Yips... (risk of losing your skill at the most critical time)
#73: Skilled, experienced people often face this sudden skill loss during their most important performance. Why? & How to avoid it?
Yips1. aka "freezing", "the jerks", "the staggers", "the waggles", and “the whiskey fingers”
Yips is a sports term to denote a sudden and unexplained loss of ability to execute certain skills in experienced sports players. (Especially in Golf, Tennis, Cricket, Baseball, and Gymnastics)
They forget their next move and are stuck like a rabbit in the torchlight. Or their muscles fail to cooperate.
Yips can be both physical and psychological.
Their memory (mentally) and their muscle memory (physically) freeze.
If not freezing all at once, they make many mistakes, and multiple faults during the ‘yips’.
Avoiding playing the sports only increases the frequency of ‘yips’ appearing to someone.
Too much exercising of your skills (for a decade, in the case of sports) will increase the chance of becoming yips victim.
If something doesn’t kill you, it will make you stronger. But in some worst cases, it amputates you.
What to do?
Rest… Rest between training/practice allows you to grow.
Allow your body & mind to settle. Constantly keeping things in control results in chaos.
Practice makes you perfect. But too much practice (beyond perfection) could be counter-productive.
Expand your horizon. Try different fields. Give a break to your core skills. Get a vacation — And you know the others…
& I end with my usual advice » prefer progress over perfection.
Past issues you may want to read
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yips
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8269759/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8224395/