Body language in sports isn’t mystical. It can win or lose the next play

This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak’s newsletter here.

Amy Cuddy is a social psychologist who studies nonverbal communication. She was a professor at Harvard Business School and is a best-selling author.

A few weeks ago, NBA reporter Zach Lowe flagged something about Kevin Durant that had nothing to do with his scoring average. It was his body language.

On his podcast Lowe described watching Durant during a stretch against the Oklahoma City Thunder. After a few bad entry passes by his Houston Rockets teammates, Durant threw his arms up, rolled his eyes and slumped. Lowe called it “sulkiness” and suggested it rattled Durant’s teammates. He said he’d heard from agents and players that when Durant gets like that, it intimidates the young players who revere him.

“That kind of stuff can seep into the ether of a team,” Lowe said.

To be clear: Durant has been phenomenal this season. He’s an All-Star, one of the best players in NBA history and a big reason the Rockets are in the conversation at all. This isn’t about whether Durant is great. It’s about what even great players’ bodies do when things go sideways — and what it costs.

Last spring the Chicago Bears made quarterback Caleb Williams’ body language an explicit offseason project. First-year head coach Ben Johnson showed Williams film of himself from his rookie season. They walked through the slow rises after sacks, the visible deflation after turnovers.

“Is this what we want to look like or not?” Johnson asked.

They agreed it wasn’t.

“Body language is a huge thing,” Johnson said. “Demeanor. We don’t want to be a palms-up team where we’re questioning everything.”

Two scrutinized athletes, months apart, with the same diagnosis. The reason coaches and analysts keep returning to body language isn’t mystical. There are real mechanisms at work, operating in multiple directions at once.

This is something I’ve studied and written about for years — the relationship between expansive and contractive posture and how people feel about themselves. The version that plays out in sports may be the most vivid illustration, because it happens in real time, under enormous pressure, and the next play is seconds away.

When a player collapses inward after a mistake — head drops, shoulders curl, chest narrows — that isn’t just an expression of how they feel. It’s a mechanism that deepens the feeling. The body doesn’t merely reflect internal states; it shapes them.

Once you physically contract, you may be reinforcing a psychological state that makes the next play harder.

Many sports are built on rapid exchanges with possession changing fast, and momentum shifting constantly. In these games, players experience a relentless stream of what I’d call micro-wins and micro-losses. They sink a successful 3-pointer, then miss another. They hit a clean first serve, but later have a double fault. What a player does with their body in the seconds after each one matters more than most people think.

Philip Furley and Geoffrey Schweizer, researchers at the German Sport University Cologne, have spent more than a decade studying nonverbal behavior in athletic competition. Their work outlines three pathways through which body language affects performance. All three can work against you simultaneously.

• The first is intrapersonal: what your posture does to you.

Athletes who display contracted, defeated body language after mistakes recover more slowly and perform worse on subsequent tasks. This is very consistent with my own work on how adopting expansive versus contractive postures can make us feel more or less powerful, and influence some of our choices and behaviors. The sports context makes the feedback loop faster and the stakes more immediate.

• The second is interpersonal-team: what your body language does to your teammates.

When a team leader visibly deflates after a mistake, it ripples. This is what Lowe noticed with Durant. When the best player on the floor looks frustrated and defeated, the 22-year-old guard who just threw the bad entry pass isn’t going to feel empowered to shake it off. He’s going to tighten up.

The research is clear on this: The higher status the individual, the more weight their nonverbal behavior carries. When someone who means that much to a team lets his body signal defeat, even briefly, the younger players don’t push back. They pull inward — not because they’re fragile, but because that’s how humans respond to distress signals from the person they look up to most.

• The third is interpersonal-opponent: what your body language tells the other side.

Furley and Schweizer showed that observers can accurately determine from just three-second silent clips whether an athlete is winning or losing. They don’t need to look at the scoreboard because they can judge it from posture. When you broadcast defeat, your opponent picks up on it, and their confidence increases. Displaying submissive nonverbal behaviors in competition, as the researchers put it, may be “highly dysfunctional” — inviting your opponent to increase pressure at the exact moment you’re least equipped to handle it.

Three pathways. Three ways a few seconds of body language can compound a mistake.

Iain Greenlees and his colleagues found something related in tennis. Players form impressions of opponents during warmups, before a single competitive point is played, based on body language alone. Positive body language made opponents less confident that they could win.

Before the match even starts, the psychological landscape is being shaped.

These responses run deep. In 2008, Jessica Tracy and David Matsumoto studied judo competitors at the Olympic and Paralympic Games across more than 30 nations — including athletes who had been blind since birth and had never seen another person express victory or defeat. The patterns were remarkably consistent. Winners tilted their heads up, expanded their chests, and raised their arms. Losers slumped, narrowed and dropped. The congenitally blind athletes showed the same responses as sighted ones. These aren’t poses we learn. They’re innate responses to success and failure — part of our evolutionary inheritance.

That means that when a basketball player misses a shot and shrinks into a defeated posture, they’re not making a choice. They’re experiencing a pull that is older than language, older than sport. We all are. This isn’t a character flaw; it’s human wiring. The question isn’t whether that pull exists. It’s what we can learn to do about it.

The best coaches I’ve worked with treat body language not as a personality trait but as a skill. Kathy Delaney-Smith spent 40 years as Harvard’s women’s basketball coach, becoming the winningest coach, men’s or women’s, in Ivy League history. Delaney-Smith told me she would never assign the point guard role to a player who couldn’t manage her reactions after mistakes, because those reactions had consequences.

Point guards are the players everyone watches. If one misses a shot and her body says things are falling apart, the team reads it instantly. The opponent does, too.

Sue Bird understood this as well as anyone. Across 21 years and four WNBA championships with the Seattle Storm, Bird was described again and again as a calming presence — composed, unflappable, the emotional anchor of every team she played on.

At 5-foot-9, she was often the smallest player on the floor, but teammates said she was the most influential communicator with her steady posture, eye contact, precise gestures and a demeanor that never changed whether the Storm was up 15 or down 10. It wasn’t just what Bird didn’t do after mistakes. It was also what she did after successes. She’d nod, point or make eye contact with the teammate who set the screen. Micro-wins reinforced the same way micro-losses compound.

Damian Lillard has spent more than 15 years as one of the NBA’s most clutch performers, collecting six All-Star selections, an Olympic gold medal and a reputation for being at his best when the pressure is highest. He’s unusually clear-eyed about what reactive body language costs and contributes to a team’s success.

Speaking to a group of young players a few years ago, he zeroed in on the specific physical moments: “It was just your body language. When you miss a shot, when you throw the ball away, your teammate throws a bad pass or somebody misses you, it wasn’t overly or excessively bad. It’s just that y’all gotta learn to not be emotional about every single play.”

Those seconds, he told them, are where composure is built or lost. When a teammate’s pass goes out of bounds, he said, “I’m gonna go back to the other end and we’re gonna slap hands and we’re gonna move on.” He acknowledged the pull is real — “I’m gonna get mad sometimes too, I ain’t perfect” — but the goal is to keep those physical reactions to mistakes and negative plays “minimal.”

That composure wasn’t passive. It was a form of leadership that told everyone around them, without a word, that the situation was under control. I talked to the Los Angeles Dodgers’ rookies about this a decade ago. Coaches at every level say they notice body language after mistakes. It’s not in the box score, but they see it, teammates feel it and opponents exploit it.

That’s part of what makes Ben Johnson’s approach with Caleb Williams worth noting. When Johnson showed Williams film, he wasn’t asking his young quarterback to become robotic, and to Williams’ credit, he seemed open to it. He engaged. Johnson was pointing to the difference between a quarterback who gets sacked and pulls himself up immediately — shoulders back, eyes forward, already moving toward the huddle — and one who stays down an extra beat, rises slowly with his head lowered, walks back like the game is already lost.

Those players are telling their team two different stories. Given everything Williams went through as a rookie — 68 sacks, coaching changes midseason, a 5-12 record — his body language was an understandable response to a difficult situation.

However, even understandable responses can be worth changing. Durant’s body language after a made three is already electric, and when he carries that into the moments after a teammate’s bad pass, the whole team feels it.

Furley and Schweizer’s work adds one more wrinkle: Fatigue degrades the ability to regulate intentional nonverbal behavior while automatic emotional expressions persist. In other words, precisely when it matters most to project resilience — late in a game, deep in a losing streak — the body is least equipped to cooperate.

The encouraging part is that body language isn’t fixed. Instead, it’s a habit, and habits can be reshaped. Coaches can build it into practice, simulating adverse moments and working on physical resets. Players can develop personal cues, such as taking a breath, a posture check, a deliberate step toward a teammate. Those decisions interrupt the collapse before it takes hold. Film review can include, “Watch your body here. Now watch it here. See the difference?”

Players who make the biggest changes start to notice patterns in themselves with curiosity, not self-criticism. Oh, that’s what I do when it goes wrong. What if I did something different?

The body tells a story after every setback. With awareness and practice, we can change the next chapter.

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