What is a method you can use to alter your cadence when you have been recovering from a running injury? Well, that is what we’re talking about today on the Doc On The Run Podcast.
I was recently on a follow-up call with a runner who is recovering from a calcaneal stress fracture. And when you get a stress fracture, one of the bones in your feet, well, they’re all important, but the heel bone in particular is extremely important because you cannot stand, walk, run, anything without putting stress on the heel bone. But some things apply more stress than others.
For example, if you land as a heel striker, you land on the heel bone, it stands to reason that you’re applying more stress through the heel bone itself. And if you’re a heel striker, normally you got the stress fracture because you landed in the same way over and over and over. Now, this particular runner, her story was that she was doing really well, it was healing, it was getting better, her symptoms had decreased significantly.
I was walking her through this and I’d said that in her case, where she was in this phase of recovery, I thought that it would be useful for her to alter her form so that when she landed, she was not applying the same stress in the same way, but instead would land as a forefoot striker or midfoot striker to spread out those forces differently. What we talked about was increasing her cadence. And she asked me specifically, what was the difference between pace and cadence and all these terms that are so commonly used by runners and thrown around, and she wanted to be absolutely clear on what they were.
It is very simple, speed and distance, we know what these are, right? The speed is how fast you’re going over the ground. Your pace is how fast you’re running for a given distance, like a mile. Well, in a similar way, your cadence is nothing more than your RPMs. Like in a car, you have revolutions per minute, the number of times the crankshaft turns around during one minute. Well, your cadence is basically your RPMs. It’s the number of times your right foot, let’s say, hits the ground a certain number of times within one minute.
Now, why is this important for this heel bone issue? Well, if you think about increasing your cadence, what are you doing? You are increasing the number of times your foot hits the ground within one mile. That means that that distance between each stride has to be shorter. The more you shorten your strides, the more difficult it becomes to land as a heel striker. And so I thought that that would really serve her well in this case, because we know that your form will change if you increase your cadence without increasing your pace.
So, you have got to run at the same speed while you’re doing this. One of the ways we talked about doing this, about increasing her cadence, was to use a thing called a tempo trainer. I bought one of these when I was doing Ironman triathlons. I was trying to better my swim form. And one of the things that helps with that too is basically timing your swim strokes.
A tempo trainer is a thing that I bought at a swim store. It’s about that big around. It would actually clip to the back of my swim goggle strap, and you could set it to a certain cadence. And so the tempo or the cadence is telling you how fast you should move your arms in the water. You can use the exact same thing on the track or when you’re running. You can basically clip it to the back of your hat. You can use that tempo trainer, and you can use that to increase your cadence running at exactly the same pace.
You have got to look at your watch, make sure you’re staying on pace because you don’t want to just speed up. That is different. You’re trying to go the same speed but keep the number of foot strikes a little bit higher than what you were doing before and that will force you to shorten your strides and change your form a little bit.
Another way that you can do that is not just the tempo trainer, but if you listen to music when you run, there are a number of different apps that will sort music according to different attributes. One of those is beats per minute. So if you know what your cadence is, you go out and you run one mile and you count how many foot strikes, how many times your right foot hits the ground in one minute, then you can sort your music by beats per minute and then try to find some that are a little higher beats per minute than whatever your foot strike is. And if you do that, if you’re going maybe five to ten percent higher, that will start to alter your form a little bit. You can try to see how that adjusts your form and how it adjusts the forces applied to your foot. So, try doing that and see if that would help.
If you have a stress fracture and that is why you found this episode, you might want to learn the strategies that I use with runners who have these kinds of stress fractures and are trying to get back to running. They’re the exact same strategies I teach to physicians when I lecture at medical conferences, and you can get it for free. Those strategies are in the Stress Fracture Masterclass. You can go sign up. Go to www.docontherun.com/stressfracturemasterclass and I’ll see you in the training.
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