Examining different aspects of functional performance using a variety of bench throw techniques

The purpose of this experiment was to examine upper-body bench throw performance during tests that specifically target different aspects of functional performance. A pool of 26 male, semi-professional rugby league players (age: 23 ± 3 years, height: 180.8 ± 5.6 cm, mass: 95.7 ± 13.0 kg, estimated 1 repetition maximum bench press: 130 ± 20 kg) volunteered to participate in this study, which consisted of 2 components. First, the reliability of peak force (f) and displacement (d) measured during 4 different types of bench throws was assessed. These tests consisted of full range of motion (ROM) countermovement throws (FC), full ROM static start throws (FS), half ROM countermovement throws (HC), and half ROM static start throws (HS). For all measures, intraclass correlation coefficients were >0.80. The second component of this study examined the relationship between all measures, with a focus on the 2 simplest protocols to implement in an athlete assessment setting-FC and FS. A Pearson's correlation matrix revealed that a combination of FSd and FSf measures was moderately to highly correlated with all outcome measures, whereas neither FCd nor FCf was significantly correlated with HSf-a measure of the athlete's ability to produce force in the midrange of the movement with minimal elastic energy contribution. The results of this study suggest that, in situations where time efficiency is important, assessing full ROM bench throws from a static start may provide a representative measure of both upper-body full and partial ROM performance.