and do what it's meant to do, what
I've trained it to do. There's certain techniques over the
years that I've used, that being one of them that
on a really mentally tough day or a mentally tough
(06:13):
end or arrow, I can use that and fall back
on it as a crutch to basically get through those
moments and keep my conscious mind at bay and archery.
Your conscious mind is not your friend, and so you know,
any way to distract that I'll use. On a good day,
I won't need that. My conscious mind is very quiet.
I can just do what I'm supposed to do. But
we're human. That's not always how it goes. So that's
(06:36):
just something that I've kind of used over the years
to to help during those pressure situations. So what was
the song so you're gonna laugh, um. The one song
that I chose when I was ten years old, and
I've used the same song ever since was do You
Believe In Magic? By Ali and a j from the
Disney Channel, which I was watching when I was ted.
(07:04):
My recommendation if you're going to pick a song to
sing is make it something that's happy. Make it something
that is upbeat, because in those pressure situations, something with
a little bit of fast tempo is going to keep
you engaged as far as like pushing, pulling and all
that stuff. Something really slow can kind of slow your
shot process down mentally. The other thing that's really neat
(07:25):
about archery that we haven't touched on yet is again
it's all about consistency, but that also means consistent shot timing.
Shooting a bow is a multi step process, and Page
is going to talk about anchoring or when an archer
has fully drawn her bow and is preparing to shoot
an arrow. So from when you anchor to when your
shot breaks, you want a consistent time, and very often
(07:47):
under pressure, that time will change. So one really neat
thing that using a song will do is also let
you know, Okay, I'm definitely holding too long. So what
I would do is whenever I hit my anchor point,
I would start the core us at the same exact spot.
And I knew that roughly around this part of the
chorus that my bow should fire. And if it didn't,
(08:07):
it's like, Man, I'm overholding, I'm holding too long. I
should let down, which means basically, instead of shooting the shot,
you just let the string down. You can restart, take
a few breaths, and then draw that back again. Um.
And so it also not just helps with mental distraction,
but also with shot timing in those pressure situations and
letting you know if you're doing your job, or if
(08:30):
you've slowed down or if you've sped up. Where the
mind goes, the body flows under pressure, the mind has
a tendency to go to the past or to go
to the future. Now to combat that, page is taught
herself to have her mind chew on something else, and
in this case it's a song. Essentially, what she's doing
(08:51):
is she's distracting yourself. She's thinking on purpose with purpose,
But what does she do to keep herself mentally locked
in today. So how I mentally prepare for a competition
looks a lot different now than it did when I
was younger and was still trying to work on establishing
a mental game and mental toughness and mental strength and consistency.
(09:12):
But visualization has always been something that I've done through
my career. I started that about when I was ten
years old, and um have done that ever since. And
so a lot of times, if I'm coming up to
a big tournament, I've been to the venue. I know
what it looks like because I've shot all these tournaments
for so many years, and if I haven't, you can
look up pictures or videos of what that venue is
going to look like. And so I will visualize myself,
(09:35):
you know, walking in, shooting on the practice range, shooting
arrows for a score. So by the time I get there,
in my mind, I've already done all of that quite
a few times, and I feel like that helps reduce
the level of pressure that I'm going to feel. The
other thing that I'm doing on the daily is I
actually have daily affirmation cards that are posted all around
my house. They always are, and I update those after
(09:57):
every event just to basically portray whatever my next goal
is or the next thing that I'm trying to achieve.
And there's some lines on there that might always stay
the same, but then certain things for different events will
change depend on the format or the style or the
mental approchooning to take to be good at that style event.
It sounds simple, but it's amazing how those simple practices
(10:18):
can provide huge benefits. Not only does she write down
her daily affirmations, she goes one step further. I am
an auditory learner, and I knew that about myself, so
writing the cards, reading the cards in my own mind like, yeah,
that's fine, But I took that a step further. And
anyone with you know, a phone nowadays, it probably has
the ability to record. So I went into my phone,
(10:41):
went into voice memos and actually recorded my daily affirmation
and so I will actually play that back to myself
a couple of times a day, and hearing that had
a way bigger impact on myself than just reading the card.
And so I think what's really interesting is everybody's minds
are different. They're all going to read at different to
different things. And so I took the normal part of
(11:04):
what would be called a mental management process and try
to change that a little bit to something that I
knew would work better for myself and my learning style.
And I kind of think that's what it's all about.
I feel like, when you've shot enough tournaments over enough years,
you know it's not that you need that exact mental
training before every event. You've just done it so much
(11:24):
that it's kind of built into you that you're going
to be fine. But I still like to use those
day to day techniques to just make sure that I
keep up on my mental game and it doesn't start
to fall behind. I love the term she uses mental management.
What that implies is that Page is constantly aware of
where her mind is. She's aware of her thoughts, and
(11:46):
she's aware that her thoughts will impact her emotions, which
will impact her body, which will ultimately impact her performance,
which is why she's very deliberate with what she says
to herself and what she thinks about herself. What's also
interesting is that she customizes her practices to her needs.
She changes, she evolves, and the things she did in
(12:08):
the past might not be things she does right now. However,
she doesn't just stop doing it completely. She still makes
it part of her process, but she tweaks it occasionally
according to her current needs. It's very easy to hit
the autopilot mode and just go through the motions, and
Page understands that it's a constant upkeep. And the reason
(12:31):
that's so important is because at the highest level of
sports or music, or business or any industry, everyone works hard,
everyone is smart, and often times the separator is the
mental game. It's the person who's able to quiet their
mind and manage their thoughts who has the competitive advantage. Now,
(12:53):
when we're back, we're talking about the yips and archery,
it's target panic. After this, you're listening to losing control
and I'm justin suah. I'm talking with Page Pierce, one
of the best archers in the world. Page and I
talked about how she keeps her mental game sharp. But
(13:16):
what happens when the yips occur in archery? The yips
are known as target panic. Back to the conversation, can
you please talk about target panic? So, target panic in
archery is a very interesting and complex thing. Basically, it's
when something is happening in your mind that shows through
(13:37):
and your shot that you cannot control, like your mind
is taken over, you know, what's wrong and you know
that shouldn't be happening, but no matter what you do,
it happens anyway. It's something that has just gone wrong
in your mental process. So in your mind is the
one that's doing something that you don't want. It's a
very very long road to try to break down those
bad habits and rebuild new ones. Have you ever seen
(14:00):
either with competitors or teammates where target panic it ended
up affecting them not only as an athlete, but it
affected them outside of their sport as well. Have you
ever seen the devastating effects of someone experiencing target panic
when we spend so much of our life shooting a bow,
(14:21):
seeing someone who's on the professional level battle that and
go through something like that, I mean, you can see
that it wears down not just on their archery game
and their performance, but that's going to hurt their overall confidence,
their overall self esteem, their overall self image. And so
I feel like a lot of the times, you know,
if they're performing well and shooting well and things are
going smooth in normal life, their normal energy is going
(14:43):
to be really high and very positive. But a lot
of times when you're struggling that will carry over to
normal life as well. And that's something that I hate
to see in archery, but it's very real. Like I said,
when you spend so much of your life shooting a
bow and you feel like you're failing and you're struggling,
and your mind is doing something you don't on it
to do, of course you're going to feel those same
emotions on a day to day basis, and so you know,
(15:05):
it's something that can be very challenging, but if you
can learn to work through it and you can beat
it can also be very rewarding. Have you ever experienced it.
I do experience a form of aiming target panic, and
what that means is that my mind does not like
when my pin aims in the center of the target,
and so my mind's comfort zone when I'm aiming is
(15:25):
actually low on the target face. Now, if we have
a scoring face that scores ten, seven, six and so on,
my comfort zone is right around the eight ring and
so I can aim there nice and steady. But if
I take my bow and I try to force aim
it in the middle, my mind freaks out. My bow
moves all over the place, and it's just not comfortable.
(15:46):
But if I let it relax back down by the eight,
it will sit nice and still. Page became a world
champion archer while she was living with target panic. Most
people look at target panic like something is severely wrong
and I have to fix it. But rather than struggle
through fixing my problem, I just embraced it and I
shot aiming that way for basically my entire life up
(16:09):
until this last year. I finally worked on fixing it,
and I've had pretty good success since then. But it
was brutal, it was tough, it was challenging, it was frustrating.
But up until then, I did what most people haven't done,
and I just let it aim where it wanted and
just embraced it, and I trusted it and I rolled
with it. And while I was struggling with a form
of obviously mental target panic, at the same time, I
(16:32):
was also showing a form of mental toughness to be
able to just say, I'm going to make this work,
this is what's going to happen. I'm just gonna sit
in for it. I'm gonna shoot it, and it's gonna
work well. And it did. It worked very well for
a lot of years. But I finally decided you know what,
I want to beat this. I want to break this,
and I want to be better than that. And so UM,
I had to put a lot of time, in a
lot of effort in but I'm finally making some really
(16:54):
good progress. You're probably not surprised to hear that page
figured out how to manage her target panic, even after
leaving with it for the majority of her career. Last year,
I was finally like, I'm sick of aiming low. I've
had enough of this. I was constantly having to adjust
my site every time I walked up to the line,
it would want to aim lower and lower, and I
(17:14):
was sick of fighting that. So I actually reached out
to a guy. His name's Joel Turner, and he has
what's called shot i Q. It's literally like a little
online course that you can pay and you go through that.
He had some very good information in there. But it's
funny because it was one of the most simple things
that ended up helping me. And I'll say it because
it's UM's. It is so simple yet so helpful. So
(17:36):
one UM small thing that made a huge difference was
I actually now drawback anchor and then I put my
pin in the middle first, and mentally it was so
much easier to do that I'm discovering it was because
I know my bow camp fire, and so it's the
anticipation of the shot going off that I was struggling with.
But if I put my pin to the center without
(17:58):
my thumb on the trigger, I know bo cannot go
off basically pages aiming first, and then only when she's
ready to fire does she put her thumb on the trigger.
That was one small, small thing, but it made a
huge difference for me, and I'm still using that same
thing in my shot process today. And so with target
panic being so mental, you know, it's just trying to
(18:21):
break down the mental wiring that we've built and create
a new one or change the one that is there
to basically help, you know, stop that mental process that
is creating target panic for you. I asked Paige if
the mental training she does for archery translates into other
aspects of her life. I do think that the mental
(18:45):
aspect of archery does help me manage other things in
my life. The cool thing about mental stuff is that
it's never just for one thing. It really will change,
like how you think about life as a whole and
how you handle situations as a whole. And so even
if you're not someone who's a professional athlete or that's
not your goal, there are still huge benefits even in
(19:06):
daily life to you know, being able to step back
and think about certain situations differently, maybe stay calm in
times when you wouldn't have and so, you know, mental
management and learning how your mind works and how to
control it and stuff is something that I would recommend
to everybody because I really do think and it can
improve your quality of life in any job or any situation,
(19:27):
in relationships, um and all of the above. Really, I
always shy away from absolutes. And while the mental management
tools you're working on in your sport may help in
other areas of your life, it doesn't necessarily mean it will.
I've had players tell me that they're taking the mental
skills we've worked on together and are teaching it to
their children. But I've also had players tell me that
(19:49):
they wish they were better at applying the mental skills
work they use on the field to other areas of
their life. You might not be battling target panic, but
think about the moment mints of friction in your life.
Can you approach them deliberately. Can you implement a strategy
that meets your needs. Can you visualize yourself surmounting that
(20:10):
obstacle you've been facing. It's worth a shot. We'll be
back with David Owen after this. I'm justin Sewa and
this is losing control, and we're back for the second
half of today's episode. From archery to golf, two sports
that require incredible mental prowess. Now, of all the sports
out there, the yips may be the most widely studied
(20:32):
in Gulf And maybe that's because it just seems so impossible.
How can you not hit a ball that's not moving.
It's got to be nerves or choking, right. I think
that people who do not have the yips, and they're
looking at somebody who does the most obvious expensis, well,
they must be nervous. They're you know, they're they're choking.
But I think that for somebody who is experiencing the
(20:55):
yips from the other side, it's entirely different. It doesn't
feel like that at all. That's the voice of day
It Owen. He's been a staff writer at The New
Yorker magazine since He's written numerous books, but more importantly
he's a contributing editor at Golf Digest, and he's been
writing about golf for many years. I think every golfer
(21:16):
you know people who get nervous and hit poor shots
when they're nervous. But you also know people who are
clearly affected by something that is darker and deeper than that,
because you can see it. You can see the movement
in there. You can see the flinch in their hand
when they try to make a putt. I've seen it
in other people, and it's it is fascinating when you
watch someone closely and you see every time they make
(21:40):
the putting motion, their hand turns. You know, it turns
in the same way every time, and they're they're not
conscious of it necessarily, but they can't stop it. There's
you could point it out to them, you could show
it to them on videotape, and they would be unable
not to do it. And just like in baseball, in gymnastics,
and in our tree, there's no easy fix. I think
(22:01):
that one of the hardest things about it for people
who suffer from it is that people who don't suffer
from it, I think there must be an easy solution.
Anybody who has the YIPS is used to getting endless
technical advice from playing partners. You know, just do this,
just hold your hands like this, just you know, just
stop doing that, do this. You know, don't hit up,
hit down, do do whatever. And it's not the difficulty
(22:23):
is that it's not that kind of problem. It's not real.
True yips is not a problem of technique. It's uh,
it's it has been accurately described, I think by people
who suffer from it. Is a wiring problem in the head.
It's a It can be totally career ending for professionals,
and you see it at every level. It just it
could destroy the players, not only success, but any enjoyment
(22:46):
they take in the game, and you see people who
do extraordinary things to try to avoid it. There's trying
to avoid it, and then there's trying to manage the
yips once you have it. One of the most famous
ones is the golfer Johnny Miller, who became a beloved
golf announcer, and his announcing career really began because he
couldn't play competitive golf anymore. And the reason he couldn't,
(23:06):
even even though he's basically at the peak of his
ability in every other way, he had this terrible yipping
problem with his putts, and he actually won the British
Open while yipping. But in order to enable himself to
put he had to do this really strange thing. He
painted a red dot on the grip of his putter
and he looked at that instead of at the ball,
(23:27):
and that enabled him to get by well enough to
go on. Now, there's also Hank Haney, one of the
best known golf coaches out there. Hank Haney, who was
Tiger Woods his teacher for a long time, had what
is much less common than putting yips, which is full
swing yips. He was unable to take a full swing
with a golf club, and he studied it and studied it,
(23:48):
looked at slow motion videotapes of himself playing golf, and
he would go out by himself and try to overcome
it mechanically. What he eventually realized by accident is that
he was able to hit the ball pretty well if
he didn't look at it. And so he would be
teaching people and he would hit a shot without looking
at the ball, and the students were impressed because it
looked like something difficult, but for him it was just
(24:08):
it was just the only way he could hit a ball,
and he eventually developed this really peculiar routine where he
would take what sort of looked like baseball practice swing
and he would take the club all the way back.
It was this little routine that he went into before
he hit the ball, and he was basically winding himself
up through this succession of very odd looking movements, and
(24:31):
to end, then he would let go when he would
hit the ball, and he could do it. So we
have Johnny Miller and Hank Haney. These aren't just well
known characters who have had the yips. These are some
of the best pros out there. I think probably the
best known golfer with a yips problem was the German
golfer Bernard Longer, who has actually he's found workarounds for
(24:53):
his yips three different times during his career. He got
the yips while putting, and then he adopted a putting
struck in what he would he would hold up putter
all the way up his left forearm and then he
would grip his left forewarm around the putter shaft with
his right hand, and so he had kind of immobilized
his left hand and his right hand and the putter
shaft became, I guess really an extension of his left arm,
(25:15):
and he could put that way. Then that stopped working.
He moved to a long putter and cured it that way.
And then the two big international golf governing bodies, in
their wisdom, decided that putting with a long putter anchored
against the body would no longer be allowed. UH, And
so he had to develop a third way to UH,
(25:36):
yet another way to overcome this problem. Bernard Longer is
a guy who won the Masters, not once, but twice.
There have been many, many well known golfers, many well
known athletes, who have, at some point in their career,
usually late, they get this uncontrollable like a spasm when
they try to do particular action. It's always a particular act,
(26:00):
and it's often one involving fine motor control. It's often
one that's often repeated, and an often one that's in
slow motion. As an expert in the yips, tell me
you don't see tennis players with the yips except on
the serve or on the toss. It's always a movement
that starts from immobility. You know, a golfer is always
immobile before taking a swing. A dart player is always
(26:22):
standing there. The snooker player, a biliar player, is standing still.
The motion starts from a dead stop. A tennis player
playing tennis, you know, returning volleys is in the flow,
and it doesn't happen. They're the only times it happens.
With the serve, the toss, and also with a you know,
with a lob shot. That's we're getting ready to return
a lob shot. You're gonna smash it down the throat
(26:44):
of your opponent, and you have too long to think
about it and the ball ends up in the net
or beyond the end of the court. One thing you
said that was intriguing to me is you said, usually
later in careers is when you have seen this develop.
Why do you think that's the case. Well, one reason
may simply be that if if it happens to somebody
(27:06):
early in their career, they don't have a career. But
I think also there's a there is a sense that
there is some certainty that it's a problem that gets
worse with use, and that if it is as some
people believe it as a kind of wiring wiring problem
neurological wiring problem, there are connections that like an electrical
system where you developed short circuits, so they're they're sparking
(27:27):
across gaps, and that it's more likely to occur later
after repeated, repeated, repeated use. And if you think about
it this way, it's pretty clear how the workarounds work.
You're just bypassing a broken circuit. I think some of
the workarounds really are like workarounds are like detours. There's
a wiring problem in one neural path, and you overcome
(27:50):
it by kind of creating a new neural path so
that the the signals you're sending or taking a different
path to this there. It's kind of shaking things up.
You're trying a different chnique of doing what's essentially the
same thing moving the putter back and forth. You're sending
different signals to the hands to bypass whatever this roadblock
is that's developed. And I think that's why the workarounds work.
(28:12):
The really interesting thing about all these is that nobody
really understands why they work or why they stopped working.
When sufferers find something that enables them to overcome their
difficulty and it works for a while and then it stops.
And so I think if you're a yip suffer, or
dark titis suffer, or a target panic suffer or flincher.
If you're a shooter, you have to be ready to
(28:34):
try something else. And the same is true in golf.
When you see somebody who cannot make a a normal
putting stroke right handed but has no problem at all
left handed under any circumstances, you realize that you know
it's not because he was choking. There was something else
going on, even if we aren't entirely certain what it was.
You have to be ready to experiment, and sometimes what
works starts to yep. When David wrote about Hank Haney swinging,
(29:00):
it was unconventional, But years later Hany had to change
his swing again because his yips had shifted. Hanny told
me that, and he said that his swing. If I
played with him that day, he said, I would find
that his swing look much more conventional than it had
on the day that I had played with him before.
But he said that if he get let it get
(29:21):
too conventional, he could feel his problem coming back and
he would have to go back to his to his workarounds.
So Bernard Longer is another example of someone he found
a way to cure his yips but then his hips
came back and he had to find it another cure.
So it's not a cure like making the problem go
away forever. There's clearly in some people there's a tendency
(29:41):
and it tends to it sneaks back, it finds a
way to work back in. David said that there may
be a tendency to yip. I'm gonna go back to that.
There's a researcher who did it a really interesting study. Well,
it took a bunch of people who had never played
golf ever and gave him a puttern a ball and
no instruction, said just you know, do whatever you need
(30:02):
to get this ball in the hole. And they filmed
them in super slow motion with all this analytical equipment
and detected severe yips and something like the people these
were people who never played golf before. And then they
did this interesting thing of turning them around. So you
take somebody who was right side dominant, and whatever putting
start they had invented, they had them do the mirror image,
(30:23):
so they were doing it left side, and when everybody
putted the other way around, the hips all went away.
So I think it's probably something that is common to
some degree. In many many people, many more people than
who look as though they have a real problem. In
many people, that's at a level that they can accommodate
(30:43):
it just with you know, they learned to they learn
to work around it. But I think that the idea
that that it's widespread, you know, the explanation could be
that just because of ordinary life, maybe using your you know,
typing on your phone, all the activities that we do,
these fine motor activities that we do with our hands,
with our fingers, maybe over time they create a tendency
(31:05):
to make miss motions and they become visible in certain activities,
like maybe they become visible in putting in golf, or
or maybe you start playing darts and in this accumulated
damage that you've done to your whatever, to your nervous system,
to plus your perceptual system, maybe somehow that all works
(31:25):
together and causes a problem. From the perspective of a writer,
you've been around the game for a long time, you've
played the game for a while. How do you think
about the relationship between the body and the mind when
it comes to golf. Well, I think in every sport
it's huge, and you're seeing golf, you know, the world
of golf at the highest levels is incredibly deep. The
(31:46):
skill level of all over the world. There's so many
players who basically have perfect technique, and yet a relatively
small number of them or make it as tour players,
as professional tour players. And the reason has to do
with the mind. Know there for one reason or another,
they think like dominant athletes. Tiger Woods is the most
extreme example, and and he has a totally extreme example
(32:08):
during the you know, in the in the two thousands,
in the odds, when he was at the peak of
his powers. There were years when he had enough points
in the World Golf ranking system to be both the
number one and number two player in the world. In
other words, you could have divided his year and half
and each half was better than whoever was next in line.
(32:29):
It was just an incredible level of dominance. And it
wasn't his technique. It wasn't I mean, he's a brilliant,
brilliantly skilled, physically skilled athlete, but I think his main
advantage was, you know, was mental, and he was somehow
you know, like Michael Jordan's, like some other great players.
He was just able to think in a way that
(32:52):
a champion thinks however, that is it's not something that
I have any experience with. I wasn't once told by
an athlete that he is more nervous watching the game
from the dugout than actually being in the game himself.
And I asked him why. He said, well, because when
you're in the game, your focus is narrow. The only
thing that matters is this moment. You're not worried about
(33:14):
the future, you're not worried about the past. You're in
the here and now. This champions mindset that David is describing.
For a lot of these athletes, they do it by default.
David had a chance to watch Tiger Woods up close.
I did get to spend time with Tiger Woods, and
I decided that the thing that distinguishes an athlete like
(33:35):
Tiger Woods Michael Jordan's. You know, these like ultra superstars.
The guy's way at the top is not that they're
determined to win, but that they're not afraid to lose.
And so with Michael Jordan's, you know that if there's
a second to go in a basketball game, and there's
a somebody can a shot from the three point line
could win the game, you want Michael Jordan to take it.
And the reason is not that he's set on winning,
(33:57):
but then he's not afraid to miss the shot, and
so he doesn't. He doesn't clench up in a way
that you or I might, and the same with true
Tiger Woods. You think of how many times he had
a longish pot to win a tournament at the very
last moment and made it and uh, you know, he
told me that he never feels calmer than when he
is in a situation like that. It's kind of, I think,
the reverse of what it is for most of us,
(34:19):
and it's one of the many explanations for why we
don't do things at that level. But it's interesting that
what life must be like for athletes who perform at
that level. And the same true probably in poker, in uh,
in bridge and other in chests and other activities. But
here's the thing. Even someone as dominant as Tiger Woods
isn't immune to the yips. The yips uh and it's
(34:42):
related difficulties are different. It's not you know, people who
people who come down, you know, Tiger Woods could come
down with them. And there are people who have thought
that maybe he had the full swing yips. It's not
because if he did, or if he does, if if
he had them or has them, or if he ever
develops them. It won't be because he is not mentally
fit to play his game. It will be something else.
(35:03):
It will be some some difficulty, some wiring difficulties, some
neurological difficulty that we don't yet understand. And I and
that's true with at all levels. You know, people there's
a particular kind of problem. There are many kinds of
problems that can affect people's ability to play games, physical difficulties,
mental difficulties. But I think the yips fall more into
(35:25):
the physical category than they do into the mental, even
though there are psychological elements that can make it worse.
It originates somewhere else, and the root causes somewhere else,
and we aren't exactly sure what that is. On the
next episode of Losing Control, we bring in the neuroscientists
(35:48):
and neurologists. It's the science behind the yips. Next time
on Losing Control. A sincere thank you to our guests.
Page Pierce, a world champion archer and member of Team USA,
and David Owen, a staff writer at The New Yorker
magazine and contributing editor at Golf Digest. David wrote about
(36:09):
the Yips for The New Yorker. In the piece is
called the Yips, What's behind the condition that every golfer writes?
Thank you so much for listening, and don't forget to
rate and subscribe. I'm Justin Suah, your host, and you
can find me on Instagram and Twitter at Justin Suah.
That's j U s t I N s u A.
(36:34):
You could also check me out on the Increase Your
Impact podcast. Losing Control is a podcast from Sports Illustrated
Studios and I Heart Radio. Original music by Jerem Suah.
Michael McDowell is our producer. Editing and mixing by Will Stanton.
This episode was fact checked by Zoey Mulloch at s
I Studios. Max Miller is supervising producer, and Brandon Getchus
(36:57):
and Matt Lipson are executive producers at I Heart Radio.
Sean ty Toone as our executive producer. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast
does not provide medical advice, and nothing you here on
this podcast is intended or implied to be a substitute
(37:18):
for professional medical consultation, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the
advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with
any questions you may have regard in your health. Never
disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because
of something you have heard on this podcast.
Losing Control is a podcast from Sports Illustrated Studios and
I Heart Radio. I'm justin Suah and this is Losing Control,
a podcast about one of the strangest phenomenon sports, the yips,
or when an athlete or elite performer suddenly finds themselves
unable to do the thing that they do better than
almost everyone else on the planet. If you're listening for
(00:22):
the first time, welcome, but if you want the full experience,
head back to episode one. Losing Control is a podcast
told through conversations with athletes, coaches, neuroscientists, and more, and
it's in order. Each episode features a first hand perspective
that contributes a piece to the puzzle that is the yips.
Along the way, you'll learn about some of the challenges
(00:43):
that high performers face and the mental work that enables
them to do what they do. Not only that, you'll
hear how you can incorporate these tools, strategies, and mindsets
into your own life, because it's not just about losing control,
it's about getting it back. So it's gets darted now.
Even though it might seem like sports are solely physical
(01:04):
in nature, all sports have a mental component to them,
and today we're looking at two sports where the mental
side of the game plays a huge role, archery and golf.
Archery and golf are also two sports where the yips
are fairly common. In archery, it's known as target panic,
and in golf, the yips are simply the yips. In
(01:25):
the first half of this episode, you'll meet one of
the world's top archers, Page Pierce, and in the second
half i'll introduce you to David Owen, who has been
playing and writing about golf for decades. We're starting with archery,
a sport you might not be very familiar with. Here's
Page Pierce. There are many different types of archery, but
(01:46):
all of them involved the person shooting a bow and
arrow at some form of target bag. Go back Page
Piers with a ten. My name is Page Pierce. I
am a world champion professional archer. I'm also a member
of the United States Archery Team, so now I travel
the world um competing all year long, and that's what
(02:07):
I do for a full time job. If you've never
seen professional archery, I highly recommend you watch a few
videos of Page. She's incredible, she is poised, she is focused,
her eyes are still, her breathing is consistent, her routine
is on point. She looks like she's been doing this
for a long time. When did Page first pick up
(02:30):
a bow? So I actually started shooting around the age
of two, which I know sounds totally crazy, but both
my parents shot, um, I would say, semi professionally. They
had some sponsors, but always had other full time jobs,
and so when they had kids, my younger brother and I,
they were always out on the range shooting, and so
they just took us with them and we started shooting
(02:52):
as soon as we could, you know, remotely attempt that.
They would actually push us around in a stroller and
then stand us up, have a shoot the tar it,
put us back in the stroller, and then push us
to the next one. So it's pretty crazy. I've literally
been shooting longer than I even remember doing it. Page
was breaking archery records before she was even a teenager.
When I was ten years old, I was shooting a
(03:14):
state tournament and I broke a record, and um by twelve,
everyone was saying, hey, you're pretty good at this. You
should um go and try for the US team. We
have a Junior World Championships coming up. It's kind of
a big deal, and so when I was thirteen the
following year, I actually tried out for the team and
I qualified for that and at the time, I was
actually the youngest person to ever do that, which was
(03:36):
pretty exciting. And then we went on to win a
team gold medal there at that Junior World Championships. That
was pretty exciting. When I was fifteen years old, I
decided I wanted to go pro. I applied, got my
official pro card and then I've been traveling around on
the pro circuit since I was fifteen in page during
earlier this year. So let's get into it. What does
the mental side of pages shot actually look like? I
(03:59):
was say that archery is about mental and about ten physical,
and what I mean by that is, once you're at
that top level, so much of what we do is mental,
and so with that, so much of that shot process
is part of a subconscious process. In other words, I'm
not thinking about it. I've done it so many times
over the years that it just happens naturally. I let
(04:22):
my subconscious process run my body. My mind just knows
what it's doing and it does that and I don't
really have to think about it. Thanks for talking about
the mental side of archery, because that's a topic we
want to double click on a little bit and peer
into what does mental toughness look like in the sport
of archery. Well, to be honest, mental toughness in the
(04:43):
sport of archery shows up in the form of consistency
and repeatability. So what's hard about archery is it's not
a sport where if you get really excited or really
jacked up and you know that you're maybe run faster
or jump higher. It's all about staying calm, keeping your
body and a consistent state, keeping your heart rate low,
keeping your breathing even so under pressure, those can be very,
(05:07):
very difficult things to do, and through mental training you
can teach yourself to stay more calm in those situations.
And so someone with a very solid mental game will
look very calm and very relaxed in high pressure situations.
And so our mental training is a little bit different
than other sports. In the aspect of ours is just
remain calm, stay steady, keep everything consistent. And we have
(05:30):
to do that all the time, from beginning to end.
During a scoring round, can you talk to us about
how you mentally prepare for a competition, So when I
was younger. My very first mental health technique was when
I'm at full draw sing a song, and my thought
process was, you can't think two thoughts at once. So
if I'm singing a song, I can't be thinking negative thoughts.
(05:52):
I can't be fretting over, you know, anything that I'm
worried about. I'm just going to be focused on those
song lyrics. That's going to distract my conscious mind enough
that my subconscious mind can do what it knows how
to do and do what it's meant to do, what
I've trained it to do. There's certain techniques over the
years that I've used, that being one of them that
on a really mentally tough day or a mentally tough
(06:13):
end or arrow, I can use that and fall back
on it as a crutch to basically get through those
moments and keep my conscious mind at bay and archery.
Your conscious mind is not your friend, and so you know,
any way to distract that I'll use. On a good day,
I won't need that. My conscious mind is very quiet.
I can just do what I'm supposed to do. But
we're human. That's not always how it goes. So that's
(06:36):
just something that I've kind of used over the years
to to help during those pressure situations. So what was
the song so you're gonna laugh, um. The one song
that I chose when I was ten years old, and
I've used the same song ever since was do You
Believe In Magic? By Ali and a j from the
Disney Channel, which I was watching when I was ted.
(07:04):
My recommendation if you're going to pick a song to
sing is make it something that's happy. Make it something
that is upbeat, because in those pressure situations, something with
a little bit of fast tempo is going to keep
you engaged as far as like pushing, pulling and all
that stuff. Something really slow can kind of slow your
shot process down mentally. The other thing that's really neat
(07:25):
about archery that we haven't touched on yet is again
it's all about consistency, but that also means consistent shot timing.
Shooting a bow is a multi step process, and Page
is going to talk about anchoring or when an archer
has fully drawn her bow and is preparing to shoot
an arrow. So from when you anchor to when your
shot breaks, you want a consistent time, and very often
(07:47):
under pressure, that time will change. So one really neat
thing that using a song will do is also let
you know, Okay, I'm definitely holding too long. So what
I would do is whenever I hit my anchor point,
I would start the core us at the same exact spot.
And I knew that roughly around this part of the
chorus that my bow should fire. And if it didn't,
(08:07):
it's like, Man, I'm overholding, I'm holding too long. I
should let down, which means basically, instead of shooting the shot,
you just let the string down. You can restart, take
a few breaths, and then draw that back again. Um.
And so it also not just helps with mental distraction,
but also with shot timing in those pressure situations and
letting you know if you're doing your job, or if
(08:30):
you've slowed down or if you've sped up. Where the
mind goes, the body flows under pressure, the mind has
a tendency to go to the past or to go
to the future. Now to combat that, page is taught
herself to have her mind chew on something else, and
in this case it's a song. Essentially, what she's doing
(08:51):
is she's distracting yourself. She's thinking on purpose with purpose,
But what does she do to keep herself mentally locked
in today. So how I mentally prepare for a competition
looks a lot different now than it did when I
was younger and was still trying to work on establishing
a mental game and mental toughness and mental strength and consistency.
(09:12):
But visualization has always been something that I've done through
my career. I started that about when I was ten
years old, and um have done that ever since. And
so a lot of times, if I'm coming up to
a big tournament, I've been to the venue. I know
what it looks like because I've shot all these tournaments
for so many years, and if I haven't, you can
look up pictures or videos of what that venue is
going to look like. And so I will visualize myself,
(09:35):
you know, walking in, shooting on the practice range, shooting
arrows for a score. So by the time I get there,
in my mind, I've already done all of that quite
a few times, and I feel like that helps reduce
the level of pressure that I'm going to feel. The
other thing that I'm doing on the daily is I
actually have daily affirmation cards that are posted all around
my house. They always are, and I update those after
(09:57):
every event just to basically portray whatever my next goal
is or the next thing that I'm trying to achieve.
And there's some lines on there that might always stay
the same, but then certain things for different events will
change depend on the format or the style or the
mental approchooning to take to be good at that style event.
It sounds simple, but it's amazing how those simple practices
(10:18):
can provide huge benefits. Not only does she write down
her daily affirmations, she goes one step further. I am
an auditory learner, and I knew that about myself, so
writing the cards, reading the cards in my own mind like, yeah,
that's fine, But I took that a step further. And
anyone with you know, a phone nowadays, it probably has
the ability to record. So I went into my phone,
(10:41):
went into voice memos and actually recorded my daily affirmation
and so I will actually play that back to myself
a couple of times a day, and hearing that had
a way bigger impact on myself than just reading the card.
And so I think what's really interesting is everybody's minds
are different. They're all going to read at different to
different things. And so I took the normal part of
(11:04):
what would be called a mental management process and try
to change that a little bit to something that I
knew would work better for myself and my learning style.
And I kind of think that's what it's all about.
I feel like, when you've shot enough tournaments over enough years,
you know it's not that you need that exact mental
training before every event. You've just done it so much
(11:24):
that it's kind of built into you that you're going
to be fine. But I still like to use those
day to day techniques to just make sure that I
keep up on my mental game and it doesn't start
to fall behind. I love the term she uses mental management.
What that implies is that Page is constantly aware of
where her mind is. She's aware of her thoughts, and
(11:46):
she's aware that her thoughts will impact her emotions, which
will impact her body, which will ultimately impact her performance,
which is why she's very deliberate with what she says
to herself and what she thinks about herself. What's also
interesting is that she customizes her practices to her needs.
She changes, she evolves, and the things she did in
(12:08):
the past might not be things she does right now. However,
she doesn't just stop doing it completely. She still makes
it part of her process, but she tweaks it occasionally
according to her current needs. It's very easy to hit
the autopilot mode and just go through the motions, and
Page understands that it's a constant upkeep. And the reason
(12:31):
that's so important is because at the highest level of
sports or music, or business or any industry, everyone works hard,
everyone is smart, and often times the separator is the
mental game. It's the person who's able to quiet their
mind and manage their thoughts who has the competitive advantage. Now,
(12:53):
when we're back, we're talking about the yips and archery,
it's target panic. After this, you're listening to losing control
and I'm justin suah. I'm talking with Page Pierce, one
of the best archers in the world. Page and I
talked about how she keeps her mental game sharp. But
(13:16):
what happens when the yips occur in archery? The yips
are known as target panic. Back to the conversation, can
you please talk about target panic? So, target panic in
archery is a very interesting and complex thing. Basically, it's
when something is happening in your mind that shows through
(13:37):
and your shot that you cannot control, like your mind
is taken over, you know, what's wrong and you know
that shouldn't be happening, but no matter what you do,
it happens anyway. It's something that has just gone wrong
in your mental process. So in your mind is the
one that's doing something that you don't want. It's a
very very long road to try to break down those
bad habits and rebuild new ones. Have you ever seen
(14:00):
either with competitors or teammates where target panic it ended
up affecting them not only as an athlete, but it
affected them outside of their sport as well. Have you
ever seen the devastating effects of someone experiencing target panic
when we spend so much of our life shooting a bow,
(14:21):
seeing someone who's on the professional level battle that and
go through something like that, I mean, you can see
that it wears down not just on their archery game
and their performance, but that's going to hurt their overall confidence,
their overall self esteem, their overall self image. And so
I feel like a lot of the times, you know,
if they're performing well and shooting well and things are
going smooth in normal life, their normal energy is going
(14:43):
to be really high and very positive. But a lot
of times when you're struggling that will carry over to
normal life as well. And that's something that I hate
to see in archery, but it's very real. Like I said,
when you spend so much of your life shooting a
bow and you feel like you're failing and you're struggling,
and your mind is doing something you don't on it
to do, of course you're going to feel those same
emotions on a day to day basis, and so you know,
(15:05):
it's something that can be very challenging, but if you
can learn to work through it and you can beat
it can also be very rewarding. Have you ever experienced it.
I do experience a form of aiming target panic, and
what that means is that my mind does not like
when my pin aims in the center of the target,
and so my mind's comfort zone when I'm aiming is
(15:25):
actually low on the target face. Now, if we have
a scoring face that scores ten, seven, six and so on,
my comfort zone is right around the eight ring and
so I can aim there nice and steady. But if
I take my bow and I try to force aim
it in the middle, my mind freaks out. My bow
moves all over the place, and it's just not comfortable.
(15:46):
But if I let it relax back down by the eight,
it will sit nice and still. Page became a world
champion archer while she was living with target panic. Most
people look at target panic like something is severely wrong
and I have to fix it. But rather than struggle
through fixing my problem, I just embraced it and I
shot aiming that way for basically my entire life up
(16:09):
until this last year. I finally worked on fixing it,
and I've had pretty good success since then. But it
was brutal, it was tough, it was challenging, it was frustrating.
But up until then, I did what most people haven't done,
and I just let it aim where it wanted and
just embraced it, and I trusted it and I rolled
with it. And while I was struggling with a form
of obviously mental target panic, at the same time, I
(16:32):
was also showing a form of mental toughness to be
able to just say, I'm going to make this work,
this is what's going to happen. I'm just gonna sit
in for it. I'm gonna shoot it, and it's gonna
work well. And it did. It worked very well for
a lot of years. But I finally decided you know what,
I want to beat this. I want to break this,
and I want to be better than that. And so UM,
I had to put a lot of time, in a
lot of effort in but I'm finally making some really
(16:54):
good progress. You're probably not surprised to hear that page
figured out how to manage her target panic, even after
leaving with it for the majority of her career. Last year,
I was finally like, I'm sick of aiming low. I've
had enough of this. I was constantly having to adjust
my site every time I walked up to the line,
it would want to aim lower and lower, and I
(17:14):
was sick of fighting that. So I actually reached out
to a guy. His name's Joel Turner, and he has
what's called shot i Q. It's literally like a little
online course that you can pay and you go through that.
He had some very good information in there. But it's
funny because it was one of the most simple things
that ended up helping me. And I'll say it because
it's UM's. It is so simple yet so helpful. So
(17:36):
one UM small thing that made a huge difference was
I actually now drawback anchor and then I put my
pin in the middle first, and mentally it was so
much easier to do that I'm discovering it was because
I know my bow camp fire, and so it's the
anticipation of the shot going off that I was struggling with.
But if I put my pin to the center without
(17:58):
my thumb on the trigger, I know bo cannot go
off basically pages aiming first, and then only when she's
ready to fire does she put her thumb on the trigger.
That was one small, small thing, but it made a
huge difference for me, and I'm still using that same
thing in my shot process today. And so with target
panic being so mental, you know, it's just trying to
(18:21):
break down the mental wiring that we've built and create
a new one or change the one that is there
to basically help, you know, stop that mental process that
is creating target panic for you. I asked Paige if
the mental training she does for archery translates into other
aspects of her life. I do think that the mental
(18:45):
aspect of archery does help me manage other things in
my life. The cool thing about mental stuff is that
it's never just for one thing. It really will change,
like how you think about life as a whole and
how you handle situations as a whole. And so even
if you're not someone who's a professional athlete or that's
not your goal, there are still huge benefits even in
(19:06):
daily life to you know, being able to step back
and think about certain situations differently, maybe stay calm in
times when you wouldn't have and so, you know, mental
management and learning how your mind works and how to
control it and stuff is something that I would recommend
to everybody because I really do think and it can
improve your quality of life in any job or any situation,
(19:27):
in relationships, um and all of the above. Really, I
always shy away from absolutes. And while the mental management
tools you're working on in your sport may help in
other areas of your life, it doesn't necessarily mean it will.
I've had players tell me that they're taking the mental
skills we've worked on together and are teaching it to
their children. But I've also had players tell me that
(19:49):
they wish they were better at applying the mental skills
work they use on the field to other areas of
their life. You might not be battling target panic, but
think about the moment mints of friction in your life.
Can you approach them deliberately. Can you implement a strategy
that meets your needs. Can you visualize yourself surmounting that
(20:10):
obstacle you've been facing. It's worth a shot. We'll be
back with David Owen after this. I'm justin Sewa and
this is losing control, and we're back for the second
half of today's episode. From archery to golf, two sports
that require incredible mental prowess. Now, of all the sports
out there, the yips may be the most widely studied
(20:32):
in Gulf And maybe that's because it just seems so impossible.
How can you not hit a ball that's not moving.
It's got to be nerves or choking, right. I think
that people who do not have the yips, and they're
looking at somebody who does the most obvious expensis, well,
they must be nervous. They're you know, they're they're choking.
But I think that for somebody who is experiencing the
(20:55):
yips from the other side, it's entirely different. It doesn't
feel like that at all. That's the voice of day
It Owen. He's been a staff writer at The New
Yorker magazine since He's written numerous books, but more importantly
he's a contributing editor at Golf Digest, and he's been
writing about golf for many years. I think every golfer
(21:16):
you know people who get nervous and hit poor shots
when they're nervous. But you also know people who are
clearly affected by something that is darker and deeper than that,
because you can see it. You can see the movement
in there. You can see the flinch in their hand
when they try to make a putt. I've seen it
in other people, and it's it is fascinating when you
watch someone closely and you see every time they make
(21:40):
the putting motion, their hand turns. You know, it turns
in the same way every time, and they're they're not
conscious of it necessarily, but they can't stop it. There's
you could point it out to them, you could show
it to them on videotape, and they would be unable
not to do it. And just like in baseball, in gymnastics,
and in our tree, there's no easy fix. I think
(22:01):
that one of the hardest things about it for people
who suffer from it is that people who don't suffer
from it, I think there must be an easy solution.
Anybody who has the YIPS is used to getting endless
technical advice from playing partners. You know, just do this,
just hold your hands like this, just you know, just
stop doing that, do this. You know, don't hit up,
hit down, do do whatever. And it's not the difficulty
(22:23):
is that it's not that kind of problem. It's not real.
True yips is not a problem of technique. It's uh,
it's it has been accurately described, I think by people
who suffer from it. Is a wiring problem in the head.
It's a It can be totally career ending for professionals,
and you see it at every level. It just it
could destroy the players, not only success, but any enjoyment
(22:46):
they take in the game, and you see people who
do extraordinary things to try to avoid it. There's trying
to avoid it, and then there's trying to manage the
yips once you have it. One of the most famous
ones is the golfer Johnny Miller, who became a beloved
golf announcer, and his announcing career really began because he
couldn't play competitive golf anymore. And the reason he couldn't,
(23:06):
even even though he's basically at the peak of his
ability in every other way, he had this terrible yipping
problem with his putts, and he actually won the British
Open while yipping. But in order to enable himself to
put he had to do this really strange thing. He
painted a red dot on the grip of his putter
and he looked at that instead of at the ball,
(23:27):
and that enabled him to get by well enough to
go on. Now, there's also Hank Haney, one of the
best known golf coaches out there. Hank Haney, who was
Tiger Woods his teacher for a long time, had what
is much less common than putting yips, which is full
swing yips. He was unable to take a full swing
with a golf club, and he studied it and studied it,
(23:48):
looked at slow motion videotapes of himself playing golf, and
he would go out by himself and try to overcome
it mechanically. What he eventually realized by accident is that
he was able to hit the ball pretty well if
he didn't look at it. And so he would be
teaching people and he would hit a shot without looking
at the ball, and the students were impressed because it
looked like something difficult, but for him it was just
(24:08):
it was just the only way he could hit a ball,
and he eventually developed this really peculiar routine where he
would take what sort of looked like baseball practice swing
and he would take the club all the way back.
It was this little routine that he went into before
he hit the ball, and he was basically winding himself
up through this succession of very odd looking movements, and
(24:31):
to end, then he would let go when he would
hit the ball, and he could do it. So we
have Johnny Miller and Hank Haney. These aren't just well
known characters who have had the yips. These are some
of the best pros out there. I think probably the
best known golfer with a yips problem was the German
golfer Bernard Longer, who has actually he's found workarounds for
(24:53):
his yips three different times during his career. He got
the yips while putting, and then he adopted a putting
struck in what he would he would hold up putter
all the way up his left forearm and then he
would grip his left forewarm around the putter shaft with
his right hand, and so he had kind of immobilized
his left hand and his right hand and the putter
shaft became, I guess really an extension of his left arm,
(25:15):
and he could put that way. Then that stopped working.
He moved to a long putter and cured it that way.
And then the two big international golf governing bodies, in
their wisdom, decided that putting with a long putter anchored
against the body would no longer be allowed. UH, And
so he had to develop a third way to UH,
(25:36):
yet another way to overcome this problem. Bernard Longer is
a guy who won the Masters, not once, but twice.
There have been many, many well known golfers, many well
known athletes, who have, at some point in their career,
usually late, they get this uncontrollable like a spasm when
they try to do particular action. It's always a particular act,
(26:00):
and it's often one involving fine motor control. It's often
one that's often repeated, and an often one that's in
slow motion. As an expert in the yips, tell me
you don't see tennis players with the yips except on
the serve or on the toss. It's always a movement
that starts from immobility. You know, a golfer is always
immobile before taking a swing. A dart player is always
(26:22):
standing there. The snooker player, a biliar player, is standing still.
The motion starts from a dead stop. A tennis player
playing tennis, you know, returning volleys is in the flow,
and it doesn't happen. They're the only times it happens.
With the serve, the toss, and also with a you know,
with a lob shot. That's we're getting ready to return
a lob shot. You're gonna smash it down the throat
(26:44):
of your opponent, and you have too long to think
about it and the ball ends up in the net
or beyond the end of the court. One thing you
said that was intriguing to me is you said, usually
later in careers is when you have seen this develop.
Why do you think that's the case. Well, one reason
may simply be that if if it happens to somebody
(27:06):
early in their career, they don't have a career. But
I think also there's a there is a sense that
there is some certainty that it's a problem that gets
worse with use, and that if it is as some
people believe it as a kind of wiring wiring problem
neurological wiring problem, there are connections that like an electrical
system where you developed short circuits, so they're they're sparking
(27:27):
across gaps, and that it's more likely to occur later
after repeated, repeated, repeated use. And if you think about
it this way, it's pretty clear how the workarounds work.
You're just bypassing a broken circuit. I think some of
the workarounds really are like workarounds are like detours. There's
a wiring problem in one neural path, and you overcome
(27:50):
it by kind of creating a new neural path so
that the the signals you're sending or taking a different
path to this there. It's kind of shaking things up.
You're trying a different chnique of doing what's essentially the
same thing moving the putter back and forth. You're sending
different signals to the hands to bypass whatever this roadblock
is that's developed. And I think that's why the workarounds work.
(28:12):
The really interesting thing about all these is that nobody
really understands why they work or why they stopped working.
When sufferers find something that enables them to overcome their
difficulty and it works for a while and then it stops.
And so I think if you're a yip suffer, or
dark titis suffer, or a target panic suffer or flincher.
If you're a shooter, you have to be ready to
(28:34):
try something else. And the same is true in golf.
When you see somebody who cannot make a a normal
putting stroke right handed but has no problem at all
left handed under any circumstances, you realize that you know
it's not because he was choking. There was something else
going on, even if we aren't entirely certain what it was.
You have to be ready to experiment, and sometimes what
works starts to yep. When David wrote about Hank Haney swinging,
(29:00):
it was unconventional, But years later Hany had to change
his swing again because his yips had shifted. Hanny told
me that, and he said that his swing. If I
played with him that day, he said, I would find
that his swing look much more conventional than it had
on the day that I had played with him before.
But he said that if he get let it get
(29:21):
too conventional, he could feel his problem coming back and
he would have to go back to his to his workarounds.
So Bernard Longer is another example of someone he found
a way to cure his yips but then his hips
came back and he had to find it another cure.
So it's not a cure like making the problem go
away forever. There's clearly in some people there's a tendency
(29:41):
and it tends to it sneaks back, it finds a
way to work back in. David said that there may
be a tendency to yip. I'm gonna go back to that.
There's a researcher who did it a really interesting study. Well,
it took a bunch of people who had never played
golf ever and gave him a puttern a ball and
no instruction, said just you know, do whatever you need
(30:02):
to get this ball in the hole. And they filmed
them in super slow motion with all this analytical equipment
and detected severe yips and something like the people these
were people who never played golf before. And then they
did this interesting thing of turning them around. So you
take somebody who was right side dominant, and whatever putting
start they had invented, they had them do the mirror image,
(30:23):
so they were doing it left side, and when everybody
putted the other way around, the hips all went away.
So I think it's probably something that is common to
some degree. In many many people, many more people than
who look as though they have a real problem. In
many people, that's at a level that they can accommodate
(30:43):
it just with you know, they learned to they learn
to work around it. But I think that the idea
that that it's widespread, you know, the explanation could be
that just because of ordinary life, maybe using your you know,
typing on your phone, all the activities that we do,
these fine motor activities that we do with our hands,
with our fingers, maybe over time they create a tendency
(31:05):
to make miss motions and they become visible in certain activities,
like maybe they become visible in putting in golf, or
or maybe you start playing darts and in this accumulated
damage that you've done to your whatever, to your nervous system,
to plus your perceptual system, maybe somehow that all works
(31:25):
together and causes a problem. From the perspective of a writer,
you've been around the game for a long time, you've
played the game for a while. How do you think
about the relationship between the body and the mind when
it comes to golf. Well, I think in every sport
it's huge, and you're seeing golf, you know, the world
of golf at the highest levels is incredibly deep. The
(31:46):
skill level of all over the world. There's so many
players who basically have perfect technique, and yet a relatively
small number of them or make it as tour players,
as professional tour players. And the reason has to do
with the mind. Know there for one reason or another,
they think like dominant athletes. Tiger Woods is the most
extreme example, and and he has a totally extreme example
(32:08):
during the you know, in the in the two thousands,
in the odds, when he was at the peak of
his powers. There were years when he had enough points
in the World Golf ranking system to be both the
number one and number two player in the world. In
other words, you could have divided his year and half
and each half was better than whoever was next in line.
(32:29):
It was just an incredible level of dominance. And it
wasn't his technique. It wasn't I mean, he's a brilliant,
brilliantly skilled, physically skilled athlete, but I think his main
advantage was, you know, was mental, and he was somehow
you know, like Michael Jordan's, like some other great players.
He was just able to think in a way that
(32:52):
a champion thinks however, that is it's not something that
I have any experience with. I wasn't once told by
an athlete that he is more nervous watching the game
from the dugout than actually being in the game himself.
And I asked him why. He said, well, because when
you're in the game, your focus is narrow. The only
thing that matters is this moment. You're not worried about
(33:14):
the future, you're not worried about the past. You're in
the here and now. This champions mindset that David is describing.
For a lot of these athletes, they do it by default.
David had a chance to watch Tiger Woods up close.
I did get to spend time with Tiger Woods, and
I decided that the thing that distinguishes an athlete like
(33:35):
Tiger Woods Michael Jordan's. You know, these like ultra superstars.
The guy's way at the top is not that they're
determined to win, but that they're not afraid to lose.
And so with Michael Jordan's, you know that if there's
a second to go in a basketball game, and there's
a somebody can a shot from the three point line
could win the game, you want Michael Jordan to take it.
And the reason is not that he's set on winning,
(33:57):
but then he's not afraid to miss the shot, and
so he doesn't. He doesn't clench up in a way
that you or I might, and the same with true
Tiger Woods. You think of how many times he had
a longish pot to win a tournament at the very
last moment and made it and uh, you know, he
told me that he never feels calmer than when he
is in a situation like that. It's kind of, I think,
the reverse of what it is for most of us,
(34:19):
and it's one of the many explanations for why we
don't do things at that level. But it's interesting that
what life must be like for athletes who perform at
that level. And the same true probably in poker, in uh,
in bridge and other in chests and other activities. But
here's the thing. Even someone as dominant as Tiger Woods
isn't immune to the yips. The yips uh and it's
(34:42):
related difficulties are different. It's not you know, people who
people who come down, you know, Tiger Woods could come
down with them. And there are people who have thought
that maybe he had the full swing yips. It's not
because if he did, or if he does, if if
he had them or has them, or if he ever
develops them. It won't be because he is not mentally
fit to play his game. It will be something else.
(35:03):
It will be some some difficulty, some wiring difficulties, some
neurological difficulty that we don't yet understand. And I and
that's true with at all levels. You know, people there's
a particular kind of problem. There are many kinds of
problems that can affect people's ability to play games, physical difficulties,
mental difficulties. But I think the yips fall more into
(35:25):
the physical category than they do into the mental, even
though there are psychological elements that can make it worse.
It originates somewhere else, and the root causes somewhere else,
and we aren't exactly sure what that is. On the
next episode of Losing Control, we bring in the neuroscientists
(35:48):
and neurologists. It's the science behind the yips. Next time
on Losing Control. A sincere thank you to our guests.
Page Pierce, a world champion archer and member of Team USA,
and David Owen, a staff writer at The New Yorker
magazine and contributing editor at Golf Digest. David wrote about
(36:09):
the Yips for The New Yorker. In the piece is
called the Yips, What's behind the condition that every golfer writes?
Thank you so much for listening, and don't forget to
rate and subscribe. I'm Justin Suah, your host, and you
can find me on Instagram and Twitter at Justin Suah.
That's j U s t I N s u A.
(36:34):
You could also check me out on the Increase Your
Impact podcast. Losing Control is a podcast from Sports Illustrated
Studios and I Heart Radio. Original music by Jerem Suah.
Michael McDowell is our producer. Editing and mixing by Will Stanton.
This episode was fact checked by Zoey Mulloch at s
I Studios. Max Miller is supervising producer, and Brandon Getchus
(36:57):
and Matt Lipson are executive producers at I Heart Radio.
Sean ty Toone as our executive producer. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast
does not provide medical advice, and nothing you here on
this podcast is intended or implied to be a substitute
(37:18):
for professional medical consultation, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the
advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with
any questions you may have regard in your health. Never
disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because
of something you have heard on this podcast.
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