An athlete came to me with knee pain that three months of rest had not fixed. He had been to a physio, done the exercises, bought different shoes, and every time he built back up past about twenty five kilometres a week it came back.
I filmed him running for thirty seconds. He was taking 152 steps a minute and landing with his foot a long way in front of his hip.
We did not treat his knee. We changed one number.
Overstriding is the fault. Cadence is the lever that fixes it without you having to think about your feet.
What Overstriding Actually Does
When your foot lands ahead of your centre of mass, two unhelpful things happen at once.
You create a braking force. The ground pushes back against your direction of travel on every single step. At 160 steps a minute over an hour that is nine and a half thousand small brakes, each one costing energy you then have to replace.
And the leg lands relatively straight, which means the shock has nowhere useful to go. A slightly bent knee at contact lets the muscles absorb load. A straight one passes it up through the joint. That is why overstriders get knee pain and shin problems rather than calf problems.
The direct instruction, land closer to your body, almost never works. Tell somebody to shorten their stride and they produce a self-conscious shuffle, they concentrate on their feet, and the moment they stop concentrating it reverts. I have watched it fail dozens of times.
Why Cadence Works Where Cueing Fails
Because it changes the outcome without asking anybody to think about their legs.
If you increase your step rate at the same speed, the stride length has to shorten. There is no other option, it is arithmetic. And a shorter stride at the same speed means the foot lands closer to underneath you, the knee is more flexed at contact, and contact time drops.
You get the mechanical change you wanted, and the athlete is thinking about a rhythm rather than about their body, which is precisely the kind of external focus that motor learning research says produces better and more durable change.
The gait retraining evidence on this is genuinely good. A modest increase, five to ten percent, consistently reduces impact loading and joint forces, and cadence retraining programmes have produced substantial reductions in injury rates in novice runners.
How to Do It
First, find out what your cadence actually is. Most watches record it. If not, count your right foot strikes for thirty seconds and multiply by four. Do it on an easy run, in the middle, not at the start when you are fresh and not on a hill.
Then add five percent. Not ten, not fifteen, and definitely not a jump to 180 because you read that somewhere. If you are at 152, aim for 160. If you are at 168, aim for 176.
180 is not a target. It is a number that came from counting elite runners at racing speed, and it has been repeated so often that recreational athletes now treat it as a standard they are failing to meet. Your optimal cadence depends on your height, your leg length and your speed. The right number is a bit higher than yours currently is.
Use a metronome app or a playlist at the right tempo, and only for part of the run. Ten minutes in the middle of an easy run, twice a week, is enough to start. It is fatiguing in a way people do not expect, because you are asking the nervous system to hold an unfamiliar pattern.
What to Expect
It will feel ridiculous for about two weeks. Too fast, too busy, like you are running on hot coals. That feeling is not a sign it is wrong, it is a sign it is different.
Your heart rate will go up slightly at the same pace, initially. That settles within a few weeks as the pattern becomes economical.
And you may find your calves get sore, because a shorter stride shifts some load from the knee to the calf and Achilles. That is the trade, and it is usually a good one, but it means you should not make this change in the same fortnight you add hill sprints.
Give it six to eight weeks before you judge it. New motor patterns need repetition, and this one has to survive fatigue before it belongs to you.
What Happened to Him
We took him from 152 to 160 over about six weeks, ten minutes at a time, and did nothing else. No new shoes, no additional exercises beyond what he was already doing.
He was running forty kilometres a week without knee pain within three months. The knee had never been the problem. The knee had been where the problem was showing up.
The Bottom Line
Count your cadence honestly on an easy run. Add five percent, not more. Practise it ten minutes at a time, twice a week, with a metronome, and expect it to feel absurd for a fortnight.
Ignore 180. Watch your calves while your knees settle down. Give it two months before deciding.
