How To Improve Your Running Cadence

When I first started running my cadence was about 157 spm where it remained for about 2 years. I made a conscious effort to increase it primarily to prevent injury as my mileage increased as I’m quite heavy. I average about 170 now on most runs and nearer 180 during speed work. I think it’s helped to prevent injury and I feel quicker but that may be from just running more and being fitter. I do think it’s worth considering if your cadence is quite low and you are prone to injury.

I've been asked by other runners about how to increase cadence, and now I can point them to this video! I think it's useful initially to say that you take smaller more frequent strides to increase cadence, but ultimately I don't think cadence and stride length are related. If you keep stride length the same while increasing cadence, you run faster. This is what I always want to tell even quite experienced but low cadence runners...just add in more steps and you could run so much faster!

I've been an ocassional runner for many years but this year I want to do it seriously. I discovered the importance of cadece (thanks to your channel), as per my apple watch all these years my cadence has been around 145 spm which is incredibly low. Last run I tried to bring it up to 160spm and it was a big difference! I struggled a lot to keep the pace but I inevitably ended up running faster without feeling as tired as those km per minute use to make me feel, and first time ever I didn't feel plantar pain, nor calves pain. In the downside, I have hammered toes so I ended up with a couple blisters in my toes and a black nail... will keep improving.

Excellent work guys and enjoy all your videos . Well done

I've started to increase my cadence to approx 180-190 for the last 2-3 weeks. I'm running so much faster now. Thanks for such a great tip 😊👍😊

My running cadence varies from 177 to 190. It’s working 🙌🏻

Definitely agree on the posture point and general form as the focus. Increased cadence should then be the outcome of that. Can be counterproductive if people focus just on cadence as their form can get worse and less efficient. They end up just picking the legs up and way overusing hip flexors or hamstrings and losing all natural dynamic and elastic movement and quickly becomes a muscle dominant shuffle that ends up using more energy. Shorter strides though probably good as you say for people reaching out and slamming heels into the ground. Guess it’s like everything, should form part of an overall holistic approach but not the sole focus.

I picked up running 4 months ago with some extra energy savings around my waste. Now I can run quite well at 209 bpm, which I discovered when "staying alive" came on the radio, I think my. 'natural' cadence is a bit lower, but still well above 180. I don't think everyone runs at their personal most efficient cadence, because when you start running you simply run at the cadence you can maintain for two minutes. Ifthat is a low cadence your muscles involved in moving up and down will get more efficient at doing that, and the muscles involved in moving your feet will get trained less, and with a high cadence it is the opposte. In both cases your cadence when running a marathon stays more or less the same as the one you started at in the beginning. My personal goal for the upcoming months is doing a lot of drills to reinforce muscles bones and tendons in order to be capable to run in both lower and higher cadences, hoping that at the end my legs will have the choice of picking the best cadence at the end.

During easy runs my cadence most of the time averages at around 178 spm (+-5). That actually feels uncomfy when running longer than an hour as my hips move so little given the small stride length. I was unsure whether to sacrifice some bpm to go faster with better bio mechanics but slightly approaching zone 3 periodically. I also tried to force a slower cadence, which immediately feels unnaturally, almost like baywatch beach running

Mine seems to be 176. I'm quite tall. As an experiment a ran 1km with consciously shorter steps and it did shave 10 seconds off my average pace but felt unnatural.

Such an important (and often overlooked) topic. Thanks guys!

When I was in my early teens, I experimented with cadence and stride length quite a lot. Stopwatch and measuring tape at the ready, I periodically measured my stride length at my best sustainable pace. From that I could calculate how many strides I expected to take in a race, divide that by my target time, and train to achieve that cadence. This sounds silly today, but we didn't have readily available resources about running technique back then, just a handful of creased magazines at the library, and it worked well enough for me. As I got more serious about track, I began to tape events on TV, and I would count the runners' steps with a watch going. For the middle distances, I found that the top women were typically right around 180 spm, and the men were a bit more variable but were mostly in the 180-200 range. And I was aiming for 240 spm at those distances! I thought, hmm, they must have done the same calculation as me. But that means they are taking huge steps! I came to a bad conclusion about how those athletes achieved that stride length, and committed to a form with severe over-striding. I believe that even though my times would initially suffer as I adjusted, they would eventually improve, because that's what the pros were doing. They never really did, of course, because it's not what the pros were doing. Decades later, I still run for fun, and I still record my best times each year in the same old notebook. A couple of years ago, I came across this channel, corrected my form, and started crushing my old times... even those from my teens and twenties! I wish you'd been around way back in my youth (I guess the show would have been on public access TV then). But I guess it's better late than never! Cheers!

I haven’t tended to pay much attention to my cadence - looking back at my activities, it tends to be around 170, up to 175 for a very fast Parkrun. Going to see if I can bring it up a little.

My cadence varies with pace. For recovery runs, I average 170-175, my normal easy runs are about 175-180, tempo workouts can be anywhere between 182 and 188, depending on what I'm doing (marathon pace, HM pace, threshold, etc) and 190-220 for all sorts of intervals and sprints (from 10k pace to all out sprints). Today, I averaged 193 in the 10k race, got a PB. As a short person, I work mainly with cadence because my stride length is limited with the short legs I have.

The Clip where Mo tries to heelstrike ist Gold. Even though he hits the ground with the heel first, he still perfectly hits under the body and not in Front. His Form is just to good

I am an injury magnet. I’m prone to severe acute shin splints every time I over exercise and my cadence averages around 152 as shown on Apple Watch. Anyway, I’m keen to try this out and see if increasing my cadence can help me with the shin splints. I had to back out from couple half marathons because of my injury and I’m really afraid to run now.

question: how does increasing cadence while at a slower pace help you run faster with the same cadence rate?

recently becoming a big fan of Shane Benzie, who's got a slightly different take on this (especially around vertical oscillation and impact), and is worth checking out.

I've only been running for a few years but my cadence is freakishly stable at 180 unless I'm doing speed intervals. Regardless of speed or distance, the pace graph on my Coros watch is just a VERY flat line (with a couple of dips where I get a drink or stop at a light). So, basically, my speed is determined almost entirely by stride length. I have no idea why this is the case, although I'm a musician and when I first started running, I'd run with a 180bpm soundtrack.

Great vid. A bit random but could you do a review of the latest garmin hrm fit that was just released, the one that's connected to the sports bra? I haven't got a hrm band as I didn't want something else to put pressure on my chest, just saw this new one and thought it would be nice to actually have bra wearers reviewing it. Thanks!