Almost every golfer knows the feeling. Minutes after a picture-perfect drive down the fairway, a cascade of inexplicable missed putts leads to a disappointing triple bogey. Golfers’ lapses in play sometimes are blamed on a mysterious twitching condition called "the yips." But are yips physical or psychological? In a new Mayo Clinic study, published this month in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, researchers combined multiple methods to quantify golfers’ yips and identify those with a neurological cause. “These findings are important because they could offer athletes with a type of yips called 'dystonia,' or 'golfer’s cramp,' improved treatment options,” says Charles Adler, M.D., Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic neurologist and the study’s lead author. “Previously, there was no way to identify those with golfer's cramp using quantitative methods.” The yips is a disorder in which golfers complain of an involuntary movement ─ a twitch, a jerk, a flinch ─ at the time they putt or even when they chip. This interferes with their ability to perform that activity.

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