Running Cadence- It’s Important!
Hello and welcome to foot-free Friday! What the heck is that, you ask? Well, in my last post I went into great detail about my visit to the podiatrist, his diagnosis, upcoming treatment, and even included some medical diagrams! After all that, I promised to talk about something OTHER THAN my foot today. And I am! But first… I’ll just mention that the doctor said I could run during treatment, as long as I don’t go too far (he recommended 3-5 miles.) I also can’t run too fast- he didn’t say that, but my foot has said it, repeatedly. So… I can’t work on distance or speed- seems like the perfect time to work on… FORM. Working on running form is tricky. When things are going well, I feel invincible and that my form must be perfect (eye roll.) When I get injured, I realize my form needs work but it’s impossible to work on form when you can’t run. Now that I’m in this no-man’s land of not injured but not really well either, it seems like the perfect time. Rewind to August when I drove my son to college. One morning I ran on the hotel treadmill, which was positioned right in front of a mirror. This was HIGHLY INSTRUCTIVE. I already knew my feet cross over my midline in front of me, which is not good. As I ran on the treadmill, it was obvious they were crossing over. First I tried to tell myself “don’t cross over.” Not surprisingly, this did nothing. I knew that our minds don’t respond well to negative commands. So then I tried thinking “knees straight ahead.” Interestingly, this also had NO EFFECT. I would imagine that by trying to run with my knees straight ahead, I was managing to open up my hips a little (because it certainly felt like my feet were landing far apart) but in reality, it wasn’t enough to be visible. Since I was on the treadmill, I played around with pace (as one does) and discovered that increasing my pace did help a little. It was when I increased my cadence that I could finally see a difference in my form- my knees were pointing a little straighter ahead and my feet were crossing over a little less. Ever since then, I’ve paid more attention to my cadence. Your running cadence is simply the number of times your feet hit the ground in a given interval. The “ideal” cadence people shoot for is usually 180 steps per minute, although of course like anything else, there can be individual variations. This article does a good job of explaining cadence. “The quicker your stride rate, the ‘lighter’ your stride. By reducing your ground contact time, you are minimizing the amount of work your body needs to do for each foot strike, thereby reducing your risk of running injuries over time.” I would add that, the quicker your stride rate, the less time you have to make extraneous movements, like crossing over the midline. It forces your body to be efficient. The best way to work on cadence is to run to an actual beat, so I downloaded the free MetroTimer app on my phone. In Chi Running, Danny Dreyer recommends running with three steps per beat. In other words, if your goal is to run 180 steps per minute, you set the metronome to 60. That way you land right-left-right on one beat, and left-right-left on the next beat. You don’t want to land on the same foot every time there’s a beat, because you might subconsciously start to land more heavily on that side. Like any kind of work, you don’t want to go too crazy with it. You risk injury if you change too much all at once. It’s usually recommended to run short intervals at a slightly faster cadence than your norm. 56 was good for me- that would be a cadence of 168, and then every week or so you increase it slightly. So that’s what I’ve been up to! Inserting short intervals of cadence work into my runs. Do you ever work on cadence? Ever run with a metronome?