Standard versus Flywheel-Based Resistive Exercise

Copyright: © 2012 Caruso JF. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Resistive exercise is an increasingly popular modality to improve numerous performance and health-related outcomes. Due to its popularity and the results it provides, greater numbers of persons utilize resistive exercise to attain a myriad of benefits. While standard resistive exercise equipment has proved useful for a variety of fitness goals, some perceive drawbacks to this modality. Persons reluctant to use standard (barbells, dumbbells, etc.) resistive exercise equipment claim such devices are awkward and intimidating to use. Such persons include disuse models (cancer, HIV, aging, space flight, etc.) for whom resistive exercise may substantially improve their condition. Due to the prevalence of disuse models in modern society, their collective reticence towards standard equipment undermines their health and contributes towards a vast financial healthcare burden [1]. Newer resistive exercise equipment that requires less physical coordination and training to operate includes flywheel-based devices. Mounted onto the axles of exercise machines, the flywheel’s radii dictate the magnitude of forces required to cause their rotation in order to complete repetitions. Since muscle forces and not Earth’s gravitational pull impact flywheel rotation rates, such machines may be used during space flight to abate the adverse physical changes seen in astronauts. Flywheel-based machines offer concentric and eccentric resistance; unlike standard equipment, the kinetic energy imparted as muscles shorten dictates the magnitude of the muscle-lengthening load on the former device. This is contrary to the manner the standard resistive exercise devices operate; training adaptations from these two types of equipment may therefore yield divergent outcomes. Thus some question are, which type of resistive exercise equipment yields better results.