Flywheel for the win!

As a soccer player growing up that did very little strength training (none until high school, then very minimal "conditioning"), I suffered from several injuries throughout my soccer career. Luckily, nothing requiring surgery for me, just lots of ankle sprains and muscles strains. Now my weaknesses resulted in muscle injuries but for some people it turns into more serious injuries like ACL tears or Achilles injuries along with other structures around the knee and ankle that requires surgery.

A lot of times these injuries that occur are non-contact. In soccer players, you can make a powerful kick then BAM, quad strain as you kick that leg backwards. For a basketball player, they jump up for a 3 and you hear that gunshot of an achilles tear (a lot of times it really sounds like a very loud bang, even to the crowd). For a track sprinter (or any short fast sprint), weak hamstrings can lead to a hamstring strain just from running really fast. In all these instances, the muscles are doing their job, but they are not able to do it appropriately. These moments where injuries can occur, and do often occur, happen because the muscle is not able to handle what is called the eccentric moment. This moment is when a muscle is lengthening but also trying to control the limb so it also has to contract. So here we have a muscle that is getting longer but also trying to control or slow down your leg.

Sometimes this is hard to picture, so let's think of something we all do all the time, sitting down. Now think about sitting down slowly, or even better, get up and sit back down...slowly. Now the quad muscle group in the front of your thigh is a group that is responsible for straightening your knee. When you sit down, you are bending your knees, however, you should feel this muscle group kick on. So the muscle is getting longer, because your knee is bending but not straightening, but it is also working really hard to control your body weight to keep you in control and from plopping down. (There's other muscles working here too but I'm hoping this gives you a clear picture of what eccentric movement is). Now, you're likely not going to get injured from sitting down - if you feel like you're going to strain something doing that movement, we really need to talk! But in a sport, this eccentric control is happening with a lot of speed and power. If you don't train this type of strengthening, you're missing games or runs and risk re-injury after re-injury because you never teach the muscle how to handle that power and speed with the proper strengthening.

That's where I come in. Flywheel training! Flywheel training is all about this type of strengthening. While doing normal functional motions like squatting and rowing and sometimes sports specific movements, you have resistance pulling against you instead of just gravity and weight like normal weight training. So let's go back to that picture of sitting down. Imagine you have a strap around your waist. You stand up against resistance and as soon as you stop standing, that resistance starts pulling you back down and you have to control that resistance. This is where the training comes in. This is where you are teaching those muscles to withstand the resistance. You can do this with traditional weight training but it is a lot more difficult, less functional, and sometimes there is more risk of injury because you cannot add the speed component in the same way.

There is strong evidence for flywheel training in the research. Flywheel and overload training with the flywheel is shown to increase muscle mass in a shorter time frame, decrease of knee pain (specifically patellar tendinopathy) of in-season athletes, and can improve jumping and sprinting abilities of athletes(1, 2, 3). In one article, there were 3 hamstring injuries of soccer players that performed flywheel training compared to 10 injuries in soccer players that did not perform flywheel training (4)

These are just a few of the many benefits of flywheel training. If you have questions or want to try it out or think your child athlete may benefit, reach out for an assessment and we can see if you are ready for flywheel fun, and if not, I will show you how to get there! Email kelsi@dashphysio.com or click on the "Let's Chat" button that is following you around!

See citations below for the research mentioned but also check out https://exxentric.com/flywheel-training/advantages/scientific-evidence/ or click on the picture of the man using the kBox above for more information!

Citations:

1. Petré H, Wernstål F, Mattsson CM. Effects of Flywheel Training on Strength-Related Variables: a Meta-analysis. Sports Med Open. 2018 Dec 13;4(1):55. doi: 10.1186/s40798-018-0169-5. PMID: 30547232; PMCID: PMC6292829.

2. Gual G, Fort-Vanmeerhaeghe A, Romero-Rodríguez D, Tesch PA. Effects of In-Season Inertial Resistance Training With Eccentric Overload in a Sports Population at Risk for Patellar Tendinopathy. J Strength Cond Res. 2016 Jul;30(7):1834-42. doi: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000001286. PMID: 26670989.

3. de Hoyo M, Pozzo M, Sañudo B, Carrasco L, Gonzalo-Skok O, Domínguez-Cobo S, Morán-Camacho E. Effects of a 10-week in-season eccentric-overload training program on muscle-injury prevention and performance in junior elite soccer players. Int J Sports Physiol Perform. 2015 Jan;10(1):46-52. doi: 10.1123/ijspp.2013-0547. Epub 2014 Jun 6. PMID: 24910951.

4. Askling C, Karlsson J, Thorstensson A. Hamstring injury occurrence in elite soccer players after preseason strength training with eccentric overload. Scand J Med Sci Sports. 2003 Aug;13(4):244-50. doi: 10.1034/j.1600-0838.2003.00312.x. PMID: 12859607.