What is interesting about all this is the personal history between Marquart and Filmater after invention of the PuttLab and the arrival of Haney on the scene in late 2003 in the European PGA Teaching and Coaching Summit. Sometime after the PGA Summit in 2003, the Science and Motion organization tasked Filmater to come to the US to promote the PuttLab to fellow South African David Leadbetter. While in the US, a dispute arose between Filmater and Marquardt about ownership of the PuttLab, and Science and Motion was forced to sue Filmater in German Court and obtained an order barring him from further involvement with the PuttLab. Filmater then ended up working at the Hank Haney Ranch and developed his own "knock-off" version of the PuttLab called the Tomi system. Marquardt and others then came to the US to take up the promotion of the PuttLab, and I introduced them to Frank Thomas at the 2004 PGA Merchandise Show, and Thomas featured them on the Golf Channel as the top science at the Show. I then introduced Marquardt to the David Leadbetter operation at ChampionsGate and helped them explain the confusion with Filmater, and the Leadbetter organization then adopted and endorsed the PuttLab. In 2005 in Munich, Christian and I shared the stage at the European PGA Teaching and Coaching Summit, again attended by Hank Haney. Subsequently, Marquardt and Filmater started working together again with Haney, and Haney adopted the PuttLab, relying on Filmater as his main associate for using the PuttLab.
EARLIER YIPS SCIENCE
The Mayo Clinic of Rochester Minnesota formed a "sports science" team in 1999 to study the yips and come up with a cure. The team included Dave Pelz and Debbie Crews and a few doctors from Rochester interested in golf, but did not include any Mayo specialist in movement problems. In December 2000, the "sports science" team headed by sporst psychologist Ansly Smyth published an article in Sports Medicine that varied from two prior studies that had concluded the yips were neurological. The Mayo "sports science" team concluded the yips were mostly psychological.
I wrote extensively about the Mayo Clinic's yips study in 2002, providing a detailed report on the neurological research apparently not known by the "sports science" team and critiquing their approach as flawed because not using science to identify the cause of the yips, instead relying upon golfer behaviors to infer the character of the affliction. I specifically suggested that the Mayo Clinic "sports science" team should consult with Mayo Clinic's dystonia / movement disorders neurologist Dr Charles Adler in the Mayo Clinic's Scottsdale Arizona location. After my criticism, the Mayo Clinic "sports science" team added Dr Adler and dropped Dave Pelz, and Dr Adler redirected the yips study along the lines laid out in my paper, finding the "cause" of the yips to be "neurological." Dr Adler gained some notoriety among his peers for his contribution, lecturing at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Neurology:
"Golfers' yips may be movement disorder
04/07/05
MIAMI BEACH Yips--a condition among some golfers that describes the inability to appropriately complete a golf stroke, usually during putting or chipping and worsening with anxiety--may be a task-specific movement disorder similar to writer's cramp and musician's cramp, according to research that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology 57th Annual Meeting in Miami Beach, Fla., April 9-16, 2005.
For the study, researchers examined 20 male golfers, 10 with the yips and 10 without. All study participants were evaluated in the laboratory using surface electromyography (EMG) testing to determine muscle activity. Participants were tested while sitting at rest, arms outstretched, and during handwriting; standing at rest, holding a putter at rest, and using their own putter to putt a total of 75 putts, varying from 3, 6, and 8 feet. The golfers then rated the quality of their strokes, noting the number of putts made and the distance from the hole for missed putts.
"None of the golfers had any abnormal movements in the rest position, outstretched arms position, or while writing or standing holding the putter," said study co-author Charles H. Adler, MD, PhD, of the Mayo Clinic in Arizona. "While only two of the golfers felt they had their yips in the lab, under all putting conditions, 50 percent of the golfers with the yips had EMG evidence of co-contractions of muscles in the forearm just prior to the impact of the putter with the ball. The co-contractions were similar to those of task-specific dystonias--or movement disorders--such as writer's cramp and musician's cramp."
None of the golfers without yips had evidence for co-contraction.
A trend revealed that the five golfers with yips who had co-contractions were older, had higher current and best previous handicaps, and had yips for fewer years than the other five with yips who did not have the co-contractions. There was also a trend for those five golfers with the yips to make fewer putts and have a greater degree of error in missing the putts."
(See Psych Central, April 16, 2005).
Science and Motion was started in June 2003, after my article but before the "revised" Mayo Clinic conclusions of the augmented "team" that included Dr Adler.
HOW IT ALL FITS TOGETHER
Dr Marquardt knows quite a bit more than Dr Adler about treating putting yips, as he has had vast successful experience in clinical practice in Germany using his "retraining" of the relevant movement neurology in ordinary clinical practice, his development of the PuttLab, and his vast subsequent experience specifically treating golfer putting yips. Dr Marquardt's approach is what I suggested in 2002 in criticizing the Mayo Clinic "sports science" team: that the yips are a neurological problem wherein certain neural pathways get worn out, and the cure most likely involves a re-routed movement across neural pathways not worn thin by overuse.
In my view, the neural pathways the wear out are those controlling fine hand movements, most usually in the dominant hand, that get overused by a "touchy-feely-handsy" approach to putting. This approach invariably rests upon a "hit" stroke thru the ball that works fine in youth but that wears out the delicate neural pathways of fine motor skills of hand and fingers over decades. The average age of onset of the yips is age 43, about 2-3 decades after someone like Johnny Miller or Sam Snead or Ben Hogan gets a good start in golf.
An interesting point is how the yips are associated with co-contraction of muscles at the wrong time (a "flinch"). Most movements are tri-phasic in the pattern of contraction of agonist and antagonist muscle pairs operating on joint angles. The final co-contraction is a braking and holding behavior, sort of a "clamping down" of the limb or body part position at the end of the movement. There are really more problems like this than those occuring solely at the impact. When the golfer does not use a "flowing" stroke back and thru, but rather "yanks" or "tugs" or "pulls" the putter head back from the ball with hands to start the stroke, "defines" the stopping of the backstroke, deliberately starts the downstroke with an intentional accelerating, and then "defines" the end of the follow-thru with a stopping, IN ADDITION to the "flinch" clamping down in anticipation of impact, this golfer is flirting with the same "clamping down" problem. Good teaching avoids ALL of these problems, if you know how to teach a stroke like that.
What is interesting is that in the very political world of so-called "golf science", the Mayo Clinic does not use the PuttLab in its investigations. Nor do Hank Haney and Matthew Rudy, Filmater, and Marquardt confer or work cooperatively with the Mayo Clinic team. This appears to be a result of the typical and ill-advised division along major golf magazine lines, as in Golf Digest (Haney) versus Golf Magazine (Pelz and Crews). That won't end any time soon. A more immediate danger is that the prominence of Hank Haney's book associating the PuttLab with the yips so closely might render the PuttLab "primarily" a yips-fixing tool instead of a general teaching tool for putting stroke skills.
Accordingly, the stroke I teach is a non-"hit" flowing stroke, based on my independent study of the neurology of movement as applied to putting (1991-2002), and it's heartening to see that now the Mayo Clinic under Dr Adler's guidance (2004), Dr Marquardt (2003), and Hank Haney (2005-2006) all agree with me. They're right. More power to them.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
