Cadence: Injury Prevention Update

 It's been a little over six months since I took all of March off to attempt to heal from an injury. I wrote in a previous post about some things I've done to reduce to risk of injury. You can read about it here.

The one thing I didn't mention in that post that I'm also doing to prevent injury is increasing my running cadence. Like many things involving the human body, there's not solid evidence that increased stride rate helps reduce injury risk, but there are some studies that indicate it might. You can read about stride rate and injury prevention from a couple perspectives (How to Prevent Injury by Improving Run Cadence by Laura Norris from the Runkeeper website and Does Running Cadence Predict Injury by Alex Hutchinson from Runner's World).  

The lowdown on cadence is mixed with some studies suggesting that increasing stride rate may help prevent injury and some studies showing that there is no significant distance. From what I've read, I decided that increasing my stride rate may be helpful.

In the "How to Prevent Injury by Improving Run Cadence," Norris suggests that rather than working to a magic number, one should increase stride rate incrementally by 5%. Then, if that runner is staying healthy, she or he can increase cadence again if they desire.

Read the Runkeeper article above for how to set up tracking and setting a desired stride rate. If you don't have a smart watch or app on your phone that tracks stride rate, you can simply count your steps for a minute several times during a run to calculate your stride rate. Be aware that stride rate changes depending on how fast you are running.

I worked on increasing my stride rate with the help of Maelz Sport. I like the app's simplicity and the fact that it will keep beeping when listening to a podcast or recorded book.

I've successfully increase my stride rate by 3 - 5 % depending on the run. My stride rate was fairly high to begin with, so I didn't see a need to try and increase it more than that.

So, if you're frequently injured I'd say that as long as you increase your stride rate slowly it may be worth a shot to see if you can reduce your injuries.

Run well.