Cadence is the wrong thing to coach first

Stride frequency rises by itself once an athlete can put real force into a short ground contact.

Watch a junior sprinter get told to turn the legs over faster. Nine times out of ten they get slower. The feet start to chatter, the hips sink, and contact with the track becomes a series of apologetic taps that move nobody anywhere.

Frequency is an output. That is the part coaches keep getting backwards. An athlete running at four and a half steps per second is not doing it because somebody told them to count. They are doing it because each contact is short, and each contact is short because the leg arrives stiff and loaded and leaves again before the hip can fold. Fix the arrival and the number sorts itself out.

The counter-argument is fair enough. Plenty of athletes genuinely overstride, and telling them to shorten up produces an instant improvement on the stopwatch. I think that improvement is a mask. Overstriding is a braking problem: the foot lands too far in front of the centre of mass, and the reason it lands out there is usually that the swing leg cannot be repositioned quickly enough. Hip flexors. Posture. Cue the cadence instead and you get a smaller, tidier version of the same fault.

Then there is the measurement trap, which I blame for most of this. Watches and foot pods report cadence because cadence is trivially easy to count. Ground contact time is harder. Vertical stiffness is harder still, and actual force is close to impossible outside a lab or an instrumented straight. So the sport optimises the number it can see. I understand why that happened. I still think it has cost a generation of club sprinters about two years each.

What I would coach instead is dull. Posture under fatigue. A stiff ankle at touchdown that does not give way. The ability to hold a tall pelvis through the last twenty metres of a two hundred when everything wants to sit down. None of it shows up in a six week block and none of it looks impressive on a phone screen.

Then measure the frequency at the end of the training block rather than the start. If it climbed while the athlete was thinking about nothing except running hard, something real changed. If it only climbs when a coach shouts quick feet from the infield, nothing did. You taught a person to do an impression of a fast runner.