Running cadence

Cadence rises with speed and tends to fall with height. Among 20 elites racing 100 km it ranged from 155 to 203 and dropped about 3 steps a minute per inch of height (Burns and colleagues, 2019); novices at their own easy speeds sit around 154 to 160 (van Oeveren and colleagues, 2017). Taller runners sit lower in these bands and shorter runners higher, and neither is a defect.

If your cadence is 162, nothing hurts, and your running feels smooth, there is nothing on this page for you to fix.

The figure comes from Jack Daniels, who counted the steps of distance runners racing at the 1984 Olympics and found almost all of them at 180 or above, as he describes in Daniels' Running Formula. The observation is real. The inference, that 180 is therefore a target for everyone, does not follow.

Those athletes were elite runners at race pace, most of them small and running close to 3:00/km. A 1.90m runner jogging at 6:30/km has no business at 180, and forcing it produces a stride so short it wastes energy.

What the research does support is narrower. Landing with the foot well ahead of the hip, which is what a very low cadence tends to produce, goes with bigger braking forces (Lieberman and colleagues, 2015), and raising step rate by 5% to 10% at the same speed cuts loading at the knee and hip (Heiderscheit and colleagues, 2011); a 10% rise cut peak kneecap force by 14% (Lenhart and colleagues, 2014). That is a case for nudging an outlier upward, not for everyone converging on one number. If the real goal is speed, the bigger levers are weekly volume and threshold work, not your step rate.

A stride is a short, controlled acceleration: build smoothly for about 5 seconds, hold near mile-race pace for about 10, ease off for 5, then walk or jog for 45 to 90 seconds until your breathing is genuinely back to normal. Four to six of them cost about five minutes and almost no fatigue, and every runner's step rate rises with speed, so they are the cheapest way to feel quick turnover.

Be honest about what they do, though. Twenty seconds twice a week lets you feel a quicker rhythm; it will not reset the pattern of your easy running. If your easy-pace cadence is genuinely low, the 5% method above is the fix, and strides are the supplement.

Four mistakes turn a stride into something with a real recovery cost: running it all-out (that is a sprint), cutting the recovery (that is an interval session), holding it past about 20 seconds, and doing it on tired legs, which rehearses exactly the form you were trying to leave behind. New to them? Two strides once a week for a fortnight, then four once a week, then four to six twice a week, which you can hold indefinitely.

Search running form and you get an eight-item checklist: relax your shoulders, look ahead, keep your hands loose, engage your core, land midfoot. Every item is accurate and almost none of it is usable, because at roughly 170 steps a minute nobody can monitor eight things. Two cues carry most of the benefit, and you only need one thought at the top of each kilometre to use them.

• Quicker, lighter steps. This is the cadence cue above, and it fixes several things at once: a slightly quicker step shortens the stride, brings the foot closer to under the hips and cuts the braking force at each landing. You never have to think about your feet.
• Run tall. Most form collapse is postural. As you tire, the hips drop and the torso folds at the waist, and the creeping shoulders, crossing arms and jutting head all follow from that rather than causing it. Running tall also leaves the diaphragm room to work, which is half of breathing well while running.

To check yours, film thirty seconds from the side at easy pace, near the end of a run when fatigue has set in. Look for two things only: is the foot landing well ahead of the hips, and is the torso folding at the waist? If neither, form is not what is holding you back. Most late-run form breakdown is fatigue and strength, which is why consistent easy volume and single-leg strength work do more for form than any cue.