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

Read more

Summary

Introduction

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

Objectives
Results
Conclusion

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call

Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.