Working in Movement

I usually get ideas for blog posts from the subscriptions in Netnewswire, my news aggregator of choice for some time now. But today I tried something a little different and went fishing in the big Google pond. And I found something unexpected and maybe even a little cool. I was searching for new items on neuroplasticity but not finding much. I switched to the term "sensory motor" expecting to find lots of dry medical and academic type links.

What turned up instead was something from Golf Digest, referring to something I'd never heard of: driver yips. Now, there is lots of stuff out there on the yips (sudden uncontrolled movements) during putting.

In The Secrets Issue: How I cured my driver yips, well-known golf instructor Hank Haney describes how he overcame a problem that threatened to ruin his golf game and maybe even force him to give up the game entirely. Haney reported that his yip while swinging his driver would often send the ball off in an unintended direction, sometimes a hundred yards or more. Now, with Haney, being pretty much a scratch golfer, the ball was well-hit, just off line. Lots of lost balls and embarrassing moments.

As I read this story, I anticipated Haney making some swing adjustment that would magically cure his ailment, and then offer this "cure" to the rest of us in a forthcoming instructional book or video. But it turned out not to be that. Instead, Haney talks about the likely causes and the experimental approach that he came up with.

I've come to understand that the yips are a motor-sensory disorder. The brain stops processing the motor skill commands for a certain movement. To fix it, you can't try to do the same thing you were doing before. You have to do something different. You have to create a new pathway in your brain for the task.

How he "created this new pathway" was pretty ingenious, I think. He changed his how he held the club, adding a constraint that virtually eliminated stray hand and wrist action. He also made up an elaborate (and highly non-habitual) routine prior to hitting the ball. But the biggest departure was in his use of the eyes: he doesn't look at the ball as he hits it! Pretty clever and original way of working out a sensory motor problem.

Haney is honest here that there's no magic in any of this:

I haven't found a magic yips vaccine. The changes I made weren't scientific. This process worked for me, but following it to the letter might not work for you. It's not so important what you do to address the driver yips. It's more important to understand that doing the same thing over and over again won't work. You have to find a different pathway in your brain for the motor signals to travel. That might mean some other crazy kind of grip or preshot routine. Don't be afraid to experiment.

Most golf instructional stuff I've seen is highly prescriptive, mostly a demonstrate and imitate approach to learning a pretty complex and precise skill. I don't know where Haney will go with this -- the article ends with a promo for his next article on short game yips. But this article was a fresh approach that might get some readers thinking for themselves instead of searching for the next magical tip.