Say Less: Why the Best Cues Point Outside the Body

A player misses three forehands into the net. The coach has a lot to offer: get the racket back earlier, turn the shoulders, keep the wrist loose, bend the knees, finish over the shoulder. Every item on that list may be true. The player walks back to the baseline with five instructions about their own body and very little time to use any of them before the next ball arrives.

Now picture the same moment with one sentence instead: send the ball a racket’s length over the net. Nothing about elbows or knees, just a job for the ball. Research on attention suggests that this kind of cue usually helps more than the list does. It also suggests that “usually” is doing real work in that sentence.

Inside and outside

The research uses two terms. An external focus is attention on the intended effect of a movement; an internal focus is attention on the movements of body parts. That is how a 2021 set of meta-analyses by Chua, Wulf and colleagues defines them.

One detail matters a great deal for tennis coaches: the racket counts as outside the body. In a classic golf study, one group focused on the arm swing and another on the club swing, and the club was the external condition. A review of racket sport studies lists cues such as “focusing on the ball leaving the racket”, or attention to the racket itself, as ways of creating an external focus. So “keep the racket face looking at the target” is an external cue, while “keep your wrist firm” is an internal one, even though they may be trying to produce the same contact.

What the evidence says

The pooled numbers favour the outside. In the 2021 analyses, an external focus was more effective than an internal focus for performance, with an effect size of 0.264, and clearly more effective for retention and transfer, both around 0.58. In plain terms, the advantage was modest while players were practising and larger when they were tested later.

Tennis has its own example. In a study where two groups hit tennis balls at a target, one group focused on the ball coming toward them and the other on the ball leaving the racket. The group attending to the ball leaving the racket “demonstrated more effective learning.” The review of racket sports reached the same overall conclusion, that an external focus “has advantages for learning and performance of racket sport skills”, while noting that most of the studies it assessed showed a high risk of bias.

How do tennis coaches actually talk? A study that recorded ten coaches working with 87 players aged 18 or under counted 3049 relevant statements. 45.1% promoted an external focus and 33.1% an internal one. Coaches used more internal statements with beginners, and external statements were more common in instructions (59.0%) than in feedback (43.0%). The authors suggest that sports with an implement and an external target, like tennis, “might be better suited for inducing an EF.” There is room to improve, especially in what gets said after a miss.

The honest caveat

This is where coaching courses often stop, and where the story gets more interesting. In 2024, McKay and colleagues reanalysed the external focus literature and reported “moderate to strong evidence of publication bias for all analyses”. After correcting for it, the average effects were close to zero: 0.01 for performance, 0.15 for retention and 0.09 for transfer. In their words, the results “contradict the existing consensus that an external focus is always more effective than an internal focus.”

Tennis studies add their own nuance. When national level players served for maximum speed, there was no significant difference between external and internal cues; the fastest serves came with augmented feedback. In a study with 60 children, an external focus beat an internal one on the skill test, but there was no significant difference on the transfer test.

Body cues also have a legitimate place. A study of novices and experienced performers found that novices benefit from step-by-step attention to what they are doing, while “high-level skill execution is harmed” by it. A 2023 review of reviews concluded that internal instructions “seem to be better applicable to direct movement form changes” than external ones. If a player needs to change a grip or rebuild a service motion, talking about the body may be the right tool for a while.

The fair summary is that pointing attention outside the body is a sensible default, with a small to moderate advantage in many studies and a contested size once publication bias is considered. It is not a law.

Fewer rules, sturdier strokes

The second half of the title, saying less, rests on a different body of research. In a well-known study of golf putting under pressure, Masters described how a skill can break down when a performer tries to run it by “consciously processing explicit knowledge of how it works”. He found support for the idea that performers with a small pool of explicit knowledge are less likely to fail under pressure than those with a large one.

Analogies are one way to teach a stroke without a pile of rules. In a table tennis study, novices learned a forehand topspin either explicitly, implicitly or through a single analogy. The analogy group gathered fewer explicit rules, and when a stress intervention was added, the explicit group’s performance suffered while the analogy group’s did not.

The benefit is sturdiness rather than speed. In a basketball shooting study that compared one analogy with a set of eight technical instructions, retention tests showed “similar amounts of learning for all groups”. The difference appeared when players had to do a second task at the same time: the explicit and control groups deteriorated, the analogy group did not. Matches are full of second tasks, from the score to the opponent’s position to the wind.

Turning this into coaching

None of this requires a new method. It changes the shape of what a coach says:

• One cue per block of balls. If a second idea seems necessary, it can wait for the next block.
• Give the ball or the racket a job: height over the net, depth, spin, or the path of the racket face through contact.
• Translate body cues where possible. “Snap your wrist” can become “brush up the back of the ball”; “follow through over your shoulder” can become “finish with the racket pointing where you want the ball to go”.
• Keep body cues for deliberate changes in technique, and hand back to an outcome cue once the new movement starts to settle.
• Pay attention to feedback after a miss, which is where coaches in the tennis study used external language least.

The OPTIMAL theory of Wulf and Lewthwaite places an external focus alongside two other conditions that support learning: enhanced expectancies for future performance and the learner’s autonomy. A short cue the player helped choose, delivered with confidence that it will work, fits all three.

Testing this does not need a laboratory. Pick one stroke for a couple of weeks, keep every cue about the ball or the racket, and watch how that stroke holds up when the score starts to matter.

Five instructions feel thorough to the person giving them. To the person receiving them, one clear job for the ball is usually worth more.

Sources

• Chua, Jimenez-Diaz, Lewthwaite, Kim and Wulf (2021). Superiority of external attentional focus for motor performance and learning: systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Psychological Bulletin, 147(6), 618-645. PubMed
• McKay and colleagues (2024). Reporting bias, not external focus: a robust Bayesian meta-analysis and systematic review of the external focus of attention literature. Psychological Bulletin, 150(11), 1347-1362. PubMed
• Wulf and Lewthwaite (2016). Optimizing performance through intrinsic motivation and attention for learning: the OPTIMAL theory of motor learning. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 23(5), 1382-1414. PubMed
• Wulf, McNevin, Fuchs, Ritter and Toole (2000). Attentional focus in complex skill learning. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 71(3), 229-239. PubMed
• Wulf, Lauterbach and Toole (1999). The learning advantages of an external focus of attention in golf. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 70(2), 120-126. PubMed
• Starzak and colleagues (2024). Attentional focus strategies in racket sports: a systematic review. PLoS ONE, 19(1), e0285239. PMC
• Keller, Schweizer and Gerber (2023). Pay attention! The influence of coach-, content-, and player-related factors on focus of attention statements during tennis training. European Journal of Sport Science, 23(6), 1001-1009. PubMed
• Keller, Kuhn, Lüthy and Taube (2021). How to serve faster in tennis: the influence of an altered focus of attention and augmented feedback on service speed in elite players. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 35(4), 1119-1126. PubMed
• Tapan, Şahan and Erman (2023). The effect of internal and external focus of attention on tennis skill acquisition in children. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1308244. PubMed
• Beilock, Carr, MacMahon and Starkes (2002). When paying attention becomes counterproductive: impact of divided versus skill-focused attention on novice and experienced performance of sensorimotor skills. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 8(1), 6-16. PubMed
• Werner and Federolf (2023). Focus of attention in coach instructions for technique training in sports: a scrutinized review of review studies. Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology, 8(1), 7. PubMed
• Masters (1992). Knowledge, knerves and know-how: the role of explicit versus implicit knowledge in the breakdown of a complex motor skill under pressure. British Journal of Psychology, 83(3), 343-358. doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1992.tb02446.x
• Liao and Masters (2001). Analogy learning: a means to implicit motor learning. Journal of Sports Sciences, 19(5), 307-319. PubMed
• Lam, Maxwell and Masters (2009). Analogy versus explicit learning of a modified basketball shooting task: performance and kinematic outcomes. Journal of Sports Sciences, 27(2), 179-191. PubMed