A question about cadence.

[Curlygurly2]

Can anyone help me with this please? If your running music has, say, 165 beats per minute, will your cadence be 165 steps per minute?

[Flossie22 Graduate]

Have you tried looking at jog.fm? If you put in your pace per km, it comes up with lots of music you can run to that fits your steps per minute. I haven't been able to use it yet, but have put together a lot of music that fits my supposed pace!

[Curlygurly2 Graduate in reply to Flossie22]

Thanks but that's not what I'm asking. A friend says BPM will not equal the same cadence, I want to know if she's right or not.

[Irish-John Graduate in reply to Curlygurly2]

Good question! Logically I would think that at the very least your cadence would synchronise with the BPM - you might not be going 'footfall per beat' but maybe 'two beats per footfall' or something like that? Never ceases to amaze me though how the right track can give you a massive energy boost

[Curlygurly2 Graduate in reply to Irish-John]

Gawd, that would be way too fast! If you run to music of 168, can you imagine two steps per BPM lol!

[Irish-John Graduate in reply to Curlygurly2]

Two beats per footfall would be running at half cadence though Think of all those Dril cadences - notably in 'An Officer and a Gentleman' - 'I don't know but I've been told etc "

[RainbowC Graduate]

I think I'd understood that cadence = bpm (or if the music is 80bpm, cadence would be more likely to be 160 steps/min) - so I suppose it's not necessarily the same, but there'll be a direct relationship between the two.

Hope that makes sense...

[RainbowC Graduate]

Just to add to that... fellrnr.com/wiki/Cadence

[Millsie-J Graduate]

Type in link between cadence and beats per minute, there are quite a few sites! It's all a bit confusing so I think plenty of reading around the subject is required😃

[agedsnailspace Graduate]

This all assumes that you ARE running to the beat... if you aren't, there won'the be any correlation.

[Millsie-J Graduate]

So from what i can see cadence = bmp, also known as steps per minute. Presuming you are hitting the beat! It does not indicate speed, to do that you also need to factor in stride length. So if you have little legs like me (sob sob) you may run at same cadence as someone with loooooong legs, but who-ever has the longest stride will cover more ground per stride so move quicker!

Marvellous what you can learn from this running mularky. I now know i need to increase cadence and lengthen my stride to help improve my pace🏃🏻‍♀️😀

[Tomas Graduate]

When I was running to a metronome I got he exact same running cadence as the metronome's bpm.

[Curlygurly2 Graduate in reply to Tomas]

Thank you Tomas, it was silly Kat who said she uses music with 155 BPM to get a cadence of 168....

[Tomas Graduate in reply to Curlygurly2]

Maybe she has even less sense of rhythm than I have (hard to believe... I carry around a police citation forbidding me to get within 150 yards of any dance floor)

[Irishprincess Graduate]

Does your Garmin give cadence? Mine does so I can always test this for you. I'll pick a beat with a certain cadence and run to it and then see what the Garmin says.

[Curlygurly2 Graduate in reply to Irishprincess]

No it doesn't, I wish now I'd got one of those! That would be really kind thank you!

[Millsie-J Graduate in reply to Curlygurly2]

The link that RainbowC posted above tells you how to work out your current cadence. I believe you can search most music sites for beats per minute. If you know what cadence you have now you can stretch by downloading music with a (slightly) faster beat. Happy running!

[Curlygurly2 Graduate in reply to Millsie-J]

I got some of the Audiofuel stuff, my music player can vary the speed of the music, I'm going to increase slowly till I get to 180 if I can. I've got a metronome too, but that's a bit boring.

[Irishprincess Graduate in reply to Curlygurly2]

Curlygurly2 I tried this and can say it worked. I ran to Tusk by Fleetwood Mac which is 180 bpm and has a good strong audible beat to it and it was easy to follow in footstrike. In fact my footstrike was spot on (and a lot of fun!).

My Garmin gave me a cadence of 179 and I think it wasn't 180 because I wanted to run a full kilometer at this pace and needed to repeat the track and so was faffing around with my iPod half way which probably slowed me down a bit.

But I've tried a couple more tracks and it was pretty accurate with the Garmin. But you do have to have an audible beat that you can pick up and run to. With some tracks it's not that easy to get the beat.

[Curlygurly2 Graduate in reply to Irishprincess]

Thank you IP! I can only wonder what my friend was thinking, unless she has absolutely no sense of rhythm! Maybe she just made a mistake... thanks again for clearing that up, most music that's meant for running at a certain cadence does seem to have a clear beat, I got a few from Rock My Run before they changed, these days you have to use the app, a shame because they were good!

[Irishprincess Graduate in reply to Curlygurly2]

I guess they measure the beat of music electronically nowadays so our job is just to follow it!