Flywheel training beat the barbell for agility, and less was more

Changing direction at speed is a decisive quality in field and court sports, where accelerations and decelerations follow each other in quick succession. Traditional resistance training with weights is the standard way to build the strength that underpins those actions. Flywheel resistance training has emerged as an alternative in performance settings, and coaches want to know whether it actually delivers more for change of direction ability than conventional lifting. This review set out to compare the two approaches directly across the published trials in male athletes.

The authors screened five databases up to December 2021 for studies comparing flywheel resistance training with traditional resistance training on change of direction performance in male athletes. Seven studies met the inclusion criteria and were pooled in a meta-analysis. Beyond the headline comparison, the analysis examined single training factors separately, including weekly session frequency and the total number of sessions completed. Effects were expressed as standardised mean differences so that results from different tests could be combined.

Flywheel training produced a significantly larger improvement in change of direction performance than traditional resistance training, with a standardised mean difference of 0.64 between the two approaches. Within groups, flywheel training showed a large effect (1.63) while traditional training showed a moderate one (0.62). Dose mattered in an unexpected direction: 2 or fewer flywheel sessions per week produced a large effect (1.33) while more than 2 did not reach significance, and 12 or fewer total sessions showed a large effect (1.83) while more than 12 showed none. For traditional training, none of the training factors examined made a detectable difference.

This adds comparative evidence to growing interest in flywheel methods, and it points in their favour for one specific quality rather than for training in general. Seven studies is a slim base, all of it in male athletes, so the finding cannot yet be extended to women or to non-athletes. The less-is-more pattern in the dose analyses is intriguing, but it comes from comparing study subgroups rather than from trials designed to test dosing directly. Head-to-head dosing trials and studies in female athletes are the obvious next steps.

If you play a sport built on sharp cuts and rapid direction changes, this is a reason to see flywheel training as a serious option rather than a gimmick, at least on the evidence from male athletes. The pattern in these data also challenges the instinct that more sessions always mean more progress: the larger effects appeared at the lower training doses examined. As ever with a small evidence base, this describes what the pooled trials found rather than a prescription, and how it transfers to recreational players is not yet known.