Chasing cadence is how good sprinters get slower

Stride frequency is easy to count and easy to raise, which is exactly why it has become the most misused number in sprint training.

Speed is stride length multiplied by stride frequency. That identity has done more harm than any other equation in athletics, because it invites you to believe the two terms are independent dials you can turn one at a time.

They are not. Raise frequency by consciously turning the legs over faster and you almost always shorten the contact, which reduces the impulse you can put into the ground, which shortens the stride. The product barely moves. Sometimes it falls. The athlete feels faster because everything is busier, the clock says otherwise, and then everyone blames the timing gate.

The mechanism worth caring about is force in the available contact time. At top speed a sprinter is on the ground for a period well under a tenth of a second. You cannot lengthen that meaningfully without slowing down, so the only way to get more out of it is a bigger vertical force applied earlier in the contact. That is a strength and stiffness problem, not a rhythm problem. Frequency then rises as a consequence, because a stiffer contact is a shorter one.

I would go further. Cadence drills that ask an athlete to run over closely spaced markers train something that looks like sprinting and behaves like a different skill. The foot starts reaching for the marker. Reaching means landing ahead of the hips. Landing ahead of the hips means braking, which is the exact fault the drill was supposed to cure.

There is a defensible version of frequency work and it is narrow. Very short accelerations at genuinely maximal intent, full recovery, no target rhythm imposed from outside. You are not teaching the athlete to turn over. You are letting a strong athlete discover the turnover their legs can already support.

The countercase is that some athletes really are frequency limited, particularly tall ones who cover ground easily and cannot get the legs back under themselves. Fair. But the fix there is usually hip flexor strength and a cleaner recovery mechanic, not a metronome.

None of this stops coaches quoting steps per second, because steps per second can be counted off a phone video by anybody in about a minute, and ground reaction force cannot. We measure what is cheap and then let the cheap number set the training.

Run harder into the ground. The cadence will sort itself out, and if it does not, you were never going to fix it by counting.