On the Role of Proprioception in Making Free Throws in Basketball

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.

Keywords::

• compensatory variability
• joint position sense
• sensory control
• shooting accuracy

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Alain Weisz and Vincent Bousgarbies for sharing their technical expertise in basketball. We would also like to thank Sylvain Raymond, Raphaelle Creniault, Nicolas Flores, Raphael Lagarde, and the players of Aix-Marseille University basketball team for their help in data collection. A very special thanks to Jean-Jacques Temprado for lending us his “coordinator,” a multiarticulated coordination apparatus that we have turned into a proprioception-testing apparatus, to Antoine Morice for experimental setup illustrations, and to Michel Poulin for English-language revision.