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The Yips articles

Below are the best articles we could find on The Yips.

Athletes of many kinds can experience the yips, which was a term originally coined by golfer Tommy Armour. Usually affecting professionals or other high-level athletes, the “yips” refer to the sudden inability to perform critical fine-motor control or certain fundamental physical skills associated with the sport, such as putting in golf or throwing a baseball accurately. (In gymnastics, the term “twisties” is used for the sudden loss of body control mid-air.) There’s no single standard physical or psychological cause or treatment, and while some athletes recover within weeks, others never fully regain their previous level of ability. These disruptions in body control can range from disorienting to downright terrifying, and often bring up intense feelings of fear and self-doubt.

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Is Fixing the Yips as Easy as Admitting You Have Them? A Yale Professor Makes the Case

It’s a theory of cognitive science called “ironic process theory,” which argues the more we try to suppress certain thoughts, the more likely we are to make them surface.

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What “Ted Lasso” Could Help Us to Understand about Athletes Protecting their Mental Health

A well-handled storyline about “the yips” explains and supports Simone Biles’ decision to avoid potential injury.

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What’s Happening Inside Simone Biles’ Brain When the ‘Twisties’ Set In?

A complex system in the brain that keeps gymnasts balanced can get out of whack.

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The Yips—If You’ve Had ’Em, You’ve Got ’Em

The bitter, inescapable truth remains. Once you’ve had ’em, you’ve got ’em.

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Don’t Cramp My Style

He had succumbed to what doctors call focal dystonia, golfers call the yips, and instrumentalists and scribblers, respectively, call musician’s cramp and writer’s cramp.

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The Yips

What’s behind the condition that every golfer dreads?

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Why Simone Biles Getting ‘the Twisties’ Was So Terrifying and What Recovery Could Look Like

This is clearly not a matter of an athlete struggling with technical aspects of a skill or not being physically prepared. There’s something else at work here.

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Why Do Top Athletes Suddenly Develop “the Yips”—a Tendency to Choke under Pressure?

One suggested explanation is a neurological condition called focal dystonia that results in involuntary muscle contractions when performing a motor task and tends to affect a muscle group that is used frequently and repeatedly.

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Twisties and Yips: Simone Biles Reveals a Powerful Mind-Body Connection

“We are not really good at fully understanding the relationship between the brain and the mind, or the brain and performance."

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Jose Altuve, the Yips, and Some Sympathy for the Astros

Every baseball player fears the affliction, the sudden mental block that prevents them from making a routine throw. It goes by a funny name—the yips—but it is invisible and terrifying.

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