Free throws decide basketball games, yet players deliver the ball through two very different movement styles. A new study has found that the one-motion and two-motion free-throw techniques are distinguished by measurable differences in movement timing, muscle activation and neuromuscular coordination, while also showing that a player’s height carries substantial predictive information about which style they use.
Researchers compared the two techniques in twenty right-handed male basketball enthusiasts, with ten players in each group. Each participant completed five valid free-throw trials. Motion was captured with a Vicon T40 three-dimensional motion capture system, and muscle activity was recorded with Noraxon Ultium surface electromyography, a technique that measures the electrical signals produced by muscles during movement.
The analysis combined three complementary approaches. The researchers averaged kinematic data, electromyographic signals and muscle synergies across participants. Muscle synergies, extracted using non-negative matrix factorization, represent coordinated groups of muscles that the nervous system appears to recruit together as functional building blocks of movement. Group comparisons were carried out with permutation tests, and false-discovery-rate correction was applied to control the statistical risk that arises when many comparisons are tested at once. Machine learning was included only as a secondary exploratory analysis.
The clearest biomechanical distinction lay in how the shot unfolded over time. Two-motion execution showed a longer movement cycle, consistent with the characteristic pause or reset between the lower-body drive and the upper-body release that defines this style. One-motion execution, in which the lower and upper body actions flow continuously, unfolded more quickly within its own normalized cycle.
Muscle activation patterns also separated the groups. Two-motion shots showed greater integrated EMG in selected lower-limb muscles, indicating a larger overall amount of electrical activity in those muscles across the movement. One-motion shots showed greater relative activation coverage in selected muscles, a measure of how activation is distributed across the movement cycle. Because these differences appeared in specific muscles rather than uniformly, the two techniques appear to load the lower body and coordinate the shot in distinct ways.
Joint kinematics told a more selective story. Among all joint-kinematic measures tested, only the peak timing of wrist internal-external rotation angular acceleration survived statistical correction, occurring later in the normalized one-motion cycle. Wrist rotation is central to controlling ball release, so this timing shift suggests the two styles differ in when rotational control of the wrist peaks relative to the shot. Notably, no full-waveform comparison of kinematics or muscle synergies remained significant after correction, indicating that the strongest group differences were concentrated in discrete timing and activation measures rather than in the entire signal shapes.
The exploratory machine learning analysis added an important caution. A model fusing movement and muscle data reached a balanced accuracy of 0.75 in distinguishing the two techniques, but a baseline model using height alone performed better, at 0.85. When the researchers removed height-associated information by residualizing height within the training folds, the fused model’s balanced accuracy fell to 0.50, the level expected by chance. This indicates that much of the model’s apparent predictive power reflected body height rather than technique-specific movement signatures.
The authors position these findings as biomechanical evidence that may contribute to individualized free-throw technique selection and movement training strategies based on different movement characteristics. Because the study involved twenty male enthusiasts with ten per group, the results describe this population and sample size rather than elite players or the general shooting population. The machine learning component was exploratory, and the height residualization result shows that apparent classification success can depend heavily on anthropometric variables. Even so, the combination of longer movement cycles and higher lower-limb integrated EMG in two-motion shots, greater activation coverage in one-motion shots, and later wrist rotation acceleration peaks in the one-motion cycle offers a concrete, measured picture of how these two familiar free-throw styles differ in execution and neuromuscular control.
Subject of Research: Biomechanical and neuromuscular differences between one-motion and two-motion basketball free-throw techniques in male basketball enthusiasts
Article Title: Distinct biomechanical and neuromuscular coordination strategies characterize one-motion and two-motion free-throw techniques in male basketball enthusiasts
Article References: Zhu, Y., He, Y., Zhang, Y., & Wang, Y. (2026). Distinct biomechanical and neuromuscular coordination strategies characterize one-motion and two-motion free-throw techniques in male basketball enthusiasts. BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13102-026-02211-9
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1186/s13102-026-02211-9
Keywords: basketball, free throw, biomechanics, neuromuscular coordination, electromyography, muscle synergies, motion capture, kinematics, machine learning, sports science, Distinct, biomechanical
News Source: Ophelia Keating. (October 30, 2026). One-motion and two-motion free throws rely on distinct biomechanical and neuromuscular strategies in male basketball enthusiasts. Scienmag.
