Overcoming Service Yips

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Have you ever struggled with your service game to the point where you lose all feel or control? Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn. Today I'm going to discuss a challenge for tennis players that baffles them. We're talking about the service yips.

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Here's what Ryan had to say. I feel anxiety when it's my turn to serve. When the yips come on, it's not just that I'm double faulting, it's how I'm double faulting. I literally have no feel or control. There's a significant drop in my power. In some cases, my serve is literally bouncing to the net, which seems impossible to me, but is my new norm. With these yips, I have no feel, no power or control. That's the best way that I can explain it. What the heck's going on? Ryan, thanks for your question about the service yips. They're not super common in tennis, but I do see the yips quite a bit in the area of golf, particularly putting and chipping. And also in baseball and softball, I see the yips throwing. So it's more common for me to see the yips in those sports than it is in tennis. Let's start off and talk about what the heck are the yips because they're not well understood in any sport yet alone having them in your service game. The yips are when you feel like you don't have any control over what your arm is doing or your action. In many cases, people will freeze or they'll continually catch the ball on their toss and they really can't start the motion. In other cases, once they get close to contact, they'll jab at it or stab at it or or over control. And that that's the issue here we're talking about with the service ships. For me, it's caused by fear, but that fear leads to a severe over control of your service action. What do I mean by over control? You're trying so hard to control your service motion that it almost feels like you're out of control, that you're losing the feel. Think of it as you sending 4, 5, 6 messages to your arm about how to hit a good serve, then all of that is colliding and collapsing at one time. And then your body is totally confused and doesn't know what to do. And that's why I talk a lot about simplification, about simplifying your strokes in this podcast. It's super important. When you're thinking about 2, 3, 4, 5 things at once, it's really confusing the body. And that's what I feel like the yips are all about. It's an over control syndrome, syndrome caused by really worrying about outcomes. So what's the solution? The solution is you got to get free with your motion. And that really is going to start in your practice and then in your practice matches and eventually be able to take it out to your matches. But the solution is counterintuitive to you because I'm going to tell you to think less and do less. But your initial response is I have to really try hard and control my service action in order to make a good serve, and that's what gets you into trouble. So my recommendation is get back to serving like a kid again. Well, what does that mean? Serving like a kid again means you're basically going to just go up after the ball and think about the ball going to your target. That's it. Nothing about your action, about where you want to contact the ball or any of that good stuff that you learn all the time, maybe in your lessons that you do. So simplification and using your imagination is going to help you become freer. The other part I can't really help you with because you didn't discuss that in your question. And that is, where's the source of fear? Often I find in golf and in baseball, softball, and in tennis, it's about the fear of embarrassment. If I can't serve, I'm gonna lose my service games. If I lose my service games, I'm gonna get wiped off the court and this is gonna be embarrassing. So there's a little bit of an underlying issue about the fear that you have to investigate to ultimately overcome the IIPs. Hey, you want some more great tips? Audio programs, videos, podcasts, articles? Jump over to sportspsychologytennis.com and check out what we have to offer there. In addition, if you didn't know, we do mental training with tennis players 12 and up. And if you want some help there, jump over to peaksports.com and contact us. And you can also send us your mental game question. Thanks.

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