Solved: The Mystery of the Throwing Yips By Dr. Tom Hanson Erik Jones is terrified. His mouth is dry. His heart is thumping. His chest is tight. He’s got a knot in his stomach, his hands are clammy, and his arm is tense. Given that he’s a Division I college sophomore, scholarship athlete, you’d think he was about to step on a tight rope strung 400 feet above the ground. Or about to give a speech to 1,000 people. Or at least mustering the courage to lean in and go for a first kiss. No, Erik is about to throw a baseball to a fellow player just 40 feet away. Hello Yips! The throwing yips have been a mystery for years now. Until lately, it was unsolved. Baseball doesn’t use the term “yips” as much as golf does, but that’s how I’ll refer to it. It also goes by “The Throwing Problem,” or “The Thing,” or “That thing that Steve Sax got that knocked him out of baseball.” Rick Ankiel pitched his team into the World Series, then pitched himself into the outfield. Chuck Knoblauch played 2B well enough to win a Gold Glove, then badly enough to move to the outfield. The yips take many forms. Sometimes it’s a pitcher that can’t find the plate. Sometimes it’s a catcher that can gun a runner down stealing, but can’t throw the ball back to the pitcher. I’ve also worked with several pitchers who are okay pitching, but can’t throw to bases. I recently asked one stand out pitcher what the most stressful part of the game was for him, and he said, “When the catcher puts the sign down for me to throw to first base.” Second basemen are also common victims of yips, becoming unable to get the ball to first on easy ground balls. Outfielders get it. I just finished working with a pro player who could make the long OF throws, but dreaded the thought of playing catch to get loose. Coaches at all levels get it and can’t throw BP (see below). Typically a player can make a tough, hurried throw, but are stricken with seizure-like arm action on easy throws. These players may laugh and smile with their teammates, but on the inside they’re dying. Understanding the Yips The yips can be tough to understand. Until recently, the yips kicked my butt. It was sort of like cancer: if I got a call from a player really early on, I could help him a lot. But if it was an advanced case, I could help him cope with it, but not lose it. I’d have him breathe and visualize and do a routine, but I couldn’t dig in there and root it out. One thing that helped me understand the yips was better understanding how the brain functions. As I understand it, the brain has three parts, non-technically referred to as 1) the Mental Brain (the cortex/neo-cortex that is responsible for higher brain functioning like thinking and remembering), 2) the Emotional Brain (the mid-brain area responsible for emotions) 3) the Physical Brain (the brain-stem area responsible for bodily functions and to some degree reflexes) When information comes in to us through our senses it goes immediately to our Emotional Brain. There a vital decision is made: “Am I safe?” If the Emotional Brain decides that the new information poses no threat, control of the situation is given to the Mental Brain. As a result, we are calm and cool and able to remember things we’ve been told or read. But if the Emotional Brain decides that the new information says “DANGER,” it shifts control to the Physical Brain and the primal responses of fight, flight, or freeze kick in. None of those are good options when you’re trying to throw a small ball at a relatively small target. You may recall from Ken Ravizza’s and my book, Heads-Up Baseball, that one disastrous form of pitching is called “Primal Pitching.” This happens when a pitcher perceives his current situation as threatening – that his well-being is under attack – and he forgets all he’s been told about how to pitch and he humps up and throws like a cave man throwing a rock at a charging T-Rex. So the key here is that when a player perceives a situation as threatening, the Mental Brain, where he keeps all the coaching he’s given on how to throw, is by-passed. Anyone who has coached a player with the yips – or had them -- will tell you that words don’t matter. “Relax,” “Just throw it easy,” “Don’t try so hard, just let it happen” and so on do no good. That information goes into the Mental Brain and sits on the bench as the Emotional and Physical Brains play the game. How You Get the Yips Let’s go back to poor Erik. He’s a composite of the yippers I’ve worked with lately. Something happened to Erik that significantly embarrassed or humiliated him. It was most likely a baseball and in particular a throwing-related event, but it doesn’t have to be. It may have been an acute (one-time) event, or something more chronic. It may have involved his parents – primarily dad – but it may not have. But something happened so that now his brain judges making certain kinds of throws as threatening. He may not even remember the event. But for some reason his Emotional Brain created a program that says “X type of throwing situation is threatening.” As a result, his body kicks into “fight, flight or freeze” mode and a seizure-like, spastic arm action flings the ball almost randomly. The bad throw is humiliating, and the pattern is reinforced. (“See,” says the Emotional Brain, “having to make that throw IS threatening.”) Once the ball gets rolling (literally and figuratively), it’s tough to stop it. But why wouldn’t it happen all the time? Why would Knoblaugh and Ankiel and others be fine for so long, then have it kick in? I see it sort of like herpes. The herpes virus sits dormant in your system until a stressful time hits or your immune system is low for some reason. Then it wreaks havoc. I would bet those two and others with the yips have some event or series of events in their past where they got “infected.” (I’m not a psychologist. I’ve always focused people much more on their future and present then their past. But in this case, I’ve found that identifying events in the past and neutralizing them can speed yip elimination greatly.) Although it could get some cheap laughs, I don’t call the yips “throwing herpes” because unlike herpes, the yips can be cured.
Throwaballaphobia I see the yips as a phobia. A fear of throwing the ball. An irrational fear. Again, the Emotional Brain perceives a throwing situation as threatening and creates a fear. Fear is designed to protect us, to warn us. But in this case it messes us up. Remember, rational thinking of the Mental Brain does not come in to play, so don’t get hooked on how this doesn’t make sense. Actually, it makes perfect sense. If we perceive a threat (it doesn’t matter that the fear isn’t rational), our body kicks in to its primal, physical safely mode. The question becomes: How do we change how the Emotional Brain perceives the situation?
How to Cure the Yips I’ve heard two people, an NFL long snapper and a former baseball player tell me they got through the yips by “toughing it out.” They just sucked it up, got yelled at by a tough coach, and fought through it. Well, a lot of tough people have failed to do that. I was with the Yankees in 2001 and got to see Knoblaugh go through it up close. I’ll always admire his courage for going out there, day after day, and facing his demon in front of tens of thousands of people. He’s tough, so I don’t see force as a viable solution. And we already determined we can’t just “talk it through.” My answer has come from the East. Not the Eastern Division, but Eastern philosophy. Namely, acupuncture. The Chinese came up with this about 5,000 years ago. Their view of the body is that it runs on a flow of energy. Like Einstein, they see everything as being made up of energy. When that energy is flowing freely through our bodies we feel good and perform freely. When that energy is blocked, we feel bad and perform badly. In energy psychology terms, when someone has the yips there’s a disturbance in his energy flow around his throwing. Sort of like a traffic jam. You might be in With the yipper, the message comes from the Mental Brain: “Throw the ball to that guy,” but message gets blocked and disrupted along the way. The message has to take a long, crazy route to get delivered and executed, so you see some of the weirdest throwing actions ever. So in Western terms, we need to change how the player’s Emotional Brain perceives throwing. In Eastern terms, we need to remove the blockages to the player’s energy flow (those blockages were caused by the humiliating past incidents that now sit like car-wrecks on the player’s energetic freeway). A form of acupuncture, somewhat skillfully applied, can do that. Fortunately, this form of acupuncture doesn’t require needles, just fingers. It can even be done over the phone. I’ve never met most of the players I’ve cured. Before and After Comments from Players Most former yippers prefer to remain anonymous, but here are a few of their comments before and after participating in my Yip Elimination Program (YEP): Player 1 (DI catcher)
Player 2 (Pro OF)
Player 3 (DI catcher)
A Coach Who Couldn’t Throw BP Jeremy Sheetinger, a graduate assistant at the
A few weeks later he commented on the effectiveness of the program…
Way More Than a Yips Cure The big news for everyone in baseball, yips or not, is the amazing power of this technique to improve anyone’s performance. If it is powerful enough to remove the yips, can you imagine how powerful it can be for non-yippers? About the Author: Dr. Tom Hanson has consulted with the Yankees, Rangers, Angels, Twins and many top professional players and teams. He co-authored “Heads-Up Baseball: Playing the Game One Pitch at a Time, and now has several audio and DVD programs that take the mental game to the next level. Get his free program, “5 Steps to Unstoppable Confidence” at his website www.BaseballConfidence.com He’s also set up a new site dedicated to the yips, www.YipsBeGone.com
Special to Collegiate Baseball The full yips cure is pretty involved, but Collegiate Baseball has arranged with Dr. Tom to teach you the basic process on line. To learn his technique, visit www.BaseballConfidence.com/cb.html Winning the Emotional Game of Baseball By Dr. Tom Hanson What do all these stories have in common? These stories have two things in common: first, I recently coached each player through their change, and second, I couldn’t have done it a year ago. At least not as fast and easy. In some cases I wouldn’t have even tried. (Incidentally, with just one exception, the coaching was done over the phone.) A major change is coming to college baseball. In my mind this is like telling an investor about Microsoft when it was two years old. You can either get out in front of this one, or play this season at a significant disadvantage. Don’t be like me… I Wasted 3 ½ Years Three and a half years ago I sat in on a teleseminar (a class taught over the phone on a conference line) that taught a weird technique that involved tapping my fingers on different spots on my body while I repeated hokey sentences. The guy teaching it was the “guru” of the technique. It did nothing for me and I dismissed it. Last spring I met a guy who said he uses it and I made a snide remark about how it didn’t work. “Then you didn’t really do it,” he said and offered me a free lesson. I will never coach the same way again. What I’m about to say will have more weight if you have a sense of where I’ve been. I have a Ph.D. in sport psychology and was the hitting coach at UVA for 3 years before being a Division III head coach at Skidmore for 7 years. I consulted/coached with the Rangers for a couple of years before being hired full-time by the Yankees for a year. I wrote Heads-Up Baseball: Playing the Game One Pitch at a Time with Ken Ravizza back in 1995. I’m a “seeker,” always looking for new things, new ways to help people perform better and be more fulfilled (starting with me…), so for 20 years I’ve been trying out new things, going to seminars, reading books, being coached – almost all outside of baseball. (I find baseball generally inbred – not very open to new ideas that don’t come from within the game itself.) In my opinion, this is… The Best Tool Ever This technique is by far the most powerful tool for performance enhancement I’ve ever seen. I’m still amazed with it daily after 7 months of intense study and practice. It not only is the basis for how I cure the yips, it can remove all kinds of negative emotions and replace them with positive ones. It can speed injury recovery, reduce pain, speed up mechanical changes, and increase flexibility. I believe I could teach a person off the street enough about it in two hours to make him be more effective at helping players than most mental game coaches. He’d certainly be able to do things I couldn’t do myself before I learned this technique. (And by the way, did you notice the I’d Blown Off the Guru The “guru” I mentioned is Gary Craig. He master-minded the approach and is a truly amazing man. I could keep what I’m doing a secret and make a lot of money quietly producing great results, but the spirit of the technique that Craig has created, along with my broader goal to make a huge improvement in the experience players, coaches and parents have in baseball led me to return my new friend’s favor and offer you a free lesson. I mentioned in my previous article that I’m now doing acupuncture. That’s how I’m curing the yips. This form of acupuncture does NOT use needles. I’m not telling players over the phone where to stick themselves with sharp objects. Instead, you simply tap on certain points with your finger tips, as if you are tapping repeatedly on a keyboard key. If it hurts or you get tired, you’re doing it wrong. How Tapping Works The Western explanation is that the tapping releases peptides that are stuck in receptor sites in your cells. The Eastern explanation is that your energy flow is blocked like an internal traffic jam and the tapping clears the way. Craig says that “All negative emotions result from a disruption in your energy flow.” The tapping “works” on whatever you’re focused on, so ironically the key to getting rid of a negative emotion – frustration, anger, disappointment – is to focus ON the negative while you tap. So I’ll actually encourage you to “think negative” during the exercise. The process affects your body at a level below the Mental Brain. In my previous article I discussed how the Emotional Brain is the initial decision maker in the brain; if it decides you are safe, the information in your Mental Brain that you’ve learned or been taught comes into play. But if you’re Emotional Brain decides you are threatened, control goes to the survival mechanism in your Physical Brain and by-passes the information in your Mental Brain. So what you “know” and have been told about what to do in your current situation doesn’t come into play. The tapping works on the Emotional Brain. It “main veins” the good vibrations into your system way beyond what mere words can do. Its sort of like a glass bottle of ketchup – you can try to force the ketchup out and fail, and you can try to talk the ketchup out of the bottle and fail. But just tap the glass in the right place and the ketchup flows. Go With the Flow As coaches we want to produce flowing performances. Performing in the “zone” is synonymously called being in “flow.” Free flowing performance happens when nothing is stuck. Nothing is forced Yes, there’s effort, but powerful pitching and hitting actions feel effortless. For those of you who have read Heads-Up Baseball or heard us speak, you’re familiar with the Traffic Light metaphor. When you have a Yellow or Red Light, you’ve got a “disruption in your energy flow,” or in other words, you’ve got peptides stuck in your cells that are blocking your free flow of movement. When you have a Green Light you are freed up; no excess tension, nothing in your way. You’re free to play to your full ability. I’ve always taught players (and I’m sure always will) to take a deep breath between pitches, and to step away and take a few if they get a Yellow Light. Now I’ve added another piece – tap. You can tap under your eye or under your collar bone, or tap on the sides of your fingers (must less conspicuous). This will help you clear out the negative emotions and tension and get you on your way back to Green before the next pitch. Like other forms of mental training, there are many exercises you can do off the field that free you for greater success on the field. How to Learn Craig’s Technique Although ultimately the technique (formally known as the Emotional Freedom Techniques, or EFT) is very simple, it is a bit involved to learn the first time, so I’ve created a video to demonstrate it to you. This is your free lesson, passing on the one that was given to me. You can get the lesson and learn much more about the technique at www.BaseballConfidence.com/cb.html About the Author: Dr. Tom Hanson has consulted with the Yankees, Rangers, Angels, Twins and many top professional players and teams. He co-authored “Heads-Up Baseball: Playing the Game One Pitch at a Time, and now has several audio and DVD programs that take the mental game to the next level. Get his free program, “5 Steps to Unstoppable Confidence” at his website www.BaseballConfidence.com | |
|
|
Get $39 worth of confidence building programs & my email coaching tips FREE! Enter your name and email address below and click "Click."
| Home | ||||
| Free Stuff | ||||
| Products | ||||
| ||||
| Ask a Question | ||||
| Dr Tom Hanson | ||||
| Baseball Players | ||||
| Baseball Coaching | ||||
| Parents | ||||
| Parents who Coach | ||||
| Softball | ||||
| Homebase | ||||
| Youth | ||||
| Site Map | ||||
