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- Whether you're new to running
or you're an old hand at it,
you've probably heard people talking about cadence.
Cadence is basically the amount of strides
that you're taking per minute.
And it does seem to be a topic that's open to debate.
- Indeed, a large proportion of amateur athletes
have a slow run cadence, and therefore
taking fewer strides per minute.
But research does suggest that if we want to run faster
then we would striving to have a higher cadence
and therefore more strides per minute.
- Yeah, however, as triathletes,
we've obviously swam, and cycled already
so it's going to effect your cadence.
It's not the same as running on fresh legs.
So with that in mind, we're gonna be taking a look
at the ideal cadence for triathletes.
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- Cadence, also referred to as stride rate,
is the number of steps that a runner takes per minute.
The most common target that you'll see referred to
is 90, or that is 180 taking in
both feet hitting the ground.
- Yeah, well that actually comes from research that was done
in the 1984 LA Olympics,
where those elite distance runners were seen
to be doing around 90 strides per minute.
And some of them even as high as 100.
- Running with a higher cadence
means more than just moving our feet faster,
it changes the position of where our feet land
underneath us.
So rather than having a foot stride
that lands way out in front of our hips,
when you have a higher cadence, it lands underneath us
and under our centre of gravity.
- Yeah, and obviously, you're going to be spending
less time in the air if you're moving your feet quicker,
so that means you're going to be
landing on the ground with less impact.
And talking about foot placement,
If you do have a tendency to over stride,
you're gonna be naturally putting in a bit of a brake
as you land on your heels.
So it just prevents that happening as well.
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- Recent studies have shown that cadence
is certainly not a one size fits all.
In fact, our cadence is effected by a number of factors,
our height, our weight, running ability,
and of course, running off the bike.
- Yeah, and the optimal cadence that we talk about
is really for your race pace.
So if you're doing an easy run,
it's okay to have a lower cadence
than you'll see the elite runners do as well.
But you've probably run at the same cadence
for your race pace for years,
for the whole time that you've been racing,
and you'll find to change that, even a tiny bit,
will feel really dramatic,
but if you can increase it, even just ever so slightly,
it will have quite a significant impact
on your running efficiency.
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- You can work out your strides per minute
by simply counting the number of left foot strikes
or right foot in a minute and that is our cadence.
- Yeah, or you can use a watch,
some will even show you your cadence live, like this one,
so as you're running along, if you glance down
and see how your cadence is being effected
and then obviously you can download all that data
and analyse it afterwards to see how your cadence varied
running at different paces.
- And now that you've got that number,
that is the cadence that you can aspire to changing
in different types of run sessions.
And ideally, we want to take that number
and increase it by five to 10%.
Now obviously if you've got a lovely smart watch
like Heather, then that's brilliant,
but if you don't, don't panic.
You can just take section of road
that's say, between two trees, two lamp posts,
something you can measure and go and hit that at your pace
and then do it again but with an additional increase
in cadence and see what your number is.
And if you can hit that increase in 10%.
- Yeah, and it's also worth taking into consideration
how your cycling beforehand effects your running.
So in a race situation, try to up your cadence
a little bit on the bike, and you will find
that that has a positive effect on your running cadence.
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So 90 strides per minute might be that ideal target,
and it's great to have something to strive for,
but don't get hung up on it
because there are so many other factors
that can effect your cadence.
For example, how long your legs are,
the speed you're running at,
and the distance that you're running as well.
- And we're also running off the bike.
And we could be hours after having started the race
at that point, so there's clearly gonna be
an element of fatigue.
That being said, this could be the ideal time
to try and focus on our run cadence to try
and make sure we don't go into
that slow and laboured run style.
- Yeah, well, hopefully you've enjoyed this.
Hit the thumb up button if you have.
And to subscribe to make sure you don't miss any more
of our videos at GTN, just hit the globe.
And if you want to see an experiment
that we did looking at how changing your cycling cadence
can actually effect your running cadence,
that video is just here.
- And if you want to look at the video
that's done about how to improve your run cadence,
click here.