Hey, what's up everybody and welcome back to that triathlon show, the podcast presented by

Scientific Triathlon.com. I'm your host Michael and this is beginner tip 20 where I'll talk about

running cadence. Having a high enough running cadence is important for a couple of big reasons.

And the first one is that having a high running cadence or stride rate, steps per minute,

whatever you want to call it, is that it avoids over striding.

I don't really care about whether you hit the ground with a four foot strike, a midfoot strike or a

heel strike, point in case, meb heel strikes, but landing with your foot right underneath your hip,

your center of mass, that is important. It reduces the risk of injuries quite significantly. For example, there was a research

paper that was called Effects of Step Rate Manipulation on Joint Mechanics during Running,

and they found that by increasing your cadence by 5 to 10%, you can greatly reduce the amount of impact forces that go

through both your knee and your hip joints for example and overstriding is also a bit like

running with your brakes on so you can just simply think about it like if you have your leg go out in front of you and you land,

then a force from the ground is going to come back through the leg

and it will basically stop you from using the momentum to go forward

as quickly as you could otherwise have.

So both in terms of avoiding injury and going faster,

you want to avoid over striding and having a high enough cadence is key to that.

You simply cannot over the stride if your cadence is high enough enough.

And as I said, 5 to 10% increase in cadence for most runners seems to be achievable and beneficial, both for performance

and for reduction of injury risk standpoints. So let's go to the second reason. It's related to

the performance that I already mentioned through over striding, but another factor that comes into how fast you run how

good you perform on the run is that your running economy can improve with a higher cadence since

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