Last week I posted,
”There’s something about 315 pounds that gives me a case of the yips. I don’t know why, but the sight of three big plates on either side of the bar suddenly makes me forget my form.”
I went on to state,
”310 last week was fine. 320 next week will go up easy, hell, last year I was doing this lift with 365 pounds on the bar. No reason at all that this one should have been difficult except for the little worry goblins in the back of my mind.”
Here’s this weeks 320 pounds:
Now, it may not look like it, but that weight is moving up much better than it did last week, despite being five pounds heavier.
In sports lingo, the “yips” is defined as “The sudden and unexplained loss of ability to execute certain skills in experienced athletes.” Despite the fact that I am — more or less — experienced in a couple of sports, I don’t get the yips very often. Matter of fact, the only times I can remember have been using a bait-caster reel in fishing, and seeing three big plates on a bar.
Still can’t use a bait-caster reel without bird-nesting it to hell and gone the first cast, despite a previous record of using one quite successfully for a good bit, but that’s probably because a spinning reel works just as well.
I don’t know about anyone else, but for me the yips first start with doubt. It’s a thinking problem, and probably why I’ve never yipped during fencing or judo — those aren’t thinking sports. To participate successfully I have to shut off the yammering part of my brain; to settle my thoughts into a predatory stillness that allows me to act and react without thinking about it. Thinking during a fencing pass or a judo bout is to be slow. To be slow is to lose.
I can mostly do the same thing during a lift. When I step up to the bar, I mentally walk through a perfect lift, then shut off my thinking mind and just do it.
Unfortunately while I’m waiting to do a lift, or stepping up to the bar, my mind is working. And sometimes it starts thinking about injuries and heavy weights. And that’s where the yips start — that tiny little niggle of doubt in the back of my mind. “What if my form isn’t perfect?” “What if I blow the lift and a vertebrae at the same time?”
My subconscious hits the brakes, and suddenly a weight I’m physically perfectly capable of lifting won’t get off of the pins.
The same thing happens to me in blogging. When I got a reputation as an “excellent blogger” suddenly I started worrying that my next post wouldn’t be up to the same “excellent” standard. Worse, I started gauging every post — “good enough” just wasn’t good enough, each one had to be “excellent”. But I’m not capable of “excellent” all the time …
… and the little Demon of Doubt sneaks in. And my hands lock up on the keyboard. Perfectly capable of writing a blog post — a couple of decades experience shows that — but my subconscious won’t let me do it.
The yips.
I suspect this happens to a lot of authors — particularly the ones that start off with a bang. If your debut novel has everybody all effusive, and literary … your next one has to be at least as excellent — if not better. But are you really capable of that level of writing all the time?
There’s that little doubt bastard. And hello case of the yips!
“Yes, Ian, all very well, but how do I fix it?”
I don’t know. I do know what works for me.
For lifting weights, I have my coach video the lifts, and I post them on-line. The fear of failing in front of an audience is much, much stronger than my fear of getting hurt.
That … may not be the best way to go about your writing, though.
For blogging, I fix the yips by just sitting at the keyboard and writing with no plan. The idea could be to compare a video of this week’s lift to last week’s lift, and I stop thinking and let my fingers type. I may write that post, or I may start that post and turn out a screed about the yips — either way I just shut off my think-pudding and let my fingers act and react.
Not as easy as it is on a fencing piste — not by a sodding long shot — but it can be done. Mostly.
Anyhoo, your blog post for today.
Ian
I adore Cedar's Fox illustrations, they draw me into reading your blog.