Coinciding with the European Week of Sport, researchers highlighted that strength training with isoinertial resistance, devices powered by the athlete using their own strength capacity, without external power, provides greater improvement in the performance of athletes than gravitational training, which uses devices such as weights or resistance band.

This is the main conclusion of a study conducted by the Department of Physiotherapy in two groups of handball players. One of the groups did gravitational training, the most common in sports training, and the other group trained with isoinertial devices. Both methodologies showed improvements from beginning and the end of the process, but improvements were greater in the group that trained with isoinertial devices in the repetition of direction change tests, according to the authors. 

As Daniel Romero, director of the Department of Physiotherapy and one of the authors of the study explained, “The key to the study lies in the fact that the inertial device allows the tension developed in the braking phases of the movement to be increased, while this is not possible to the same extent with a gravitational device because resistance is not self-adapted.” 

The authors also pointed out that the results of this study are applicable to all sports in which explosive actions are performed and isoinertial training may be more justified. However, athletes in other sports, such as marathon runners, could also benefit since this type of device not only increases explosiveness, but also resistance of muscle and tendon structures.

After verifying the effectiveness of isoinertial training, the Department of Physiotherapy researchers have launched a study to determine the benefits of this methodology in active people over age 60, compared to the gravitational system.