|| Clinic
CLINIC
Will increasing your step rate reduce your knee pain? We look at how cadence may affect injury
YOUR EXPERT
Sports Injury Fix Health member Dan Morris is a Graduate Sport Rehabilitator (GSR). He lectures at Wrexham Glyndwr University on their new BASRaT accredited BSc Sports Injury Rehabilitation programme. Dan has a passion for running related injuries which have been a large proportion of his clinical work and the topic of both his undergraduate and post graduate research (sportsinjuryfi x.com)
Cadence is quite simply the total number of steps we take per minute. Our pace is dictated by both this and our stride length. Hitting 180 beats per minute has been seen as a magical figure for cadence in the past, but it’s a bit of a generalisation. Elite runners, for example, will have a higher step rate than recreational runners, and the strategy will vary from one runner to the next.
Research has shown that humans are good at optimising their cadence over time to minimise the physical effort of running so if you are running comfortably and pain free, you may not want to be overly conscious of it.