Chasing a cadence number is how runners get hurt

Step rate is largely set by your body and your speed, so forcing it toward a number borrowed from elites usually backfires.

One hundred and eighty steps a minute. It became gospel from a count taken at a distance championship, at race pace, among people whose limbs and speeds have very little in common with a club runner jogging on a Sunday.

Step rate is not a free parameter. It emerges from leg length, from speed, from how much force you can put into the ground, and it scales with pace almost automatically. Run faster and it rises. It rises on its own, without being told to. Which means a target number, applied at every speed, is asking a runner to hold their fastest rhythm while moving slowly, and that is not efficient, it is just busy.

There is a real finding underneath the myth, and it is worth keeping. Runners who overstride, landing with the foot well ahead of the body and the knee locked, take a bigger impact and load the knee more. Increasing step rate slightly, five to ten per cent, tends to pull the foot back under the hips and reduce that. Slightly. For runners who overstride. That is a targeted intervention for a specific fault, not a universal law, and somewhere between the research and the watch it turned into one.

What I see now is the opposite failure. Runners with a perfectly reasonable stride shortening it, taking small choppy steps to satisfy a display, and shifting the load onto the calf and the achilles instead. They have not removed an injury risk. They have relocated it, and traded some economy for the privilege.

The watch is not measuring anything wrong. It is reporting a number faithfully and offering no context, and a number with a colour-coded target next to it becomes an instruction whether or not anyone intended that.

Here is the test I would use instead, and it costs nothing. Film yourself from the side at your normal easy pace. Look at where the foot lands relative to your hips. If it is roughly underneath you, your cadence is correct by definition, whatever it says.

If it is a foot in front, you do not have a cadence problem either. You have a strength problem, and no target number is going to solve it.