Will My Cadence Change For Easy Runs Versus Faster Runs

Audio Transcript

Coach Jeff: Today’s question is from Hope. Hope asked, “My cadence on regular runs is a constant 175 steps per minute, at around 520 per kilometer pace. My easy run pace is slower, but I saw a drop in my cadence and my stride length. What is the correct cadence for easy runs? Should I shorten my stride and compensate with an increased cadence, or should I not worry so much about cadence on my easy and long runs?”

Hope, that’s a great question and one of the reasons that I selected it as our first episode, is because we get a lot of questions about cadence. What is it? What’s the magic number? How important is it? Why is it important? Et cetera. I think that’s a great way to start our daily podcast. The first thing that we want to do is, we want to answer, what is cadence for people and how to get it, in case you don’t know.

Cadence is basically a measure of how many steps you take per minute, when running. In order to get somebody’s cadence, the easiest way I find is, to count how many steps you take, with just one foot in a 30 second period. When you’re out running, just count in your head how many times you’re taking a step with your right foot in 30 seconds. Then what you’re going to do is multiply that number by two, because that’s going to give you both right and left legs, so that’s both legs and then you’re going to multiply by two again to get 60 seconds, since we only recorded for 30 seconds. That number is going to be your cadence or your steps per minute.

Why is cadence important? The reason it’s really important or the most important reason is that, almost all runners that we see that have a low cadence, end up over striding. When I talk about low cadence, I’m talking anywhere from 150 to 160, 165 steps per minute. The problem with over striding is that your foot is going to land out in front of your center of mass.

Usually, it’s going to land out in front of your center of mass with a straight leg as well, so your knee is not going to be bent to help absorb some of the impact, so your leg is going to be straight. Often you’ll land like that. Heel striking as well, doesn’t happen all the time, but I would say probably 90% of the time. If you’re over striding, you’re heel striking as well, which heel striking itself isn’t an issue. It’s only an issue when you’re over striding, but that’s a complicated or a more in depth discussion for another time.

In any case, over striding is really bad for running injuries because it puts a lot of pressure on your hips, your knees, your shins, and almost every muscular and tendon and structure in your lower body. The reason for that is that, without the knee being flexed and your leg being straight, there’s no absorption. The knee doesn’t absorb any of the impact. Your leg is straight and all the impact goes straight up into your hip or potentially into your shin as well, so it contributes to shin splits, IT Band problems, and a host of other knee injuries. Most running injuries can be tied back directly to overstriding or if you do over stride, your injuries can probably be tied back to overstriding. It’s really important that we eliminate that.

One of the easiest ways to eliminate that is to get your cadence up to a higher number. When I say a higher number, what does that higher number mean? There used to be this idea that there was a magic number or magic steps per minute for every runner, and that magic number we used to think was 180 steps per minute, but what we found recently, in more research, in looking at elite runners and looking at different variety of runners is that, there is no magic number. First your cadence; your individual cadence is going to be very unique to your running style, your own bio mechanics, your height, how tall you are, and other factors, so there’s not an individual number. Not everybody is going to be comfortable or efficient at 100 steps per minute.

The second is your stride per minute is going to change based on how fast you’re running. The faster you run, more than likely your strides per minute are going to increase. This number has been verified by looking at the stride per minute or steps per minute of Olympic caliber runners finishing a 10K. Some of the runners were up at 200 steps per minute, 210 steps per minute when finishing the 10K race as fast as they could. We know that cadence is going to change based on how fast you’re running.

Basically what we want to do from that standpoint is, we need to set some guidelines about what is a too slow of a cadence. This is a little bit my opinion, definitely backed up by some research, but usually if I see runners with a cadence of 170 or lower, we talk about trying to increase it. If your cadence is lower than 170, it’s probably a good idea to look, if it’s a good idea, to try to increase your cadence. When I say look at I mean that you should examine your stride. You can do that by just videotaping yourself on a treadmill. You can get a professional to look it over for you. Something like that where you’re able to freeze frame, what your foot is doing as it impacts, is it out in front of your center of mass, is it straight, that kind of thing. That’s what I would determine.

If you’re between 160 and 170, there’s the potential that you’re over striding and that you should really work on increasing your cadence. You do that first step, look to make sure that you’re overstriding, and if you are, then we can take steps to improve Definitely if you’re under 160, if you’re under 165, very likely that you’re overstriding and it’s probably imperative to just go ahead and start trying to increase your cadence because it’s very difficult to have a steps per minute that low and not be overstriding, just the way the bio mechanics works. If you’re under 165, I would pretty much start implementing, trying to improve your cadence.

Also, just remember that your cadence is going to change based on how fast you’re running. Typically, when we talk about cadence and whether we want to improve cadence, basically what we do is, choose roughly the same pace that you’re going to do to try to improve. If you measure your cadence on an easy run, that’s going to be the pace or barometer that you use to weigh how fast you’re increasing. If you do it on a tempo run, et cetera, just remember that your cadence is going to be different, but what we’re looking for is a change.

In terms of changing, basically the way we want to do is, we want to try to increase your steps per minute by about 5% to 10% of the time. If you’re at 160, we don’t want to see you try to jump to 180. That’s going to feel really awkward. It’s just not going to feel right and it may not be really effective. I recommend trying to increase by about 5%. For example, if your current cadence is 160, then you’d want to increase by 5% which is about 8, so you’re going to increase to 168 steps per minute. The way that you want to do that us is break it down into actionable steps. Start with short periods, so maybe telephone pole to telephone pole, 30 seconds at a time, maybe every couple of minutes on your runs. You can also get a metronome app, and you can change the beats per minute to match your step rate, so you’d set it to 168 and then it will match that beat per minute.

What you want to do is, over time, continue to increase the amount of time that you spend working on your cadence. Start with 30 seconds, then after a few days, move to 60 seconds, and when that feel starts to feel comfortable, move to a couple of minutes. Each step, you’re just going to do it until it starts to feel a little bit more comfortable and then after, usually a couple of weeks, you’ll start to notice that unconsciously your steps per minute is increasing. When you hit that unconscious level, when you’re not thinking about trying to increase your steps per minute and it’s just happening naturally, that’s when you can increase another 5%. Let’s says after two weeks of slowly implementing the 168 steps per minute, what you’re going to do is, increase by another 8 and so basically you’re going to be talking about 173 to 176 steps per minute and go there until you’re comfortable.

Once you’re over 170, 180 or once you’re near 180, you don’t really need to increase anymore. I find between 170 and 190 to be a range for most runners, kind of where they are at and that should help. Getting back to Hope’s question, there is no correct cadence for easy runs. She said that her cadence is 175 steps per minute, so that’s right in the range where we want to be. I wouldn’t try to change that, but if you are somebody listening who has a cadence that needs to change, then try to increase it by 5% of the time. From there, just try to get to get to anywhere between 170 and 190. Just remember that it is going to change as you run faster. Hope you enjoyed the answer to that question.

If you want to send me your own question, what we are going to do is, we’ve set up a page where you can submit your voicemails. What you’re going to do is, go to runnersconnect.net/daily and when you go to that page, about maybe a quarter of the way down and then at the bottom page, there’ll be a big button that’s going to ask you to record your voicemails. All you do is click that button. It will open up a pop up dialogue and then from there, you can record your voicemail. In future episodes, after we get started, we’ll be taking that voicemail and adding it to the audio of this podcast, so we can here directly from our listeners.

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