After six months of experiencing training myself and elite athletes using flywheel training equipment, it became apparent to me that this technology had not realized its full potential. The initial results of complete muscle activation, increased strength, and muscle development is amazing, but the body adapts fast and progress comes to a halt. Just as when lifting weights, the resistance has to be progressively increased to have continued strength improvements and hypertrophy.

In my personal training as well as in the performance training, rehabilitation, and injury prevention of my athletes, we maxed out since the machines were not built sturdy enough to allow for additional resistance by adding more flywheels of greater diameter or mass.

There are a number of flywheel manufacturers worldwide and the original N’hance driven by Yoyo, Flywheel brand was by far the most sturdy, allowing for more resistance (i.e inertia flywheels) than the other. However, even with the N’hance equipment my athletes and I maxed out.

The interesting thing is that none of the worldwide manufacturers seemed to consider beefing up their flywheel equipment so that it could handle heavy duty eccentric training. It appears that there was some kind of superstition or fear of danger using too heavy eccentric load.

Our experience has shown that if eccentric overload is done with progressive increase of resistance, and with proper time to recover between training sessions, it is safe and also more efficient than any other kind of resistance training for strength, explosiveness and hypertrophy. I believe this is the reason why currently flywheel training equipment is used frequently in the rehabilitation of athletes post surgery, and muscle injury. It is proven as a superior way to neurologically activate a muscle and get it to function again, both concentrically and eccentrically. The concentric phase strengthens and shortens the muscle at the same time as the eccentric phase strengthens and lengthens the muscle.

This is a tremendous benefit after surgery or injury, since the training will restore lost range of motion in short muscles. This is essential since restoring full range of motion prevents an injury from becoming chronic or returning.

It has been my experience that doing concentric progressive strengthening post surgery or muscle injury with traditional weight training for an individual that does not have full passive range of motion, will inhibit full recovery of function and performance; This training will shorten an already short muscle.

As has been proven, the initial use of flywheel training post surgery or injury will have immediate progress in strength AND range of motion.

However, due to the neurological and muscular adaptation, the progress will come to a halt when the equipment no longer allows for additional resistance to be added. At this point the flywheel exercise is no longer challenging. The approach everyone seems to take at this time has been to switch back to traditional gravity based training (like squats etc).

In our thinking, that would be the same as being introduced to weight training for the first time: working out with a starter set of dumbbells ranging from 2.5 lbs to 25 lbs and starting a progressive exercise program for increased strength and muscle size, then one day the 25 lb dumbbells are too light to stimulate further muscle growth and strength. The individual wouldn’t say weight lifting is no longer working, rather he would buy heavier dumbbells or join a gym to continue progressive training with heavier weights.

Strangely, this never seemed to have crossed the mind of all current flywheel manufacturers. Their equipment is too flimsy and fragile to handle greater load.