Want to psych out your tennis opponent? Stand up straight and dress like a pro.
It takes only sports-specific clothing and confident body language to cause an opponent's resolve to waver, according to a study in the journal Psychology of Sports and Exercise.
Iain Greenlees, a sports psychologist at University College Chichester in the United Kingdom, asked experienced table tennis players to watch videos of potential opponents walking into an arena and performing warm-up exercises. When the on-screen athletes had confident body language—good posture and robust eye contact with the camera—player-viewers felt that they would win fewer games than they would against opponents who slouched and averted their eyes.
