The moment a talk begins, many speakers discover they have hands. They clasp them, pocket them and grip the clicker. What to do with your hands when presenting has a simpler answer in the research than in most stage advice: let them move with what you are saying, and let them rest when you are not. Gestures that match your words help you think while you speak and help your audience understand you, according to two meta-analyses of listener studies and a line of lab experiments by psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow and colleagues. The pose you strike before you walk on matters far less than its fans claim.

Six habits cover most of it:

1. Find a resting position you can forget
2. Let your hands show what your words say
3. Gesture where people can see it
4. Drop the movements that mean nothing
5. Rehearse with your hands as well as your words
6. Swap the power pose for a spoken warm-up

In practice, a two-minute update might sound and look like this. Your arms hang loosely while you set up the problem. One hand rises as you say sign-ups climbed, your hands move apart as you compare two options, and then they drop back to rest while you let the point land.

Stage fright gets its own treatment in the six-step guide to public speaking for beginners. Eye contact and your voice are separate skills, left for other pages. What follows is only about your hands.

Why your hands move when you talk

Gesturing is part of how people think while they speak, not decoration added for the audience. Reviewing the research in 2013, psychologists Susan Goldin-Meadow and Martha Alibali note that speakers in every culture gesture, and that people blind from birth, who have never seen anyone gesture, still move their hands when they talk.¹

If gestures were only for listeners, a blind speaker would have no reason to make them. Goldin-Meadow’s lab has tested another explanation: the hands carry part of the thinking. In a 2001 study by a University of Chicago team in the US, adults and children explaining a math problem remembered more of a separate list of letters or words when they gestured, which the authors read as gesturing lightening the load of explaining and freeing mental resources for the memory task.²

The study

Moderate evidence

Busy hands or meaningful hands? A 2012 whiteboard experiment

Students stood at a whiteboard and explained how they had factored equations while holding a short list of letters in mind. When asked to gesture, they recalled more letters than when asked to move both hands in steady circles or to rest them still on the whiteboard tray. The pattern held when the analysis used only each student’s first condition.³

The circles are the point for a presenter. Keeping the hands busy did not lighten the load on working memoryworking memory: The small mental workspace that holds and handles the information you are using right now, such as a phone number you are about to dial. Its capacity is limited, which is why juggling several things at once quickly overloads it.Full entry in the glossary; the benefit came from hands moving with the meaning of the words. One limit applies: a memory test during a math explanation in a lab is not a quarterly review in front of forty people, and the students were told when to gesture.

Stopping people from gesturing gives a less tidy picture. A 1996 experiment found that speakers who could not gesture became less fluent, but only while describing spatial content such as where things moved.⁴ Other restraint studies have produced mixed results, as linguist Alice Cravotta and colleagues note in reviewing them.⁵

Picture a manager describing a reorganization: she says the two teams will merge and brings her hands together. Going by the lab findings, the gesture may help her hold the new structure in mind while she finds the next sentence, and it shows the room the same shape. That is why the old advice to keep your hands still may cost most when you explain layouts, processes or change over time. In our search, no experiment showed that stillness itself helps, so there is nothing to gain by pinning your hands down.

Gestures help an audience follow, when they match the words

Listeners understand spoken messages better when gestures go with them. A 2019 meta-analysismeta-analysis: A study that combines the results of earlier studies on the same question into one overall estimate. Pooling makes the estimate more precise, but it cannot repair the studies it pools: a meta-analysis of surveys is still survey evidence.Full entry in the glossary by psychologists Nicole Dargue, Naomi Sweller and Michael Jones pooled 83 samples and found that gestures gave a moderate boost to comprehension compared with speech alone.⁶ An earlier 2011 meta-analysis by Autumn Hostetter, pooling 63 samples, reached the same moderate verdict; the benefit was larger for gestures showing physical actions than abstract topics, for gestures that add something the words leave out, and for children than adults.⁷

The catch is that the hands must agree with the words. In two experiments with US college students, Spencer Kelly, Aslı Özyürek and Eric Maris showed people a brief action, such as chopping vegetables, then a speaker saying a word with a gesture. When gesture and word showed different actions, people in the first experiment made far more errors judging whether they related to the action, roughly 8 to 11 times as many as when the two matched. In the second, a clashing gesture still cost accuracy even when people were told to judge only the speech.⁸

1. Hands that match the words: listeners understand faster and more accurately, and speakers keep more in mind
2. Hands that contradict the words: listeners make more errors, even when told to attend only to what is said
3. Movement with no meaning: circling hands gave speakers no memory benefit in one experiment

Schematic, not to scale. Based on lab experiments with US college students by Kelly, Özyürek and Maris (2010) and by Cook, Yip and Goldin-Meadow (2012).

Speakers rarely notice their own competing gestures. A presenter says revenue “went up this quarter” while her hand sweeps sideways across the slide, or says “three options” while her hands chop the air five times. Neither movement is wrong in itself; each gives the room a second message to reconcile with the first, at the very moment it is trying to take in the first.

The practical rule is to gesture the idea, not the rhythm. Show size, direction, sequence and comparison with your hands, and point at the thing you are naming on the slide rather than at the slide in general.

Which hand positions look closed or distracting?

Research gives a clearer verdict on movement than on stillness. Visible tension and gestures that contradict the words are the problems it identifies; our search found no test of whether crossed arms, clasped hands or hands in pockets make an audience rate a speaker worse during a talk.

The closest evidence is a 1990 study by US researchers Judee Burgoon and colleagues, in which classmates rated the videotaped speeches of 60 students. Speeches rated more persuasive went with what the authors call kinesic relaxation, plenty of movement, even random movement, but little tension, alongside a pleasant, varied voice and an expressive face.⁹ It is a correlation from one class, read in abstract only, but it points away from the stiff, gripped-hands posture many nervous speakers fall into.

The nearest test of the positions themselves used still photos, not talks. In a 2018 study in a Walden University journal, 300 people each saw one of seven pictures of a leader, including crossed arms, hands in pockets and hands behind the back, and the authors conclude that some hand gestures create more sense of closeness than others. We could read only its abstract, which does not report how each position scored.¹⁰

The advice against crossed arms and pockets rests mostly on intuition, not measurement. A reasonable reading of the evidence is that any resting position is fine if it is relaxed and lets your hands come up easily when you have something to show. Hands locked behind your back or buried in pockets make that harder, which is the real case against them.

What the power-pose failures mean for your stage advice

Standing in an expansive power pose before a talk does not change your hormones or your appetite for risk, according to a 2015 replicationreplication: Running a study again with fresh data and the same method, to see whether the original result comes back. A finding that fails to replicate is not automatically wrong, but it stops being something you can lean on.Full entry in the glossary by economists Eva Ranehill, Anna Dreber and colleagues. The pose did make people report feeling a little more powerful, and that was all it changed.¹¹

The original 2010 study behind the popular advice had tested 42 people. Ranehill’s team, based mainly at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and the Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden, used 200 and a design in which the experimenter did not know which pose each person had held, and found no effect on testosterone, cortisol or financial risk-taking.¹¹ Dana Carney, the first author of the 2010 study, later posted a statement on her faculty page:

I do not believe that “power pose” effects are real.

The wider record points the same way. Pooling 88 studies in 2022, Robert Körner and colleagues found shifts in self-reported feelings, and in some behavior, but none in physiological measures; they add that the behavioral effects may be inflated by publication biaspublication bias: The tendency for studies with striking or statistically significant results to be published, while quieter ones stay in the drawer. Since the missing studies are mostly the unimpressive ones, a pooled result tends to overstate the effect until it is corrected.Full entry in the glossary or outliers, and were larger when participants were not given a cover story for the task.¹³

Myth

Two minutes in a power pose raises testosterone and lowers cortisol before a big talk.

Fact

A 2015 replication with 200 people found no effect on hormones or risk-taking, and a 2022 meta-analysis found no effect on physiological measures.

For a speaker, this moves the attention from the corridor to the stage. A pose before you start may lift your mood slightly, and it costs nothing if you like it, but the audience never sees it. What they see is what your hands do for the next twenty minutes, so the two minutes before you go on are better spent saying your opening aloud with the gestures you plan, as step 6 below suggests.

What to do with your hands when presenting: six habits

The habits below run from the resting position to rehearsal. The middle three rest on the experiments above; the first and last are practical applications of them, and no study has tested them as a routine.

1. Find a resting position you can forget

Pick a home position: arms loose at your sides, or hands lightly together at about waist height. Neither has been tested against the other. What matters, going by Burgoon’s classroom study, is that it is relaxed rather than tense.⁹ Return to it after each gesture, so that stillness reads as a pause rather than a freeze.

2. Let your hands show what your words say

Use your hands for the ideas that have a shape: a rise, a gap, a sequence, two options side by side. Gestures about actions and movement gave listeners the biggest boost in Hostetter’s meta-analysis.⁷ Counting “three options” on your fingers, or lifting a hand as you say costs climbed, gives the room the same message twice.

3. Gesture where people can see it

In a 2019 experiment in Italy with 20 women telling cartoon stories, Cravotta, Busà and Prieto simply asked speakers to use their hands. They gestured more, and more of their gestures moved up from beside the legs and the armrests into the central, more visible space in front of the body. Their speech also grew louder, with higher pitch peaks and slightly longer stories, but it was no more or less fluent.⁵

The sample was small, the “gesture” condition always came second, and the authors caution that listeners may not notice such changes. Still, it suggests that inviting your hands in is unlikely to trip you up, and may make your voice a little louder.

4. Drop the movements that mean nothing

Circling hands gave speakers no memory benefit in the 2012 experiment.³ That makes fidgets a missed chance more than a proven turn-off: the 1990 classroom study even linked plenty of loose movement to more persuasive ratings.⁹ The everyday versions are clicking a pen, turning a ring or chopping the air on every stressed syllable. To find yours, record a practice run and watch it with the sound off; the noticing routine in the guide to cutting back on filler words works the same way for hands.

5. Rehearse with your hands as well as your words

Rehearse standing up, out loud and gesturing, because a run-through with your hands held still practices a different talk from the one you will give. In Dargue’s meta-analysis, studies in which learners made the gestures themselves found larger comprehension benefits on average than studies in which they watched them.⁶ That comparison across studies is about learners, not speakers, but it fits the Goldin-Meadow findings on gesture and thinking.

6. Swap the power pose for a spoken warm-up

Before you go on, say your opening sentences aloud with the gestures you plan to use. If you also like a wide stance in the corridor, keep it; just expect at most a modest shift in how you feel, not a change in your body chemistry.¹³

WiserHours

Before your next talk

• Choose a relaxed home position for your hands
• Mark two or three ideas in the talk that have a shape to show
• Check that each planned gesture matches its words
• Rehearse standing, out loud, with your hands free
• Watch one recorded run with the sound off to spot fidgets
• Warm up by saying your opening aloud, gestures included

Find this checklist online:
https://wiserhours.com/public-speaking/hands-when-presenting/#checklist-hands-when-presenting-rehearsal

Which hand advice has research behind it?

Gestures that help listeners understand have the firmest support; specific resting positions have almost none.

Treat the rows as a measure of how tightly to hold each habit. Build your rehearsal around the top rows, treat advice about where to park your hands as common sense rather than science, and let the power pose go without regret.

The bottom line

Your hands are not a problem to hide. Let them rest loosely, bring them up when an idea has a shape, and make sure what they show agrees with what you say. Skip the power pose as preparation and rehearse the talk with your hands moving instead.