Hello, how's it going in this video? We're going to talk about run cadence. So cadence while running. Now I want to tell you this about five or six years ago, I started to think about running cadence for myself, and it really changed the way that I run. And it was a really a game changer for me, everything, my run,

I was in the right mindset, that changed things. And it was, took me a long time to do this. So it wasn't easy. You had to work at it. But what I found was making that change really helped my running a lot. So pay attention to this one because it's important. And it's very, very simple. Like it's very,

very simple, but once you understand it, once you apply it, once you try it, you're going to go, well, first I go, Oh, this is, this is not right. This feels so wrong. But once you really get into it and you embrace it and you stick with it, you're going to find that, Whoa, Whoa,

Oh, look at this. You know, you're going to be doing some things that are gonna be surprising you. Well, that's what happened to me anyways. And I hope that it happens to you as well. Now, the first thing is, is what is cadence? Like? You know, we talk about cadence when we are biking. What is cadence

when we're running? Well, cadence is the number of steps taken per minute. It's also known as S P M. You need to make sure you know, what you're looking at. Is it RPM or S P M for years, I would have athletes. I'd tell them, okay, I want you to hold this cadence. And even on my watch,

I would look at it and the number that would show up was RPM our cadence was measured in RPM. So when I'm running the number was in revolutions per minute, and it wasn't steps per minute, you might be thinking, well, what's the difference? The difference is RPM. So how fast your legs going around is measuring one side of your body.

So one leg. Steps per minute is measuring both legs. Okay? So when you're looking at RPM, your number could be say its 80... right? So you're taking 80 steps per minute with one leg. Then when you look at steps per minute. That will be times two. So instead of being 80, you'll be 160. So oftentimes when you're looking at your watch,

depending on what watch you have and how it's measuring it, you might go, Whoa, what the heck is that number? So, first thing you need to figure out is, are you looking at RPM or SPM? So revolutions per minute or steps per minute? It's really very similar, but one's going to be twice as many. So if you look at the number and it's under a hundred,

you're looking at RPM. If you're looking at number over like 130 or over 130 or over 140, then you're looking at steps per minute. Okay. Now a quick question you may be asking him, well, what cadence should I be holding? So what I did is I looked at some of the best runners that we kind of are looking at right now in the world.

What are they doing? So just recently, Eliud Kipchoge from Kenya ran. I think he did the fastest marathon ever in Berlin. And I took a small clip of him from the, from YouTube. And I measured his cadence and his cadence was 180 steps per minute, which is 90 RPM. Now, what if you want to do this with other athletes or yourself,

how you do it is this. You take a clip of a runner and then you count one side. I do one side. It's just easier. You just keep the math easy. Right? And so I had, I had a clip of Eliud for 20 seconds and I counted one side of his, one side of his body, which was the left side.

And for 20 seconds, I made sure at the time was 20 and I counted. So every time his left foot hit the ground. One, two, three, four, five. He's pretty quick. Right? And so then when you get that number, because that took 20 seconds, I need to times it by three gives you a minute and that will be RPM.

Are you with me? Okay. So that would be...... Say his number was 30, 30 times three. Will give you 90. And that's RPM if you want it in steps per minute, you times it by two. So 90 times 2 is 180. I then looked at the best Ironman athletes. And so I looked at Patrick Lange and  Daniela Ryf.

And I took clips from their Ironman Hawaii race. And then I measured their cadence, and for Patrick Langer, I determined he's taking 93. He has a cadence of 93 RPM, which equates to 186 steps per minute. Okay. Daniela Ryf has a RPM of 87 RPM, which equates to 174 steps per minute. Okay. So that gives you an idea that the range is around like 85 to 95,

right? So Patrick Lang is on this end. Danielle Ryf is down here. She's 87. Patrick Lang was 93 and Eliud was right there at 90. So that's the window. When I am coaching people, I try to get them to be in a, in a window of 80 to, like 89, somewhere in there. If you're doing that, then you're doing pretty good.

I do have some athletes that are very short and they can be in the nineties, right? So they can have a very quick turnover. You're gonna find that the taller you are, cause you have a longer legs is difficult to get the RPM up. Now I remember when I was a running track and my coach was saying, you know, increase turnover,

increase turnover, increase turnover. And you try to go fast or try to go faster to try to go faster, but it just wouldn't work. And then one day I realized, you know what, in order for me to go get a higher cadence. So instead just trying to turn my legs over really, really fast. What I had to do was...... instead of having a stride length, like this, I shortened the star length, shorten the star length up, and it's easier to increase the cadence because you're not taking a really big stride like that through taking smaller steps. And that's what I want you to do as well. First thing I want you to do is figure out what your cadence is. Now. There's quite a few ways you can do that.

The easiest way, the easiest way is to if you've got your watch and if your watch measures it, turn on that feature and look at the data afterwards, going to your Training Peaks and look at what your average cadence is.  You don't even have to think, pull it up, look at it. It's done. If your watch doesn't do that, then you have to do some basic math.

And the basic math is this. You can count for a minute. You can count for 30 seconds, pick either of those.  Go for 30 seconds. And then when you're running count, every time your right leg hits the ground. So watch your watch pay attention to your watch until it comes to like zero. When it comes to the zero, start counting.

And keep counting until it comes to 30. And......., say if you count 30 foot strikes for 30 seconds, times by two, that give you an RPM of 60, which isn't really, really low, but it just an example. Okay? The other thing you can do is this. Any of you guys have this, this is a Finis Tempo Trainer and I highly recommend it.

And you turn it on, maybe the batteries dead, turn it on and you can set the cadence to what you want. But I think before we get to talking about how to change it, the best thing to talk about is how to measure it. And again, go out and count for 60 seconds or 30 seconds. Get your number or look at your data after the run.

So that will give you a starting point and you go, well, where am I? Now.... When I first started doing this for myself, I found that my, my RPM.  I'm gonna stick to RPM, cause I like RPM. My RPM was in the seventies. And then I was told, look, Todd, you need to try and get your RPM up to 85.

I'm like, Oh my gosh, I can't get to 85, 85 is just too fast. And then I was told, okay, not only do I want you to run 85, when you go fast, I want you to run 85 when you're going slow, when you're going medium and when you're going LSD. So you're holding 85 every time you're running.

I'm like, Whoa. And that just really was a, a really big change for me to think about. And I bet you, you're not doing that. So when you're running slow, well, first of all, you need to have multiple, multiple speeds. Some of you right now have like one speed and I get that. But for me I have multiple speeds.

And when I try to go slow, what I do is I just slow down my turnover. So I'm just nice and long and slow. But when I'm trying to keep 85 RPM, I'm going slow. That's a lot trickier. Now, how do I do that? I gotta take little steps, like little steps, but little fast steps, right?

By doing that, it trains me. So I'm training my body to run at 85. Right? So whether I'm going slow, at tempo speed, interval pace or  LSD, it doesn't matter. I'm holding that same cadence the same time now going up hills is a little bit tricky, but we'll talk about that in a different video.

Now, the first step is, get out there and measure cadence. And what is it? And then I want to see if it's below 80. We want to get that number up because remember the target that I want you to hit is between 80 to 89. If you're shorter, small legs, maybe in the nineties, the majority of us,

80 to 89.  For me, I go right in the middle. I go for 85.  I target 85. Now how, how do you increase that? Like how do you measure that when you're running? Well, I just found this out on my watch. I'm just going to turn on the watch. I'll have a Garmin 920xt yes

I know it's old, but it still does the trick. Now I, if I go into, hang on a sec, I made notes on this. My watch Garmin 920xt. I bet you, your watch may do it as well. It has a metronome feature. It's what I do is I go to activity settings, scroll down to metronome,

turn it on, enter the beats per min that I want. Right? And then go to alert. Frequency, go to Sounds. You can have tone vibration or both. I have tone on here. Listen to what happens when I start, start to run like a heartbeat just skipped a beat there. So you can hear that, right?

This is at 90. And when you hear this, every time it beeps beep your right leg is hitting the ground. Okay. This, I promise you will drive you crazy. It will!  But it will also make you a better runner. So it's like a short term craziness for a long time game. Okay? So that's one way you can do it is if you have a watch,

it has cadence and beeps or buzzes at you. You can put it on, it will drive you crazy. I promise it will. The other thing this watch can do too, is you can put it, you can put the numbers, so it pops up. And how you do that as you go to activity, settings, go to data screens,

the field number, cadence, fields.  And then enter cadence. So you can be running along. and one of the windows that you look at will have cadence. And it will, I don't know right now because I haven't used it. Whether it's going to be steps per minute or revolutions per minute, it's something I need to look at and see what it is.

So if it's, again, you know what I've talked about before, if it's less than a hundred.  You are at RPM, if it's over a hundred, like over 140, then you're at steps per minute. Okay. So just be aware of that. Your RPM will not be like over 110. That makes sense. Yeah. There are other ways you can do this as well.

And when I was doing this for the first time I had trouble doing it running. Changing my cadence outside, running. It was difficult. So what I did is I went on a treadmill and I got my kids. This is like a metronome for their music. Okay. I plugged in 90 and I stuck it on the treadmill. Okay. And then you just heard this,

right? And it's the same thing. Every time that a Beep goes, your right leg is hitting the ground. Okay. And again, this will drive you crazy. Again, short-term craziness. Long-term gain. Turn it off again. This is not a lot of money, but you still have to pay something for it. Do you need to?

If you have one, use it. If you don't, you probably don't need to use it. You probably don't need to buy it. This guy here is great for swimming as well. This is a Finis F I N I S tempo trainer. Now listen to this. I turn it on. So not only can use it for running, but you can use it for swimming as well.

Now I've already pre-programmed this to 90rpm. Okay. So you can take this, put it in your pocket. It has a little clip. You can clip it on and you're running. Right? So say, for example, if you know, your cadence is 75, right? So you're running 75. You okay. So Todd wants me to increase my cadence this week.

I'm gonna try and go 78, right? You go out and run 78 for a little bit to feel comfortable. You go, okay. I want to get up now to 79. So every week you want to gradually increase it as long as it feels good. So that naturally and gradually you get into the eighties and you have a quicker turnover, shorter strides,

always think you're shortening your stride as you're increasing your cadence. If you say Todd, I don't want to buy that either. I don't want to buy a metronome. I don't want to buy this. What else can you give me?  Well, you can go here. You go to your phone. We all have these smartphones now for me, what I have,

let's see where I put it. And I'm like you.  I don't need to pay for anything if I don't have to. All right. So we all have these go to the app store, search out metronome. This one is just basically called metronome. And it's kind of, I don't know if you can see that I'm going to swing it.

Okay. It's through my speaker anyways. Here's the idea. Okay. So that's 78 and say, you want to go a little quicker. So you want to go at, this is my favorite run. Pace for me is 85.  It's a little bit of skill involved. Alright, now I'm going to swing it. Yeah. And so it does take time for you to match your steps with this,

this noise. But again, it does help. And I do recommend you do that. Okay? It's going to feel really weird in the beginning. Like it does, it feels weird. It feels wrong. It feels like Todd, I'm taking too many steps. You're too small, but you're going to find that as you do this, you're going to get better and better.

The slower you are like the speed you go, when you're slow your strides, you're going to be your stride length is going to be quite small. Right. But then as you speed up, your cadence stays the same. Then your stride length increases. Now the idea is to keep it within that window of 80 to 89, somewhere in there,

you're going to find a cadence that really fits you best. Okay. So not, not below 80. So not over 90 except for a couple of people. So we should be right in that window. And 85, like I said, for me, it took me a long time to get comfortable running 85. But now when I go out,

I go in there right away. And this thing is cool. Like I said, you'll have it in your head and just goes, tick all the time. And it drives you crazy. You can even get music that has a certain RPM to it as well. So if you don't want to have this go out and search up music with a certain RPM and then you can run to that.

That's it? This video was all about run cadence. I want you now to go out there and measure your cadence and start increasing it or perhaps decreasing it. All right. This is coach Todd. Thank you very much. Oh, see you in the next video. Bye-bye.