(64) RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN SINGLE ARM BENCH PRESS AND OTHER UPPER EXTREMITY FUNCTIONAL TESTS

Upper extremity injuries are common in overhead sports such as baseball and softball. Unfortunately, there is a lack of return to sport assessments for the upper extremity, specifically those that can assess functional strength.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to correlate the performance on a seated single arm bench press one repetition maximum (SBP) to the upper quarter Y-balance test, seated single arm shot put, and closed kinetic chain upper extremity stability test. The hypothesis was that the SBP will have a weak correlation with the other assessments.

Methods: This correlational cross-sectional study examined 27 healthy males and females between the ages of 18-30 years. Participants had no injuries/surgeries/rehabilitation of the upper quarter in the past year and had resistance trained their upper extremities at least once per week for at least the past month. One-repetition maximum SBP were performed on a seated iso-lateral free weight machine following an upper extremity warm-up. Following the SBP, the other three functional tests were performed in a random order. Data were normalized to the participants’ bodyweight for the SBP and single arm shot put. Pearson’s correlation coefficients (r) were used to determine the relationships between tests for both the dominant and nondominant arms.

Results: All correlations between the SBP and the other upper extremity tests were weak and ranged from r = .002 to r = .451 with one significant relationship (p < 0.05); % dominant/nondominant single arm bench press and % dominant/nondominant single arm shot put.

Conclusion: The weak correlations between the SBP with the other upper extremity functional tests supports the hypothesis, therefore the SBP may assess another component of performance which may be important in the return to sport decision making process. PRACTICAL APPLICATION: The SBP may be included as part of the return to sport assessment to help identify functional strength asymmetry, but more research is needed on a clinical or athletic population.

Acknowledgements: None