Cycling Cadence: What It Is, What Is Optimal, and How to Train It

Most cyclists watch their speed. Yet whether you step off the bike after three hours pleasantly tired or with aching knees and an empty tank is decided by a number that usually is not on your bike computer at all: cadence. This article explains what it is, which values make sense, how to train it, and what to measure it with, including specific sensors you can actually buy.

The short version

• Cadence is the number of crank revolutions per minute (rpm).
• For most riders the sensible range is 70 to 100 rpm, and the value most often quoted as the sweet spot is 90 rpm.
• Below 70 rpm you are pedaling with force: muscles fatigue faster and your knees work under heavy load.
• Above 100 to 110 rpm you start spinning against nothing: the work feels light, but your heart and lungs pay disproportionately for it.
• Cadence is individual. The ranges above are a starting point for experiments, not a standard to meet.
• Without a sensor you cannot measure it in any useful way. A Bluetooth sensor today costs about as much as two inner tubes and a set of brake pads.
• Professionals are not a template. One study of Grand Tour riders measured 71 rpm on mountain passes, not 90.

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Table of contents

1. What cadence is
2. Cadence and gearing calculator
3. Why cadence matters more than speed
4. What cadence is optimal
5. Low cadence and what it costs you
6. Too high a cadence, or spinning against nothing
7. Cadence, terrain, gearing and bike type
8. The numbers people quote
9. How to measure cadence
10. Training cadence: three ready-made sessions
11. Five mistakes that undo the work
12. How DarkSpeed helps you hold your cadence
13. Why a Bluetooth sensor is worth the money
14. Cadence sensors worth considering
15. What to look for when buying
16. Frequently asked questions

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What cadence is

Cadence is the number of complete revolutions of the cranks (and therefore of the pedals) in one minute. It is written as rpm. If your right leg completes 22 full circles in fifteen seconds, your cadence is 88 rpm.

People confuse it with speed, but it measures something entirely different. Speed tells you how fast the bike is moving. Cadence tells you how you arrived at that speed: whether you are grinding a heavy gear with slow, powerful pushes, or spinning a lighter gear quickly and smoothly. The same 18 mph can be ridden at 60 rpm and at 95 rpm, and those are two completely different demands on your body.

The relationship is simple and worth keeping in mind on every climb:

speed = cadence × gear ratio

Since speed is the product of two things, any given speed can be reached in an endless number of ways. Choosing between them is exactly the part of riding we call technique.

Why cadence matters more than speed

Speed is an outcome. Cadence is one of the very few parameters you can change instantly, with one hand, by moving a shifter. That makes it the cheapest tool you have for managing your own effort.

It comes down to a single trade-off. Higher cadence means less load on the muscles but a greater demand for energy and oxygen. Lower cadence means more load on the muscles but less energy burned. You lose something on both sides of that equation, which is why there is a range rather than one correct number.

Pedaling within a sensible range brings several concrete benefits:

• It spreads the load over time. Instead of forty hard pushes per minute you make ninety lighter ones. Each individual push is weaker, so joints and tendons see smaller peak forces.
• It reduces the risk of overloading your knees. High pedal force at low cadence loads the knee joint on every repetition, and thousands of those repetitions add up over a three-hour ride.
• It improves blood flow through the muscles. Dynamic work at lower tension lets blood move more freely through the working muscle, which slows the build-up of fatigue.
• It leaves you something in reserve. Spinning at 90 rpm you can accelerate without changing gear. At 55 rpm you have nothing left to accelerate with, because all that remains in your legs is force.
• It makes recovery easier. Riding gently in a light gear at a higher cadence is a form of active rest rather than another strength session.

What cadence is optimal

Two caveats, without which the table above is misleading.

First, this is not a medical standard, it is a starting point. Your optimal cadence depends on your build, your muscle fiber composition, your experience, your crank length, and even on how long the ride lasts. Professionals ride higher because they have years of cardiovascular adaptation behind them. Someone who got on a bike in April will bounce in the saddle at 100 rpm and conclude after ten minutes that cadence is nonsense. It simply has to be trained.

Second, duration matters. Briefly going above 110 rpm in a sprint, or dropping to 60 rpm on a steep wall, is a normal part of riding, not a mistake. The problem only begins when you stay outside the range for many minutes, because only then does the cost accumulate.

If you are starting out, do not aim straight for 90. Check what you have now (usually 60 to 75 rpm) and raise it by 5 rpm every two weeks. Jumping from 65 to 90 in a single weekend ends in bouncing in the saddle and giving up.

Low cadence and what it costs you

Riding below 70 rpm is the most common mistake amateurs make, and for a reason that seems perfectly sensible: on a heavy gear you can feel yourself working. The sense of effort is clear and the speed is respectable, so it is hard to believe anything is wrong.

Here is what actually happens:

• Your muscles have to generate high force on every push, which rapidly depletes glycogen in the fast-twitch fibers.
• High muscle tension restricts blood flow during the push phase, so the muscle is less well oxygenated and acidifies faster.
• The force on every pedal stroke rises. At a given power, pedaling half as fast means each push has to produce roughly twice the force, and that force travels through the knee thousands of times over a ride.
• Your legs are cooked long before the end of the route, and every climb near the finish becomes a fight.

One popular claim deserves a correction here, because it is repeated everywhere and the measurements do not support it as stated. Low cadence is usually said to wreck your knees. What has actually been measured is narrower than that: knee load tracks how hard you are working and how your bike is set up, not how fast you are pedaling. Ericson and Nisell (1987) measured compression in the patellofemoral joint on an ergometer and found it rose with workload and with a lower saddle, while changes in pedaling rate did not significantly change it. Bini and Diefenthaeler (2013) tested competitive cyclists at 70 and 90 rpm and reached the same conclusion: workload moved the knee forces, cadence did not.

So the honest case for a higher cadence is not that it protects your knees. It is that it spreads the same work over more and lighter pedal strokes, which delays muscular fatigue and shifts the cost onto your heart and lungs, and those recover far faster than muscle does. If your knees hurt, the first things to check are your saddle height and how hard you are pushing, not the number on your screen.

The fix is trivial and always the same: shift to an easier gear. Not „try harder”, just „change gear”. Most people are reluctant to use their easiest gears, as though doing so were a failure. It is not. That is precisely why they were fitted to the bike.

Too high a cadence, or spinning against nothing

The opposite extreme is rarer but costly. Above 100 to 110 rpm the resistance at the pedal becomes so small that mechanical work barely increases, while heart rate, breathing and energy consumption all rise. Your legs do not hurt, but your body is running at high revs without a matching result.

The symptoms that give it away:

• bouncing in the saddle and an unsteady upper body (the hips „hop”),
• a heart rate clearly higher than usual at the same speed,
• a feeling that your breathing cannot keep up even though your legs feel light,
• pedals „running away” from your feet as you lose smoothness.

One caution, because this is easy to misread: a higher cadence is trainable. If after a few weeks you can sit calmly in the saddle at 105 rpm and your heart rate barely notices, that is not a mistake, it is progress. Spinning against nothing is recognized by the cost going up while the speed does not.

Cadence, terrain, gearing and bike type

One number for a whole route makes no sense. What you are aiming for is staying inside a band despite changing terrain, and your gears are the tool for that.

Flat roads. The easiest conditions for holding 80 to 100 rpm. This is where the habit is worth building, because nothing is working against you.

Climbs. Cadence naturally drops and that is fine, but stay as close as you can to the lower edge of the range instead of sinking to 50. If you cannot hold 65 to 70 rpm in your easiest gear on the climbs you typically ride, that is not a fitness problem, it is a gearing problem. Fitting a cassette with a larger easiest sprocket will change your riding in the mountains more than any training block.

Descents and coasting. Cadence drops to zero because you are not pedaling. That is not an error, and a good bike computer should not treat it as cadence falling below your threshold (more on this shortly).

Sprints. Brief excursions above 110 rpm are normal and desirable. A sprint lasts a matter of seconds, so it has no time to do harm.

Mountain bikes and gravel. On technical ground cadence is inherently more variable because the surface dictates it. An average across the whole ride tells you less here than it would on the road, but the range still applies on longer, even stretches.

Electric bikes. Assistance on most e-bikes responds to torque and cadence, so smooth pedaling in the 70 to 90 rpm band usually gives smoother assistance and noticeably more battery range than grinding a heavy gear.

The numbers people quote

Cadence attracts round numbers that get repeated until they sound like facts. Four of them come up constantly, so here they are next to the measurements behind them.

Start with the one that surprises people most: professionals do not spin at 90 rpm all day. Lucia, Hoyos and Chicharro (2001) recorded seven professionals through the Giro, the Tour and the Vuelta, and found three clearly different cadences depending on what they were doing: 71 rpm on long mountain passes, 89 rpm on flat group stages and 92 rpm in individual time trials. Uphill, in other words, the professionals of that era pedaled slower than the advice usually handed to amateurs.

Rider or group	Situation	Cadence
Professionals, 2001 study	High mountain passes	71 rpm
Professionals, 2001 study	Flat group stages	89 rpm
Professionals, 2001 study	Individual time trial	92 rpm
Tadej Pogačar	Isola 2000, 37 minutes	99 rpm
Jonas Vingegaard	Typical riding	88–93 rpm
Lance Armstrong	Tour climbs, peak years	100–110 rpm
Jan Ullrich	The same climbs	65–80 rpm
Road sprinter	Peak power	110–125 rpm
Elite track sprinter	Peak power	≈135 rpm

What cadence does Tadej Pogačar ride?

Usually 92 to 95 rpm, and higher on the climbs he wins on. On stage 19 of the 2024 Tour de France he averaged 99 rpm for 37 minutes while setting the record up Isola 2000. Jonas Vingegaard, climbing alongside him, sits closer to 88 to 93 rpm.

Put that next to the 71 rpm the 2001 study measured on mountain passes and you have one of the clearest generational changes in the sport. Gearing is a large part of the reason: a modern professional has ratios available that simply did not exist twenty-five years ago, and you cannot hold 99 rpm up a mountain on a gear you do not own.

What was Lance Armstrong’s average cadence?

On Tour climbs in his peak years, roughly 100 to 110 rpm, up from 85 to 95 rpm earlier in his career. The number is remembered mainly because of the contrast with Jan Ullrich, who rode the same mountains grinding 65 to 80 rpm.

That contrast is the genuinely useful part of the story, and it survives everything that came afterwards. Two riders with opposite cadences won the same race. Cadence is a way of delivering power, not a measure of how much of it you have.

Is 160 rpm a good cadence?

Not as a riding cadence, no. Power plotted against cadence makes an inverted U: it climbs to an optimum and then falls away. For road sprinters that optimum sits around 110 to 125 rpm. For elite track sprinters, who train for it specifically and ride shorter cranks, measurements put it near 135 rpm.

Numbers of 160 rpm and above come from laboratory protocols built to map the far end of that curve, not from anybody’s ride. On the road, if you find yourself near 160 rpm outside a sprint, you are in far too easy a gear and doing almost no work: the legs are moving and the bike is not.

What is the 75 rule in cycling?

It is not a cadence rule at all, which is exactly why it confuses people who run into it in a discussion about cadence. The 75 rule is about how hard you train: roughly 75 percent of your training time should sit at or below 75 percent of your maximum heart rate, leaving the remaining quarter for genuinely hard work.

The connection to cadence is indirect but real. Those easy three quarters are where you have the spare capacity to practice holding 85 to 95 rpm, because what limits you there is not your legs. The hard quarter is the wrong place to work on it: at that intensity you will take whatever cadence lets you survive the interval.

How to measure cadence

The stopwatch method. Count the revolutions of one leg for 15 seconds and multiply by four. It works, it is free, and it lets you check once where you currently stand. It is useless for training, because you cannot count and ride at the same time, and you need the number most when things are hardest.

Calculating it from speed and gear. Theoretically possible, practically useless, because an app does not know which gear you are in or whether you are pedaling at all. No app can measure cadence from GPS alone, and if one claims it does, it is estimating.

A cadence sensor. The only method that gives you a live value while riding, without taking your attention off the road. A small transmitter on the crank arm counts revolutions and sends them over Bluetooth to a bike computer or a phone. That is the whole of the technology, and it is why these devices are cheap.

Training cadence: three ready-made sessions

Cadence is a neuromuscular habit, not a question of strength. Training it takes a few weeks of regular work and does not require exhausting sessions.

Session 1: the basic one, 30 minutes

For someone who is only starting to work on cadence deliberately.

1. 10 minutes warm-up at your natural pace.
2. 5 sets: 3 minutes at 90 to 100 rpm, then 2 minutes at 70 to 80 rpm.
3. 10 minutes easy cool-down.

All of it on a flat stretch, in a light gear. Speed is irrelevant in this session and you should not look at it.

Session 2: fast spinning, raising the ceiling

For someone who already has the 90 to 100 rpm range under control.

1. 10 minutes warm-up.
2. 4 sets: 3 to 5 minutes at 110 to 120 rpm, then a few minutes easy at 80 to 90 rpm.
3. 10 minutes cool-down.

There is one criterion for doing it correctly: your hips must not bounce. The moment you start hopping in the saddle the set is over, no matter how much time was left. You are training smoothness, not the ability to endure chaos.

Session 3: single-leg work, technique

Without much load, ideally on a trainer or on a quiet, flat stretch with no traffic.

For 30 to 60 seconds pedal consciously as though only one leg were working (the other stays on the pedal but barely pushes), then switch. 3 to 4 repetitions per side. This drill exposes the dead spot at the top and bottom of the pedal stroke and teaches the round pedaling that is a precondition for holding a high cadence without bouncing.

How to fit it into a week

One cadence session per week is plenty, plus deliberate attention to the range on your ordinary rides. The effect, a naturally higher cadence you no longer have to think about, usually appears after four to six weeks.

Five mistakes that undo the work

1. Raising cadence without changing gear. If you want to spin faster you have to drop to a lighter gear. Otherwise you are simply riding harder, not smoother.
2. Jumping 25 rpm overnight. Your neuromuscular system needs weeks, not a single weekend.
3. Watching your cadence instead of the road. This is why the signal should be one you can take in from the corner of your eye, not a number to be read.
4. Treating 90 rpm as a standard. It is a reference point. Your own value might be 82 and be perfectly fine.
5. Looking only at the average for the whole ride. An average of 88 rpm can mean even spinning throughout, or alternating 60 on the climbs and 115 on the descents. Those are two completely different rides with the same number at the end.

How DarkSpeed helps you hold your cadence

DarkSpeed is a bike computer app built around one assumption: while riding you look at the screen for a fraction of a second and have to understand everything in that time. Cadence is exactly the number where this assumption matters most, because you have to react immediately rather than after you get home.

Live cadence, free of charge. Once a Bluetooth sensor is paired, the app shows your current cadence on the ride screen. There are four screen layouts to choose from, and every theme uses a black background, which on OLED screens means genuinely lower battery drain along with better readability in sunlight.

A cadence alert, color instead of a message. With this feature on, the cadence number changes color when you leave your range, separately for going under and going over. Nothing pops up, nothing beeps, nothing covers the screen. You take the information in from the corner of your eye, the way you register the color of a traffic light. The default thresholds are 70 and 100 rpm, both adjustable with sliders in settings, because optimal cadence is individual and hard-coding it into an app would be a mistake.

An alert that does not lie and does not flicker. This is the part that is hard to see in a store listing but decides whether the feature is usable at all:

• Coasting is not low cadence. When you stop pedaling, the sensor reports zero. The app treats that as no reading rather than a drop below the threshold, so every descent does not light up red.
• No flickering at the boundary. Spinning right around the threshold, a naive implementation would switch color several times a second. Here, leaving the zone requires crossing the threshold with a margin rather than brushing against it.
• Sprints are not punished. The upper alert only appears after high cadence has been held for half a minute, because spinning against nothing lasts a long time while a sprint lasts seconds. The lower alert responds faster, because riding an overly heavy gear can go on for a quarter of an hour, and the sooner you break it, the better.
• Returning to the range shows immediately. After shifting to a lighter gear the color returns to normal almost at once, because a bike computer should confirm a good decision rather than keep you waiting.

Average cadence in your ride history. Every ride records an average cadence, calculated only from the time you were actually pedaling. Descents do not drag the number down.

Period statistics. The analytics module shows your average cadence over a chosen period and your best single-ride average, counting only rides where the sensor was actually working. That way you can see whether the work on technique is really moving your natural cadence up, or whether it only feels that way.

The cadence reading itself is free. The color threshold alert is part of DarkSpeed Pro, together with the analytics module, the activity calendar, the bike service reminder and history export.

Why a Bluetooth sensor is worth the money

Let me be blunt: without a sensor, all of this stays theory. You cannot train a parameter you cannot see, and cadence is the one basic riding metric a phone cannot measure by itself. Speed and distance it will work out from GPS. Cadence it cannot work out from anything, because a satellite does not know what your legs are doing.

The arguments for buying one, in order:

1. The cost is wildly out of proportion to the benefit. A decent cadence sensor costs roughly the same as a good tire. There is no other piece of equipment at that price that changes your riding to a comparable degree.
2. Fitting takes two minutes and needs no tools. Modern sensors are magnetless: you strap them to the crank arm with a rubber band and that is it. There is no magnet to align, no cables, nothing to set up in the spokes.
3. A battery lasts a season or two. A typical sensor runs 300 to 500 hours on one CR2032 cell costing a couple of dollars. It puts itself to sleep when the bike is parked.
4. The sensor is brand-independent. You buy it once and it works with an app on your phone, with a bike computer, with a sports watch and with a trainer. Changing apps does not invalidate the purchase.
5. It weighs a few grams and does not spoil the look of the bike. A typical sensor is around 9 grams.

What a „Bluetooth sensor” is and why it matters

Cycling sensors broadcast on two standards: ANT+ and Bluetooth Low Energy. ANT+ is the standard of bike computers and sports watches. Phones (both Android and iPhone) do not support it, because they do not have the necessary radio.

The conclusion is simple: if a sensor is to work with an app on your phone, it must support Bluetooth. Fortunately most current sensors broadcast on both standards at once, so one device will serve both your phone and a future bike computer if you ever buy one. When shopping, look for „ANT+ / Bluetooth” or „dual band” rather than „ANT+” alone.

DarkSpeed connects to sensors using the standard Bluetooth profile called Cycling Speed and Cadence (CSC), which every serious manufacturer implements. That means you do not have to buy anything specific to our app. Whatever already works with Zwift, Garmin or Wahoo will work here.

One detail that can ruin your first evening

Many cheap two-in-one sensors (the popular Magene S3+ series, for example) are physically one device that operates either in speed mode or in cadence mode. The mode is switched by removing and reinserting the battery, usually signalled by a different color of the flashing LED. If you buy such a sensor, strap it to the crank and see speed instead of cadence in the app, that is not a fault in the app or in the sensor: the device is simply in the wrong mode. To measure both at once you need two such sensors, or a kit with two transmitters.

Cadence sensors worth considering

Below are specific models, grouped by what they actually measure. For cadence you need something from the first or second table. The third table lists speed sensors, which will not measure cadence, though they are useful on a trainer in winter and anywhere GPS struggles (woods, tunnels, dense city).

Prices and availability change constantly, so they are not listed here. The links go to Amazon search results for each model rather than to a single product page, because product identifiers differ between Amazon’s national stores and a direct link would be dead for most readers.

Cadence sensors

Two-in-one sensors and speed plus cadence kits

Speed sensors (to complete the set)

What to look for when buying

• Bluetooth is mandatory if you use a phone. ANT+ on its own will not connect to any mobile app.
• Check whether it is cadence or speed. Product listings routinely mix the two up, and the photographs are often shared between both versions. A cadence sensor mounts on the crank arm, a speed sensor on the wheel hub.
• Choose magnetless designs. With no magnet to align there is nothing to knock out of adjustment when you wash the bike.
• Pay attention to water resistance. IP67 or IPX7 is the norm in this category and genuinely worth insisting on, given the device lives two inches above the road.
• A CR2032 battery is an advantage, not a drawback. You can replace it at a drugstore for pocket change. USB-rechargeable sensors mean one more cable to keep track of.
• Do not overpay on your first purchase. The difference in accuracy between a cheap sensor and an expensive one is small. What you mostly pay for is connection stability and manufacturer support. If you are still finding out whether cadence training is for you, start at the cheaper end.

Frequently asked questions

Can I measure cadence without a sensor, using just my phone? No. GPS has no access to information about crank revolutions. An app can at best guess from speed, which is useless, because it does not know which gear you are in.

What cadence is good for a beginner? Start by staying above 70 rpm and work up gradually to 80 to 90. That 70 threshold alone eliminates most of the damage that grinding does.

Is a higher cadence always better? No. Above 100 to 110 rpm the oxygen cost rises for little gain in work, and without training you start bouncing in the saddle, which ruins your technique.

What cadence do professionals ride? In a group, usually 85 to 100 rpm, and often higher on flat individual efforts. That is the result of many years of adaptation, though, not a template to copy in your first season.

Does a cadence sensor work on a turbo trainer? Yes, and that is one of its best uses. On a trainer GPS is useless, while cadence remains fully meaningful.

Will one sensor measure both speed and cadence at the same time? Usually not. Popular two-in-one sensors operate in one of two modes at a time. For simultaneous measurement you need two transmitters, that is, a kit.

Does cadence matter on an electric bike? It does, a great deal. The assistance responds to how you pedal, so a steady cadence in the 70 to 90 rpm band usually means smoother motor behavior and more range.

What cadence does Tadej Pogačar ride? Usually 92 to 95 rpm, and 99 rpm for the 37 minutes of his record climb of Isola 2000 at the 2024 Tour de France.

What was Lance Armstrong’s average cadence? Around 100 to 110 rpm on Tour climbs in his peak years, against Jan Ullrich’s 65 to 80 rpm on the same mountains.

Is 160 rpm a good cadence? No. Road sprinters peak around 110 to 125 rpm and elite track sprinters around 135 rpm, while 160 rpm and above is a laboratory test range rather than a riding cadence.

What is the 75 rule in cycling? It is a training rule, not a cadence rule: about 75 percent of your training time should sit at or below 75 percent of your maximum heart rate.

Does a low cadence damage your knees? Not on its own. Measured knee forces track workload and saddle height rather than pedaling rate, so if your knees hurt, check your bike fit and your effort before your cadence.

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Summary

Cadence is the cheapest thing you can improve about your riding. It does not require a better bike, lighter wheels or more time to train. It requires using your gears deliberately, and a way to see where you are as you ride.

The minimum plan looks like this: buy a Bluetooth sensor for the price of a tire, strap it to your crank, set your range in the app, and for a few weeks make sure the number does not turn color. The rest takes care of itself.

To measure and hold your cadence you can use DarkSpeed, a bike computer app for Android and iOS with live cadence, a color threshold alert, and history and statistics for your average cadence.