Spoke and Sole

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Welcome to Spoke and Sole, a community built around two things that keep us moving, cycling and running. Whether you're chasing miles, hitting new routes, or just out there for the love of it, you have found your crew. We're here to share stories, tips, and anything that keeps us motivated. So lace up, clip in, and let's get moving with your hosts.

After a hard week of training, when you look at your workout data, you're probably focused on your average speed and your heart rate. However, there is a hidden metric that's quietly deciding just how long your joints are gonna last. It's your cadence. And if you let your body just settle into whatever rhythm feels natural, you just might be saving your lungs today at the sake of your knees, shins, and tendons. Your rhythm dictates your stress.

And if you don't know how to manipulate that dial, you're leaving performance on the table and putting your durability at risk. Welcome back to Spoke and Sole, home of the essential athlete. I'm Terrance, here for another solo sprint. And today, we're talking all about cadence. We're going to break down the physics of stride frequency on the pavement and then switch over to the dynamics of revolutions per minute in the saddle.

We'll look to show you how altering your rhythm can shift the mechanical burden off your joints and onto your cardiovascular system. So lace up, clip in, let's get into it. In the running world, the number that gets thrown around in terms of stride frequency, whether it be in magazines, coaching forums, you name it, is 180 steps per minute. Your stride frequency is the number of times your feet hit the pavement in one minute. While you don't need to hit that number perfectly, the science behind it is absolute.

Most recreational runners settle into a heavier, slower cadence somewhere around that 150 to 160 steps per minute. When your feet move that slowly, the only way to maintain your speed is to take massive bounding leaps. This forces you to overstride, throwing your feet far out in front of your body. Every time that heel hits the pavement, you send a massive shock up your heel, through your shin, and directly into your kneecap. You're essentially fighting your own momentum every step you take.

So how do you solve this? You simply just need to increase your cadence by five to 10%. If you're at 160, try to shoot for somewhere around 172. By taking shorter, quicker steps, your feet lands directly underneath your hips. By keeping your feet moving quickly under your center of gravity, you're converting that force into momentum as opposed to a jarring brake force.

You essentially transform your running stride from a series of bone crushing impacts into a continuous wheel of cardiovascular power. However, even with the best stride efficiency, at some point, injury will creep in. When this happens, you don't need to throw in the towel. You just need to use that cadence as your rehabilitation tool. Let me explain what I mean.

If you're dealing with a mild rhythm induced sprain, intentionally cut your distance back. Spend the next few outings just focusing on light rhythm work. Shorten your stride even further and focus on ultralight foot strikes, allowing for your lower body to get a bit of rest from all the impact. Pair that light footwork with some slow calf drops off a step to restore elasticity to that part of your legs. This allows your cardiovascular engine to carry the burden while your legs and other parts of your lower body get a chance to actually rest and heal.

Now that we've covered cadence on the running side, let's switch over to cycling. In cycling, the cadence conversation changes completely. The focus shifts from the ground and transfers to the chain ring on the bike. Additionally, the issue here is not gravity, it's more or less torque. Once you're on the bike, your cadence isn't measured in steps.

It's measured in RPMs or revolutions per minute. And the real battle here is a trade off between your muscles and your lungs. When a beginner or intermediate cyclist gets in a headwind or a steep incline, their natural instinct is to continue in the gear that they're in and mash at a pace of between sixty and seventy revolutions per minute, which puts a massive amount of strain on your legs. And this is because your breathing is easier, and that's due to your heart rate remaining relatively low. But pushing in that massive gear requires a lot of muscle force.

Every time you push down in low cadence, you're putting a massive amount of sheer force on the tendon directly below your kneecap. In that scenario, you're treating your bike like a leg press, and ultimately your tendons are gonna pay the price for that. The prevention strategy for the bike doesn't happen while you're out on the road. As I mentioned in the previous episode, a professional bike fit is the baseline to ensure that your legs can extend cleanly while on the bike. But once your geometry is locked in, you have to follow-up with a conscious effort to actually spin.

You wanna try to get to the point where you train your neurological system to spin between ninety and ninety five revolutions per minute. When you drop down a gear or two and spin faster, you instantly cut the muscle force required for each stroke in half. Additionally, prioritizing a higher spin over heavier mass, you're transferring that mechanical workload off your legs over to your heart and lungs, allowing for a much more fluid spin and taking all of that massive pressure off the cartilage surrounding your knee area. But just as with the run, even when you're completely dialed in on the bike, pushing a massive gear or a misstroke of the shifters can actually put you in a situation where you do end up injuring one of the tendons just around that knee area. But again, when something like this happens, you don't need to banish yourself to the couch.

You just need to adapt. If you're out there riding and you start to feel that familiar pain, your recovery begins right at your gears. Intentionally, drop your gears down and force yourself to spin at a higher rate, Somewhere between that 95 to a 100 RPMs. You want almost no resistance. Yeah.

It might feel like your legs are flailing at first, and your heart rate is going to increase. But the goal is to transfer that load from your legs onto, again, your lungs and your cardiovascular system. This keeps the legs moving fluidly, it allows you to get some blood flow into those tendons, and it keeps you engaged in keeping up that activity and the fitness that you've earned throughout the course of your training. When you look at the big picture, your training isn't just about the miles you cover. It's about the rhythm in which you cover those miles.

Runners need to speed up their feet and transform those heavy strides into a fluid forward momentum. Cyclists need to shift their gears to spin faster to protect their knees from that high torque that can cause pain. In short, when you control your cadence, you control your durability. That concludes today's episode. Until next time, keep those wheels spinning and those feet moving.

We'll see you on the road.