Golf tip: 6 tips getting beyond the chipping yips

You can improve and get beyond the chipping yips. You must believe you can change and improve otherwise you will stay stuck in your current mindset by thinking you have a golfing "disease."

1. The first step is to stop labeling yourself as having a disease with the chipping club. When you label yourself as a person with the "yips" you are saying that you will always struggle. Once you adopt the label and believe it, you make it very hard to shake loose of the negative stigma. You leave no room for confidence to grow.

2. Identify the specific fear associated with hitting a bad chip. The yips is often not about the fear of hitting a bad shot, it's about fear of the consequences of hitting a bad shot. You have to go even further down the line of consequences to figure out what the eventual fear means to you. So you don't chip well and add a couple strokes to your score? What does that mean to your ego? Is it embarrassing? Are you worried about what others may think if you have a poor round? Are you protecting your single-digit handicap? You have to look at the consequences to determine where the ultimate fear lies and then you can address it head-on.

3. Change your practice routine. Stop working on technique (temporarily) until you can free swing the chipper in practice and then on the course. Working too much on technique or positions in practice can cause you to further over control your stroke on the course because you will think too much about how to make a good stroke rather than seeing a good shot in your mind and reacting to that image or feeling. Instead, you should work on freedom of movement and touch or feel in your practice. Good touch and controlling distance in chipping is essential to good scoring. To do this, you need a good sense of touch around the greens. This requires that you work on controlling trajectory of the shot and judging the distance correctly. Practice reacting to a spot on the green you picked out and "tossing" the ball there with your club.

4. Let go of precision and get into feel on the course. In my experience, the yips start by trying to be too precise or thinking too much about the mechanics of the stroke. Great putting or chipping is about programming your mind and body for execution with images in your mind. A visual player prefers to see the trajectory, landing area, and roll out in their mind prior to hitting the chip. A feel-oriented player will want to feel the tempo necessary to hit a given shot. In both cases, you need to react to the image you see or feel in your mind and let the stroke flow from this. Give up control and work on being freer with the actual stroke. You have to give up control of precision to gain control of your touch.

5. Employ a shot-making strategy by hitting greenside shots that you are most comfortable hitting. For example, you have nothing to be ashamed about if you use your putter to hit a shot that is 6 feet off the fridge. The name of the game is score. Sometimes golfers trap themselves into playing the "right shot" or conventional shot, which may not be the right play to make a "scoring shot." Pick the club and hit the shot you are most comfortable hitting in that situation.

6. One bad chip does not mean you are yipping today. Do not engage with the " … Here I go again, hitting poor shots with the chipper. Am I going to struggle all day with this?" This mindset is self-defeating and reinforces the self-label of a yipper. You must let go of the bad shot and write it off ASAP. You can only give yourself a chance of recovery (from the yipping blues) if you convince yourself that the next chip you are going to hit stiff. A good putter would never say they're going to miss four-footers all day after missing the first four-footer of the day.

• Ian Grant is at Oak Brook Golf Club in the summer and Mistwood Golf Dome in Bolingbrook in the winter. Contact him at (708) 917-8951 or at Iansgolf@aol.com.