A Systematic Review of Flywheel Training Effectiveness and Application on Sport Specific Performances

Abstract

The objective of this systematic review was to examine the effectiveness of flywheel training, which allows for the replication of specific sports movements, overloading both the concentric and eccentric phases. Inclusion criteria were injury prevention outcomes; ability in terms of strength, power, sprinting, jumping and change of direction; competitive athletes; and RCTs. Exclusion criteria were a lack of a control group and lack of baseline and/or follow-up data. The databases used were Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, Cochrane Library, and Sage. The revised Cochrane risk-of-bias tool was used to assess the quality of the selected RCTs. The Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine 2011 Levels of Evidence was used. A PICOS (participants, intervention, comparators, study outcomes, and study design) approach was used to evaluate eligibility. A total of 21 RCTs with 8 to 54 participants in each study analyzed flywheel technology and its application in nine sports. The results showed that flywheel training is a good strategy to improve sports performance, providing variation in training methodologies and athletes' adherence. Further studies are needed to define guidelines on training modality, weekly frequency, volume, and inertia load. Only a few studies have applied the flywheel device directly to overload specific multidirectional movements at different joint angles. This method is not exempt from criticalities, such as the cost and the ability to carry out only individual training.

Keywords: eccentric overload training; flywheel; iso-inertial; sports.

Figure 2

Risk of bias assessment. The blinding of participants and personnel was not assessed because the nature of the interventions did not allow for blinding of the participants and personnel [16,21,23,27,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48].

Figure 3

Flowchart of the study.

Figure 4

Main results of RCTs. The green cells indicate that the authors of the studies reported significant better results for flywheel training groups compared with the other groups. The red cells indicate instead an insignificant difference [16,21,23,27,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48].

Figure 1

This figure shows a graphical illustration of a functioning flywheel device. An elbow flexion exercise was considered in the example: (a) concentric elbow flexion; (b) end of concentric elbow flexion and beginning of eccentric elbow flexion; (c) eccentric elbow flexion.