The Ultimate Flywheel Training Machine

Flywheel training places continuous resistance when performing exercises through inertial loading instead of weights. Studies have found improvements in strength and power, hypertrophy, muscle activation, muscle length, and tendon stiffness. Because of this, flywheel training is ideal for use in musculoskeletal rehabilitation, injury prevention, training after a period of unloading, post-operative rehabilitation, late-stage sport-specific rehabilitation, and fall prevention and treatment of sarcopenia among the elderly.

1. Positive impact on athletic factors such as speed, jump height, and change of direction.
2. Resistance is variable, regardless of the direction or speed of motion, allowing eccentric overload to be achieved effortlessly, particularly effective for building strength.
3. During eccentric movements, the applied external resistance can exceed the maximum momentary force produced by the muscle in a concentric muscle contraction – and with lower energy expenditure – resulting in greater work efficiency.
4. Muscle growth can be further increased when both force generation and muscle and tendon stretching occur concurrently, both involved during the eccentric contraction.
5. When performing eccentric muscle contractions, you require fewer motor units to generate the same amount of force, reducing the metabolic cost of the exercise.

A meta-analysis study looked at flywheel training with a partial overload in eccentric ROM vs. training with traditional weights. All these studies examined were flywheel vs. weights, ranging from four to 10 weeks, with healthy young people. These studies covered leg presses, leg extensions, leg curls, squats, shoulder abduction, arm extensors, and flexors.

The meta-analysis showed significant differences between the results of Flywheel training vs. traditional resistance training. Concentric and eccentric strength, muscle power, muscle hypertrophy, vertical jump height, and running speed showed the most significant improvements with Flywheel eccentric overload training. Much like increasingly emerging studies on the effects of flywheel training, the meta-analysis provides evidence supporting the superiority of Flywheel eccentric overload training compared with traditional resistance exercise. Specifically in promoting skeletal muscle adaptations in terms of strength, power, and size in healthy subjects and athletes.

Flywheel training strength training places an eccentric overload using variable resistance during exercise. This has been found to induce positive adaptations in both untrained populations and sports athletes. Long-term flywheel strength training is a valid method for positive morphological changes in muscle and mechanical adaptations like hypertrophy and strength gains.

The eccentric overload created using flywheel training leads to more significant strength gains than concentric exercises performed with traditional weights. This was reported in a meta-analysis where subjects experienced substantial increases in muscle volume and muscle fibre cross-sectional area following 5-8 weeks of flywheel training.

The benefits of flywheel strength training are most notably known for leading to beneficial neuromuscular, morphological, and function adaptations pertaining to performance enhancements in athletic movements such as vertical jumps, sprints, and changes of direction.

Eccentric Flywheel Training involves using the flywheel to overload the muscle lengthening phase of exercise. Since we are much stronger eccentrically than concentrically, we can handle much higher forces. During these eccentric contractions, protein synthesis (growth) is further increased as the force generation and musculotendinous stretch simultaneously, and there are the mechanisms underpinning hypertrophic effects and increases of muscle fiber cross-sectional area.

In essence, eccentric contractions happen when muscles lengthen due to the applied external resistance, which exceeds the momentary force produced by the muscle. When performing eccentric flywheel training, the eccentric phase results are overloaded by the inertia accumulated during the concentric phase. An eccentric contraction is accompanied by a higher force output and lower energy expenditure than isometric and concentric muscle contractions. This results in greater work efficiency because of the more attached cross-bridges under the lengthening phase.

Flywheel training generates resistance by harnessing the inertia of a spinning flywheel and accelerating and decelerating the flywheel at speed instead of moving a weight against gravity like in traditional training. This has the potential to generate a tremendous amount of force and allows athletes to train with constant resistance in both the concentric and eccentric phases.

Inertial and eccentric training through flywheel training is scientifically supported to produce impressive results in strength training and injury management, such as preferential recruitment of high threshold motor units, greater cortical activity, and improving power development.

Resistance never changes with traditional weight training, meaning that the user misses out on training the eccentric phase of the exercise. For example, it’s easier to lower the weight because the load is based on a concentric one rep max. The resistance is most challenging during the upwards phase. On the other hand, resistance constantly adapts to the user’s force production rep-by-rep in flywheel training, so each repetition is maximal.

Different flywheels can be used to suit specific goals:

• Small Yellow Flywheel: 0.01 inertial disk. You can use it for shoulder rehabilitation and slower exercises, incremental shoulder movements, rehabilitating the rotator cuff, and developing strength in the shoulder, ankle, or rotator cuff.
• Large Yellow Flywheel: 0.025 inertial disk. You can use it to target smaller muscle groups and fast movements.
• Blue Flywheel: 0.05 inertial disk. You can use it for larger muscle groups at higher speeds or smaller muscle groups at lower speeds.
• Red Flywheel: 0.1 inertial disk. You can use it for larger muscle groups at any speed. Often for advanced strength training by professionals.