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Is 180 steps a minute the right cadence?

The number came from counting Olympic finalists, and it is standing in for something you can measure directly.

The figure is usually traced back to the coach and physiologist Jack Daniels, who counted the steps of distance runners at the 1984 Olympics and found nearly all of them at or above 180 steps a minute. It has been repeated so many times since that it now gets handed to fourteen-year-olds as a target, and to injured adults as a prescription.

What the observation actually was

It was a count of finalists at an Olympic Games. Every one of those athletes was small, light, extremely fit and running very fast. Cadence rises with speed for everybody, so a number taken at their race pace is not a number that means anything at your Tuesday easy pace. Taller runners with longer levers turn over more slowly at the same speed, and always have.

It also gets the direction of the arrow backwards. Those runners were not fast because they took 180 steps a minute. They took 180 steps a minute because they were fast and were not reaching out in front of themselves to do it.

What people are really trying to fix

Almost always the same thing: a foot landing too far ahead of the hips. That is a genuine problem (it brakes on every single step and loads the joints in a way nobody enjoys), and raising cadence does help, because taking more steps at the same speed leaves less room to reach.

But cadence is a proxy. If you get somebody to 180 by having them take shorter, choppier steps while still reaching out in front, you have made them work harder for the same result. The thing worth changing is where the foot lands, and cadence is only ever an indirect way of getting at it.

So measure the thing, not the proxy

• Where the foot lands relative to the hips at contact, the fault itself.
• Trunk lean, and whether it comes from the ankles or is a fold at the waist, because a folded runner reaches by default.
• Knee fold on recovery, which is what makes a quick turnover cheap instead of expensive.

The Film Room's sprint setting reports all three from one side-on clip, against the ranges it holds: overstride as the distance the foot lands ahead of the hips, trunk lean against a 0 to 20 degree range, elbow angle against the usual 90, plus knee fold and extension. When the strike point is out in front it sends you to A-marches into A-skips and to a wall drill held in position, which are the two standard remedies and both of them work on landing under the hip rather than on step count.

Being straight about it: the Film Room does not count your cadence. There is no steps-per-minute readout, and if that number is what you want, a watch or a metronome app will give it to you for free and do it better. What this measures is the thing the number was a stand-in for.

Which is the more useful answer to the original question anyway. 180 is not a target. It is a symptom of running well, and symptoms are worth watching but not worth chasing.

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