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Using a metronome to measure and influence your running cadence can be very insightful and helpful exercise.
Finding A Metronome App
If you would like to practice using a metronome on your smart phone you may look for a musician’s metronome app. I am using one called ‘Metronome by Soundbrenner‘ which is available for Android and iPhone.
When using a musicians metronome app, you’ll need to set the type of tone (like setting the ring tone on your phone) so that you can hear it while running. Then set the ‘Time Signature’ to 2/2.
Adjust Cadence By Adjusting Form
Recall that the more you have good natural running mechanics in place, the more natural it will be to run with a faster cadence. And, in general, you are aiming for a cadence likely within the range of 170 to 180 beats per minute (bpm), or very close to that range.
Most (less-developed) runners are going along with a slow-than-suitable cadence and need to gradually work into faster cadence. But you shouldn’t try to force your cadence to instantly make big leaps faster. Faster cadence is a result of landing on the ball of the foot, placing that foot just under the center of mass (COM), and pulling the foot from the ground quickly rather than pushing off the ground – all of this results in a very low ground contact time, low ground reaction force, and very little vertical rise in the body.
First, Find Your Current Normal Cadence
The first exercise with a metronome is to find out what your current normal cadence is. So, get your metronome app set up and ready to play. Then you may toggle the beats-per-minute (bpm) dial to maybe 155 and see if that is even close to what you’re doing. Run for a bit and turn the toggle higher or lower by about 5 bpm each time until you feel like you are zeroing in on your comfortable (normal) cadence.
Cycle Through Focal Points
For your next exercise, before speeding up the cadence, you might stick with your current cadence for part of your practice time, to cycle through a set of focal points to see how much you can execute those at this cadence. Some focal points you may feel like you can do, while it becomes apparent that other focal points don’t work so well with this slower cadence. Once you start to discover those, that will urge you to start increasing cadence.
Make Small Incremental Changes
The range you eventually want to work towards is roughly 170 to 180. The closer you get to more natural form, the more your cadence will need to be in that zone to respond to it.
If you are more than 10 bpm away from that zone, then just work with a cadence that is no more than 5 bpm faster than your current normal one. In a single practice, this small increase in cadence may be challenging enough, and allow your body to make smaller adaptive shifts in how you are interacting with the ground and the forces flowing up into your body.
It is likely your body may need to spend 2 or 3 practice times at that slightly faster cadence before it is ready for another incremental increase. Be patient so that your small supporting and connective tissues have a chance to adapt to the shifts in how they are loaded as your forms shifts with cadence.
Where To Settle?
Your height, your leg-to-height ratio, your joint mobility, your body mass, and a few other factors might urge you to aim for the higher or the lower end of that 170-180 range. You might just find that your body just feels better at this particular cadence, so stay working with that until you receive some feedback that suggests your cadence should shift a bit more. (For example, Coach Mat has settled into about 182-184 bpm cadence and that feels good and trouble free for him).
You can certainly have a cadence that is too fast, so don’t go to extremes. Yet, keep it in mind that a slower cadence means more ground reaction force – the lighter, the faster your steps, the less force your body has to manage per step.
Habituating Cadence
Eventually, you train so much with good form that your cadence remains as stable as your form is. There’s a useful correlation between them. If you have a running data watch that tracks cadence you can monitor the connection.
Rather than running with a metronome all the time and then suddenly not using it, you can turn it on/off periodically to check how close your perception of cadence is to reality.
You can wean yourself off of a metronome by gradually reducing the % of the run you spend with the metronome on. You might run the first half of every mile with the metronome on, and the second half with it off. Or one minute on, one minute off.
Or just turn it on periodically to check. Every mile you might turn it on for one minute, then turn it off for the rest of the mile. Or check in at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end, when you are feeling tired.
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