As a psychologist who works with athletes, I often meet those with mental blocks. Recently, Simone Biles, a highly accomplished American gymnast, secured her eighth national title at the 2023 U.S. National Gymnastics Championships. This remarkable achievement stands out even more as it follows a two-year hiatus from gymnastics, a period in which she overcame a challenging condition known as the “twisties.”
Mental Blocks in Athletes May Not Always Be Psychological
In sports, athletes often grapple with mental challenges that profoundly affect their performance. For example, an athlete who has repeatedly performed a particular skill, possibly even hundreds of times, suddenly cannot complete that skill.
Until recently, I believed that purely psychological factors caused these frustrating barriers to performance. These challenges, known as ‘yips’ in golf and baseball and ‘twisties’ or ‘mental blocks’ in gymnastics, extend beyond mere psychological barriers and may have neurological implications.
Golf and Baseball’s Yips: A Neurological Perspective
Neurologist Charles Adler has dedicated much of his career to studying the yips in golfers. He differentiates between psychological and neurological yips, with the latter often manifesting as involuntary muscle movements or spasms. Adler’s 2018 research employed EMG technology to observe dystonic movements in golfers, proposing that a neurological factor could be responsible for some yips (Adler et al., 2018). Furthermore, research into baseball athletes suggests that the brain’s basal ganglia could be implicated in these involuntary movement errors (Mink, 2003; Muraskin et al., 2015).
Simone Biles’ Battle with the Twisties
Simone Biles recently triumphed over the ‘twisties.’ Gymnasts experiencing the twisties may become disoriented about their body position in the air. This confusion can lead to over or under-rotating during jumps, increasing the risk of injury. This issue is not exclusive to gymnasts; other athletes can also be affected. While psychological factors like pressure to perform and stress or trauma contribute to this condition, pinpointing its exact nature is complicated by the difficulties in monitoring muscle and brain activity in gymnastics (Yu et al., 2022).
Strategies for Overcoming Yips and Twisties
Jamie Shapiro, a sport and performance psychology expert at the University of Denver and a former gymnast, assists gymnasts experiencing the twisties. She notes in a recent article that stress and other external factors can disrupt these ingrained patterns, triggering a fight-or-flight response or causing an athlete to feel disconnected from their body. Understanding how a gymnast’s mind and body operate during the twisties remains speculative. The challenge lies in the inability of current technology to effectively track muscle movements or brain activity during complex gymnastic maneuvers like backflips. According to the research, physical therapy and adjusting techniques can be effective against yips in golf and baseball. However, dystonia should be considered as a potential underlying cause when these methods are ineffective (Adler et al., 2018).
Yips and twisties in athletes represent a complex interplay of psychological and neurological elements. Understanding the underpinnings of these conditions is critical to developing targeted treatments. Ongoing research is vital in recognising these issues as legitimate conditions, moving beyond the perception of them being purely psychological.
Reduce Stress, Grounding and Self Compassion
Due to the complexities of assessing these concerns, treating the psychological contributors as a first step makes sense. Strategies such as
- Reducing athlete’s stress and pressure to perform,
- Normalising blocks and yips for the athlete, and
- Breaking their skill into basic steps.
Another approach is to teach the athlete grounding or anchoring techniques, which will help them minimise the demands of their cognitive focus and reduce the potential of overthinking their skill. This can be as simple as choosing one sensory element to focus on before or during the execution of the skill. And finally, the most important factor is to teach the athlete self-compassion. This will allow the athlete to continue to work on their skill or to take time away from their sport without self-defeating self-deprecation.
New areas of treatment
Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a therapy originally designed for treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; however, some therapists are applying this technique to sporting populations and to treat concerns such as mental blocks, yips or twisties. This area requires further research; however, it may provide a new approach that can potentially treat psychological and somatic reactions to an athlete’s over-reactive fight or flight response.
Conclusion
Conditions like ‘yips’ and ‘twisties’ or mental blocks in athletes, exemplified by Simone Biles, require a holistic approach that considers psychological and neurological aspects. Incorporating therapies like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), alongside traditional methods, shows promise in treating these complex conditions. This integrated treatment strategy, blending psychological support with innovative techniques, offers a more effective pathway for helping athletes overcome these challenges.
References
- Adler, C. H., Temkit, M., Crews, D., Mcdaniel, T., Tucker, J., Hentz, J. G., Marquardt, C., Abraham, D., & Caviness, J. N. (2018). The yips: Methods to identify golfers with a dystonic etiology/golfer’s cramp. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 50(11), 2226.
- Mackenzie, R. J. (2023, September 18). Yips and Twisties: What Makes Athletes Suddenly Lose Control of Their Bodies? BrainFacts/SfN
- Mink, J. W. (2003). The basal ganglia and involuntary movements: impaired inhibition of competing motor patterns. Archives of Neurology, 60(10), 1365–1368.
- Muraskin, J., Sherwin, J., & Sajda, P. (2015). Knowing when not to swing: EEG evidence that enhanced perception-action coupling underlies baseball batter expertise. NeuroImage, 123, 1–10.
- Yu, G., Chang, K.-F., & Shih, I.-T. (2022). An exploration of the antecedents and mechanisms causing athletes’ stress and twisties symptom. Heliyon, 8(10), e11040.