Distinct biomechanical and neuromuscular coordination strategies characterize one-motion and two-motion free-throw techniques in male basketball enthusiasts

Free throws are essential for basketball scoring. One-motion and two-motion free-throw techniques exhibit distinct movement patterns. This study compared movement execution and neuromuscular coordination between one-motion and two-motion basketball free throws. Twenty right-handed male basketball enthusiasts (10 per group) completed five valid trials recorded using Vicon T40 motion capture and Noraxon Ultium surface electromyography (sEMG). Participant-averaged kinematics, sEMG, and muscle synergies extracted by non-negative matrix factorization were compared using permutation tests with false-discovery-rate correction. Machine learning was included as a secondary exploratory analysis. Two-motion execution showed a longer movement cycle and greater integrated EMG in selected lower-limb muscles. One-motion execution showed greater relative activation coverage in selected muscles. Among joint-kinematic measures, only wrist internal-external rotation angular-acceleration peak timing survived correction, occurring later in the normalized one-motion cycle. No full-waveform kinematic or synergy comparison remained significant after correction. The fused model achieved balanced accuracy of 0.75, compared with 0.85 for a height-only baseline. After training-fold height residualization, fused-model balanced accuracy fell to 0.50, indicating substantial height-associated predictive information. The present study provides biomechanical evidence that may contribute to individualized free-throw technique selection and movement training strategies according to different movement characteristics.