Abstract
Purpose: The aim of this article was to investigate the role that proprioception of the upper limb plays in making basketball free throws. Method: We designed an experiment to directly correlate the performance of basketball players in a free-throw task and an elbow- and wrist-joint position sense task. Results: We found a moderately high correlation between the free-throw success rate and wrist-joint position sense and a moderate correlation between the free-throw success rate and elbow-joint position sense. In both cases, the most successful shooters also had the best proprioceptive results. Conclusions: The results indicate that free-throw success is, at least partly, determined by players' ability to sense the position of the distal joints of their throwing upper limb. From a motor-control point of view, this suggests that basketball players may organize the compensatory behavior between the joints of their free-throwing arm on the basis of proprioception. From a practical point of view, it points toward new training techniques to enhance free-throwing efficiency.
Highlights
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not
A paired t test was performed to compare the success rate between the standing (62.7 ^ 11.6%) and seated (59.7 ^ 12.5%) throwing conditions, and this test failed to reject the null hypothesis at the default a 1⁄4 .05 significance level, t(20) 1⁄4 2 1.31, p 1⁄4 .20, suggesting that the two samples come from distributions with equal means
We set out to determine whether shooting success rate depends on players’ joint position sense (JPS) accuracy
Summary
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. Results: We found a moderately high correlation between the free-throw success rate and wrist-joint position sense and a moderate correlation between the free-throw success rate and elbow-joint position sense. In both cases, the most successful shooters had the best proprioceptive results. Conclusions: The results indicate that free-throw success is, at least partly, determined by players’ ability to sense the position of the distal joints of their throwing upper limb. From a motor-control point of view, this suggests that basketball players may organize the compensatory behavior between the joints of their free-throwing arm on the basis of proprioception. Motor-control specialists have recently considered that movement variability could be beneficial as it gives
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