Ask for an overhead mobility test and you will be handed one of at least three, depending on who is asking. A back-to-wall reach, a back-scratch behind the body, or arms sliding up a wall. They are not versions of one measurement. They read different things, and a person can pass one and fail another without anything being wrong with either result.
So the useful move is not picking the best one. It is knowing what each protocol reads, what it hides, and which segment of the chain the answer belongs to.
The short answer
- Three protocols share the name, and they disagree with each other for good reasons.
- Overhead is shoulder plus shoulder blade plus upper back extension — three links, one result.
- A wall is what stops the lower back finishing the movement for you, which is why wall-based versions are more informative and less flattering.
- Limber has no overhead-flexion measurement. No degrees, no camera, no goniometer. The battery's only shoulder reading is the Apley scratch, a five-band self-report.
- Take whichever protocol you can repeat exactly, both sides, and compare it only with your own earlier reading.
The overhead mobility test, three ways
Each of these takes a minute, needs a wall at most, and answers a different question.
One: the back-to-wall overhead reach. Stand with your heels a few inches from a wall, back of the head and upper back against it, and flatten your lower back so a hand cannot slide behind your waist. Keep it flat. Now raise straight arms overhead, thumbs back, and try to touch the backs of your hands to the wall. The reading is how far the arms travel before the lower back lifts off.
Two: the Apley scratch. One arm over the shoulder and down the back, the other up from below, and the gap between your hands measured in hand-widths. The Apley scratch test sets out the protocol and the five bands.
Three: the wall angel. Back, hips and head against a wall, feet a step out, arms in a goalpost with the backs of the hands toward the wall. Slide the arms up overhead, staying as close to the wall as you can, and note what leaves the wall first — the hands, the wrists, or the lower back. Wall angels is the guide.
What each one reads and hides
Same body, three answers, and here is why.
| Protocol | What it reads | What it hides |
|---|---|---|
| Back-to-wall reach | Shoulder flexion with the lumbar spine held flat | Which link ran out first |
| Apley scratch | Rotation, extension and flexion combined, per side | Pure overhead travel |
| Wall angel | The overhead arc with the spine pinned | Anything about rotation |
The back-to-wall reach is the strictest of the three for the overhead position specifically, because the flat lower back removes the substitution people make without noticing. The scratch is the only one that reads rotation, which is where side differences usually live. The wall angel is the only one that shows you the failure as it happens, in a place on your body you can feel.
You can pass the scratch and fail the reach. A shoulder with generous rotation and a stiff upper back does exactly that. You can also pass the reach and read poorly on the scratch, because internal rotation behind the back is a separate movement that nothing about overhead requires.
The chain, and where it cheats
Getting an arm to vertical takes roughly 180 degrees of travel, and no single structure supplies it.
The shoulder supplies most but not all. The shoulder blade has to rotate upward and tilt back across the ribs to keep the socket underneath the arm. The upper back has to extend, because the ribs the blade slides on are attached to it. A thoracic spine held in flexion holds the blade forward, and a blade held forward runs the shoulder into its own limit early.
When the third link is missing, the body finds the range somewhere else. The lower back arches, the ribs flare, and the arms arrive next to the ears. The result looks like overhead and is not — the movement happened at the lumbar spine, which was not asked and does not benefit.
A wall is what stops that. That is the whole reason the wall-based protocols exist, and the whole reason they are less flattering than the same movement done standing in a room. Thoracic spine mobility covers the segment doing the hiding.
What Limber does not measure
Printed plainly, because this is a page about a test and we sell the app that scores tests.
Limber has no overhead-flexion measurement. It does not read degrees of shoulder flexion. There is no camera and no goniometer. Nothing in the app or on this site scores a back-to-wall overhead reach, and no page here should imply otherwise.
The battery's only shoulder reading is the Apley scratch: five bands, self-reported, taken per side. It reads the chain rather than the overhead position, which makes it a screen for the region and not a measurement of your arms above your head.
The wall angel is designed as test 7 of the seven, and it is not built — in the app either. It is the reading that would come closest to overhead, and it does not exist yet. The shoulders area is designed as the shoulder reach at 60 per cent and the wall angel at 40 per cent; with the wall angel missing, the weight simply drops out and the reach carries the area alone. The Range Score names the test that is absent rather than quietly renormalising and calling the area complete.
One more shortfall belongs here. The Spine group is fed only by a seated thoracic rotation test that is also unbuilt, so the battery has no reading at all for the segment that most often stops an arm going overhead. Four of five stations is the ceiling today, on both surfaces.
What the evidence says
Three findings, and none of them says what this kind of test is usually claimed to say.
There is one decent norm set, and it belongs to the scratch. Rikli and Jones built a back-scratch reach into the Senior Fitness Test in the Journal of Aging and Physical Activity in 1999, with normative data by age and sex. That is more than any back-to-wall overhead protocol can offer, which is worth knowing before you treat a wall reach as an objective standard. Grade: moderate, and specific to their protocol rather than to overhead reach in general.
A screen is not a prediction. Moran and colleagues' 2017 systematic review in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found movement-screen composites predict injury poorly, and Bahr argued in the same journal in 2016 that this is a general property of screening: to identify the individuals who will get hurt, a test needs discriminative power that essentially no movement screen has shown. Grade: solid. A poor overhead reading is a description of today, not a forecast.
The segment doing the hiding is the hardest one to measure. Johnson and colleagues examined the reliability of thoracic rotation range-of-motion measurement in healthy adults in the Journal of Athletic Training in 2012, and the practical lesson is that even a clinic with instruments finds this segment awkward to pin down. At home, with no instrument, you are not measuring the thoracic spine. You are watching what it forces the rest of you to do. Grade: moderate for the reliability work, and the home version is weaker still.
Pain that persists, wakes you at night, radiates into a limb, comes with numbness or weakness, or followed a fall or an injury is a matter for a clinician who can examine you. Nothing here diagnoses anything and nothing here is treatment. A sharp pinch at a particular point in the arc is a reason to come out of the position, not a band to push through.
What to do with three results
Pick one protocol and keep it. The comparison that means anything is you against your own earlier reading, taken the same way, and three protocols measured casually are worth less than one measured carefully.
If you want a score, the shoulder mobility test is the built instrument: the Apley scratch, five bands, both sides, a 0–100 reading off the app's own anchors. Nothing is stored and nothing is sent. If you want the overhead position specifically, use the back-to-wall reach or the wall angel as a self-check and write down what you saw — which part left the wall, and how far the arms got before it did.
Then work the link that lost and read it again in three weeks. The rest of the cluster is shoulders and upper back.
Questions
Which overhead test should I use?
The one you can repeat exactly. If you want a scored reading, the Apley scratch is the one Limber's battery takes, and it is the only one of the three with published norms behind its shape. If you want to see the overhead position itself, the back-to-wall reach is stricter, because a flat lower back removes the substitution that makes a room-standing reach look better than it is.
Why do I pass one test and fail another?
Because they read different movements. A shoulder with generous rotation but a stiff upper back scores well behind the back and badly overhead; a shoulder with clean flexion and limited internal rotation does the reverse. Disagreement between two protocols is information about which link of the chain is short, not evidence that one of them is broken.
Does Limber score my overhead reach?
No. There is no overhead-flexion measurement in the app, no degrees, no camera and no goniometer. The battery's only shoulder reading is the Apley scratch, and the wall angel that would have come closest to overhead is designed but not built, in the app or here.
What does it mean if my lower back lifts off the wall?
That the arms ran out of travel before they got overhead, and your lumbar spine offered to finish the movement. It is the commonest result and it usually points at the upper back rather than the shoulder. The value of the wall is that it makes the substitution visible at the moment it happens rather than after the fact.
How much overhead range do I need?
Enough for what you do, which is a less satisfying answer than a number and a more honest one. There is no established threshold that separates safe from unsafe, and screening research has repeatedly failed to turn range readings into injury predictions. A reading that improves against your own earlier reading is the measure worth watching.
Can I test overhead range without a wall?
You can, and you should not trust the result. Standing in a room, the lower back arches to finish the movement without any sensation that would tell you, so the arms reach the ears and the shoulder never travelled. The wall is not a convenience in these protocols. It is the part that makes them a measurement.