There is a moment in almost every lesson where a young player hits a clean forehand, looks up, and asks the same question: “Was my elbow right?” I am Michael Boothman, and after more than thirty years coaching tennis here in Sarasota, I have learned that the honest answer is usually, “I don’t know, and neither should you.” That sounds blunt, but it points to one of the most reliable findings in motor learning research — and it changes how I run a session at Potter Park or on a private court.
The finding is about where a player puts their attention. When you swing a racket, you can think about two very different things. You can think about your body — bend your knees, drop the racket head, snap your wrist, turn your shoulders. Researchers call that an internal focus. Or you can think about the effect you are trying to produce — drive the ball through that cone, brush up the back of the ball, send it deep past the service line. That is an external focus. For decades, coaches assumed the body-part instructions were the serious, technical ones. The evidence says the opposite.
What the research actually shows
Gabriele Wulf, a motor-learning researcher who has studied this question for more than twenty years, summarized a large body of experiments showing that learners who adopt an external focus learn skills faster, retain them better, and perform them more accurately under pressure than learners told to focus on their own body movements. You can read her review of the work in the International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology (Wulf, 2013). The effect holds across sports, across ages, and across skill levels. It is not a small edge. In study after study, the same physical movement improves simply by changing what the athlete is paying attention to.
The reason makes sense once you sit with it. When a 10-year-old thinks “snap my wrist,” they consciously interfere with a movement the body already knows how to organize. The instruction freezes them. When the same player thinks “brush up and send it over the net into that back corner,” the body solves the wrist problem on its own, in service of the target. The conscious mind stays out of the way. The technical result is often better than what direct technical instruction would have produced.
Why this fits the Six Pillars
This connects directly to the first of the six pillars I build every SRQ Tennis session around: Accuracy Inside Representative Conditions. The pillar says we build placement first, inside live, game-like situations, and we hold players to a real standard — something like eight of ten balls landing in a target zone during a live drill, not a perfect-looking swing in a vacuum. An external focus is the engine that makes that pillar work. If I want a player chasing a target, I have to give them a target to chase, not a checklist of body parts to manage.
So in practice, my coaching language has shifted over the years. Instead of “get your racket back earlier,” I will set a cone and say “let’s get the ball landing past this line eight times out of ten.” Instead of “follow through over your shoulder,” I will ask a player to finish so the ball clears the net by three feet. The movement I actually want — the earlier preparation, the fuller follow-through — tends to show up on its own, because the body recruits it to hit the target. The player is solving a problem they can see instead of performing choreography they can’t feel.
What this looks like on a Sarasota court
Here is a simple progression I use with our junior groups. It takes about fifteen minutes and needs four cones.
First, I set two target zones deep in the court, one in each corner, each marked with a pair of cones. We rally live — real feeds, real movement, no machine — and the only instruction is a number: “Eight out of ten into a target. Go.” No mention of grip, no mention of swing. I just count out loud.
Then I watch what the body does. A player who is spraying balls long will, on their own, start shortening and controlling their swing to find the zone. A player dumping balls into the net will start lifting. They self-correct toward the target far faster than they would if I stopped every third ball to fix their elbow.
Only when a player plateaus — when the target alone is not getting them there — do I add one small, external cue. Not “bend your knees,” but “load and send it up over the net higher.” Still aimed at the ball and the court, not the body. The cue is a nudge toward the same external goal, not a switch back to internal micromanagement.
The numbers tell the story for the player. A kid who starts a drill at four of ten and finishes at eight of ten has evidence, not a feeling. That ties into another pillar — confidence is built, not given — but it starts here, with attention pointed at the target.
A note for parents watching from the fence
If you are a parent watching a lesson in Sarasota and you hear a coach talking mostly about targets, depth, and net clearance rather than constantly correcting your child’s arm, that is not a coach being vague. In light of the research, it is often the more technically sound approach. The stroke is being built — it is just being built from the outside in, through the ball, rather than from the inside out, through a string of body-part commands the child has to consciously juggle mid-swing.
That said, there is a place for direct technical work. Sometimes a grip genuinely needs changing, or a contact point is so far off that no target will fix it. The two laws of ball-striking — center contact and a square face — still have to be there. The point is not that body cues are useless. It is that they are the exception, used sparingly and early, while the target does most of the teaching.
If you want to see how this attention-first approach runs through the rest of our program, the coaching page lays out how the pillars connect across age groups. And the next time your young player looks up and asks whether their elbow was right, you have a good answer ready: it doesn’t matter — did the ball find the target?
Thirty years in, that is still the question I care about most.
— Michael Boothman SRQ Tennis, Sarasota FL