The article is devoted to the reduction of dynamic loads of actuating mechanisms of mining machines based on the use of elastic-damping devices with variable parameters built into the construction of these machines. It is shown that the determination of the parameters of these devices can be represented as a solution of the inverse dynamic problem based on a differential equation with variable coefficients. Using the example of a damping device proposed for reducing the dynamic loads of the digging mechanism of dragline ES 20.90, we describe the procedure for constructing the desired differential equation for synthesizing the device parameters and present the results of a numerical study of its effectiveness.