It starts with paying attention to your running cadence. For those of you who don’t know, cadence is measured by the number of steps taken in a minute.
So why am I talking to you about running cadence?
Recent studies have shown that by increasing your running cadence, you significantly reduce ground reaction forces acting on the joints of the lower limb, decrease chance of over striding (as explained in the previous newsletter), as well as facilitate forefoot landing which has been linked to improved health of knee and hip joints. Hence increasing your running cadence lowers your chance of experiencing running related injuries, which is exactly what every runner wants to hear.
How fast your cadence should be is a subject of debate amongst researchers. A few years back, a famous running coach conducted an observation study assessing over 3500 runners. What he found was that majority of successful professional runners sustained a cadence of 180bpm or greater during races. Research has since shown that running at 180bpm significantly reduces the rate of injury in runners.
if you are finding increasing your cadence to 180bpm very difficult there was another research group that has shown that even by increasing your running cadence by 10% will already significantly decrease rate of injury in recreational runners.
So are you wondering how to increase your running cadence?
Below is a video demonstrating several running drills that will help increase your cadence, each varying in level of difficulty.
Go to the video on our Facebook page.