Which Improved as you got Faster . Cadence or Stride Length?

Burnsy - Great info on an interesting study.

I've always taken it as a given that cadence doesn't vary much person to person and your body will settle into the most efficient cadence for what the athlete is doing. Also, that stride length is a function of the rate of speed and force put into the ground - just physics. Athlete gets stronger, runs faster and the stride length is naturally longer as the force against the ground has increased due to all of the improvements that come from training: aerobic efficiency, muscle strength, etc. I know your post didn't suggest it, but the idea that we can be better runners by increasing stride length is bass-ackwards. Stride length is the result of better running. If you have a high school kid that decides to increase speed by increasing stride length, then you have an injured kid.

That makes sense compared to my anecdotal experience. I was also going to throw in (unscientifically) the suggestion that cadence seems like it has less percentage room to improve overall than stride length (so thank you Burnsy for making it with real numbers and pointing out the difference isn't 'more or less important').

Rockz wrote:

Cadence should stay relatively stable and your stride length will determine your speed

Only reason i've ever heard from people over focusing on cadence and trying to get it as high as possible will generally then lower their stride and just do it due to injuries as the shorter quicker stride is often better on their specific injury

Too many assumptions.

Speed is related to stride length and stride speed.

Two slow / fast or too long / short and you don't get any faster.

There is no really simple answer here. Your foot should hit the ground just a little ahead of your center of gravity. If you haven't got the calf strength to stay on your toes, then your hips will drop, and stride length will suffer. Stride length is impacted by leg speed - on your toes, and keeping your hips high.

You aren't throwing your feet out front when you lengthen stride, you are keeping your hips high and moving across the ground faster, getting your foot down in front fast enough to keep the momentum going. All while staying on your toes and then driving off the back foot. Running fast is a single support phase. Most of you joggers are double support phase people.

Cadence is only about recovery and getting your foot down again. Keeping hips high means you cover a greater distance, if you are powerful enough in the drive phase. Your arms come into that more than you like.

The guy who is a great example right now is donavan brazier. Watch him come off the last turn in his recent 3:35 1500. Its all there

air time wrote:

What you really need to work on is air time. Think about it.

Your jest is actually the truth. The gravitational constant at Earth's surface sets your cadence based on how high you go.

Nearly all runners have cadence somewhere around 180 up to the level of elite mile (before the kick) then 800 runners elevate it above 200 and the nimbler 100 sprinters up to 300.

The reason sprinters need higher cadence is simple. To hold a high top speed, your foot when it strikes has to be going backward relative to you at the same speed the track is. If that speed is 20mph, it's going to cycle through its entire range of motion quicker than .67 seconds, unless you're 7 feet tall or something.

Nice to see this forum being used to talk about something running-related and a genuinely good question. Personally, improvements in my cadence occurred first, as I consciously focused on upping my stride rate (partially because I'm a short guy, so trying to increase stride length often resulted in overextending and hurting myself), and once I'd gotten to a baseline of 180 steps per minute, I noticed my actual stride length got longer the faster I went.

According to you a hummingbird hovering for an hour would find itself a thousand miles away when it landed to rest.

MAG_1962 wrote:

My thinking is to work on hip/glute strength and mobility. Cadence and stride length are outcomes of hip and glute mobility and strength.

This is well said. As a younger athlete, I assumed ignorantly that running form was predestined. When I got in my late 30s I decided to focus on strides to maintain my speed as I got older. Low and behold, my running got a lot better. My overall cadence quickened even on very easy runs as I did them consistently. I tended to over stride when I was younger and "reach" for my stride. I began to focus on good form, good cadence and managed to hold off almost any decline through my 40s.

But cadence and stride length work together. I am 6'0" and tend to have slower cadence than a 5'5" runner. It's physics. But increasing by 5 SPM was a drastic difference in overall pace and left me less tired than a speed increase based on stride length. Increasing stride length means more power per stride and is a higher energy cost.

Mine tend to go hand in hand: Faster running = greater cadence AND stride length. Jogging I might be doing 165 SPM, racing is is up to 190 (800m). Cadence goes up and down with speed.

Elite athletes do this too. Watch the last lap of a world class race vs the early laps. Watch a video of a world class athlete out for a jog. Their cadence is NOT 180 all the time and their stride length changes too.

I fear this is devolving towards foot speed, leg speed, basic speed, raw speed territory. If any of those terms excited you, please no.

So, what I'm hearing is that when an person runs different paces, their cadence AND stride length co-vary. You have a graph pre-training of your personal cadence and stride length at all paces. The question is, does training move you along that graph for a given race, or does it move the graph itself? Or if both, which more so? And, is there a pattern, or does it depend on the person?

Asdfasd wrote:

I fear this is devolving towards foot speed, leg speed, basic speed, raw speed territory. If any of those terms excited you, please no.

So, what I'm hearing is that when an person runs different paces, their cadence AND stride length co-vary. You have a graph pre-training of your personal cadence and stride length at all paces. The question is, does training move you along that graph for a given race, or does it move the graph itself? Or if both, which more so? And, is there a pattern, or does it depend on the person?

Ok I just read the rest of the post on the previous page and all of this was explained already. My b.

Thanks for the really great answer Burnsy. Also Wish you the very best towards your interesting research endeavors .

If stride length and cadence doesn't vary between the different groups with relation to a given running speed , i guess apparently it will all come down to finding out accurately the factors that plays the main role to maintain an elite speed . I suppose things like resting Heart rate, breathing efficiency whilst running , Optimum Muscles/Tendons strength will be some of the vital ones . But that's another topic again.

I'm not sure if it's still being pushed now, but improving cadence seemed to be a big focus from some of the running technique gurus. They suggested that most people seeking to improve in running had a cadence significantly lower than the ideal 180 range, and they should focus on increasing their cadence gradually, perhaps several steps/minute, over a course of a few weeks, by using a metronome while running. I'm not sure if anyone on the boards tried this and found it helpful. I tried it myself a number of years ago (was below 170 on marathon pace runs) and found it felt very unnatural and somewhat awkward to consciously go at 180.

Rockz wrote:

Cadence should stay relatively stable and your stride length will determine your speed

Only reason i've ever heard from people over focusing on cadence and trying to get it as high as possible will generally then lower their stride and just do it due to injuries as the shorter quicker stride is often better on their specific injury

+1 to this. Several old fart runners I know intentionally increased their cadence, some of them significantly (one guy from the upper 170s to now 195-200 at easy pace) to curtail chronic injuries. Seems to have worked but I can't imagine increasing it that much.

air time wrote:

What you really need to work on is air time. Think about it. The earth is rotating under you at a thousand miles per hour. If you can just get off the ground, the earth's rotation does the work for you.

Minimize air time when running with the earth's rotation. Maximize it when running against. This will give you a much greater benefit than increasing stride length OR turnover.

P=mv

But only if you are running towards the west. If you run east, you're basically losing ground with every step.

zzzz wrote:

Stride length is what changes as you get fitter.

Cadence increases with effort mainly. For example if you were out of shape, you might jog at 170 spm, run at 180 spm, and race a mile at 200 spm. If you were in shape, you'd still jog at 170, run at 180, race a mile at 200, but the stride length and speed would be higher for each effort level.

This is easy to verify. Just compare fast runners with slow runners in the same events, and the cadences are about the same, whether you are looking at a pro running 3:50 in a mile or JV high school kid running 5:15.

Very good point on cadence being the same throughout different paces. For example, I’m 6 feet, 156, & my cadence is relatively low for the runs that I do. 7 flat pace is around 168 spm. My stride length something I really wanna work on! What’s your guys advice?

Strides, fast short intervals (150s, 200s), short 10-15 sec steep hill sprints.