In a previous post the question was asked, do you get muscle soreness using flywheel resistance training (FRT) and if not, why? A few of us had observed very little soreness when FRT, even with the introduction of new exercises.

One of the possible explanations as pointed out by Dr Georgios Mavropalias was that eccentric overload during FRT occurs at short muscle lengths (SML) and most muscle damage and soreness is thought to happen at long muscle lengths (LML) because of additional calcium ion influx into the muscle fiber, causing inflammation on the inner structure of the cell.

So is this type of overload a good thing or a bad thing? Well good that you can resistance train and  eccentrically overload the muscle at SML, and not get sore.

However, much of the beneficial musculotendinous adaptation we seek occurs at LML, so FRT does not provide overload at such lengths. Not so. Even though the flywheel wants to return to it’s natural state as quickly as possible early in the eccentric phase (SML) you can still resist the eccentric angular momentum later in the eccentric contraction (LML) by purposefully deciding where you choose to take on the flywheel’s momentum. Implications?

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