Whole Body Kinetic Chain Muscle Activity during selected Rehabilitation Exercises in Healthy and Injured Overhead Throwing Athletes.
Liam P Owens, Ginny Coyles, Omid Khaiyat
The Advanced Throwers Ten program mostly fails to reach strengthening-level muscle activity.
Only prone exercises on a stability ball hit the threshold. Core and lower limb muscles stayed below 11% of maximum effort in every exercise tested.
Key findings
1Only exercises performed prone on a stability ball (T-Raises, Y-Raises, Prone Row into ER) reached strengthening-level activity above 40% MVC. Injured throwers hit this threshold for posterior deltoid, lower trapezius and infraspinatus, while healthy throwers reached it for lower trapezius and supraspinatus.
2Core and lower limb muscles (external obliques, gluteus maximus, rectus femoris, biceps femoris, lateral gastrocnemius) stayed below 11% of maximum voluntary contraction across every exercise in both groups, far below the level needed for a strengthening stimulus.
3Few muscle activity differences separated healthy from injured throwers. Injured athletes showed higher infraspinatus activity during T-Raises and Prone Row into ER, and higher anterior deltoid activity during Seated ER and Y-Raises. All other between-group comparisons were non-significant.
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What it does not show
Only the first set of the ATT was tested. Sets two and three include sustained holds that the authors note may elicit greater muscle activity, so the full program may produce different results. The sample was small (33 participants) and all male, so the findings may not generalise to female throwers or to other populations. Only ten of the ATT exercises were tested. Bicep curls, tricep extensions and wrist exercises, which are part of the full program, were excluded. The dumbbell weight was standardised at 1 kg to ensure all participants could complete the exercises comfortably, which may be too light to elicit true strengthening in stronger athletes. This was a single-session measurement. It tells you what one set of exercises does, not whether repeated training over weeks produces strength gains.
Declared interests
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the Advanced Throwers Ten as a complete strengthening program for the kinetic chain. Core and lower limb muscles stayed below 11% of maximum effort in every exercise tested, and only the first set was measured. The full program includes sustained holds in later sets that were not part of this study, so the results describe a partial picture of what the program can do.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →