Music and pace
You already know that I love running to music - just look at my running pictures, all with headphones on. And I’ve established that you should listen to techno instead of podcasts on the way up a hill to make it easier to get over that hill.
I’ve also dedicated a page here on the website to my beat-based Spotify playlists. They’re a mixed bag of music: you’ll find everything from Latin to pop to gabby techno (and more techno). In fact, you’ll find my daughter’s Duocorde classical guitar duo in the playlist.
If you want to put together your own list, there’s an excellent free Spotify playlist manager that shows you the BPM for each track: http://sortyourmusic.playlistmachinery.com.
How do you run or cycle to the beat? For each beat, you step or pedal with your left or right foot (always the same one). You listen to the music and move in time. For hardcore athletes, you can use a metronome (my watch has this option) or listen to a metronome app instead of Spotify.
I also use a Garmin Forerunner 265 watch, a Garmin HRM-Pro Plus chest monitor, and a Garmin Bike Cadence Sensor 2 for (indoor and outdoor) cycling. This Sensor allows you to hack the cadence for running and cycling. (I also have a speedometer for biking, but unfortunately, I haven’t been able to use it well for indoor cycling yet.)
Experiment
Recently, I’d like to know if I could burn extra calories on a treadmill by changing the cadence. During regular running (when I run just for fun) my cadence is around 170, which I can maintain quite well even for long distances. In comparison, I have increased my cadence to 180 and decreased it to 160.
The watch and the chest monitor measured the distance on the treadmill. My goal was to run for at least 30 minutes and get a full km. I added 100 meters to the distance, because sometimes the watch recalculates afterwards and I would rather have a little more distance than 4.99 km in my running log. Sorry, that’s just me.
The treadmill was set to 9 km/h with a 1 degree incline for the first three times to make it easier to compare results.
I also tested how I could maintain a 180 cadence on the treadmill, and then lastly to see if there was any change in results if I set the treadmill to my running track speed instead of 9 km/h and ran at 180 pace.
I ran the runs on days close together, in the mornings, at about the same fitness level.
The playlists I used:
- BPM MIX 080 160 (alternatives are BPM 080 and BPM 160)
- BPM MIX 085 170 (alternatives: BPM 085 and BPM 170)
- BPM MIX 090 180 (alternatives: BPM 090 and BPM 180)
In the music you use for running, the beat can be halved or doubled, so it doesn’t matter if the BPM is 80 or 160 if you adjust to that. Something else to keep in mind is that these BPMs are averages for the music, and I also round up to fit the music into a category. So you might have 174 BPM instead of 170, but that’s still within the limit.
Results
The table below shows my results in chronological order. Just adjusting the pace makes minimal difference in terms of calorie burn on the treadmill. This is surprising to me because I expected a much more significant difference. On the treadmill, I was really, really sweating at the 180 cadence and thought I was burning a lot more calories. By the way, the 160 cadence felt very slow, it felt the most tiring. In the last column are direct links to Garmin and Strava activity, for anyone interested in more detail.
And then here’s a little twist. Because I ran a personal best 5km at 180 cadence on the track, improving by almost 40 seconds on my result from a month earlier, which was not even on my target. Hurray!
Lastly, I set the treadmill to the speed I was running on the track. I expected to burn more calories.
| Where | Cadence | Time | Distance | Calories | Calories/min | Average heart rate | Average pace (min/km) | Links |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Treadmill, 9.0 km/h (6:40 min/km) | 170 | 30:30 | 5.11 | 316 | 10.36 | 136 | 5:58 | G, S |
| Treadmill, 9.0 km/h (6:40 min/km) | 180 | 33:55 | 6.10 | 358 | 10.56 | 139 | 5:33 | G, S |
| Treadmill, 9.0 km/h (6:40 min/km) | 160 | 33:22 | 5.12 | 334 | 10.01 | 136 | 6:31 | G, S |
| Track | 180 | 32:04 | 6.11 | 414 | 12.91 | 161 | 5:15 | G, S |
| Treadmill, 11.2 km/h (5:21 min/km) | 180 | 30:32 | 6.15 | 371 | 12.15 | 157 | 4:58 | G, S |
By the way, these changes can be applied to bikes and indoor bikes, I experimented quite a bit with these during the winter months. In fact, walking is also worth experimenting with, but at a lower cadence of course.
Lesson learned
Changing the cadence on the treadmill without changing the speed doesn’t make an order-of-magnitude difference in terms of active calories. Plus, for fat burning, a heart rate above 140 is not so good - so I recommend running slower but for longer periods of time. For example, during my weight loss, I walked on the treadmill for 42 minutes every day, gradually increasing the incline and speed, making sure my heart rate stayed between 115-125. This may be different for you, but regularity and paced exercise over 30 minutes will pay off.
If you’re using a treadmill to try to shed the extra pounds, here are some things you can do to regulate your calorie burn:
- varying the speed of the treadmill (obvious, but as you can see from the table, this is not the only silver bullet)
- changing the cadence
- changing the incline angle
Feel free to experiment with these settings yourself and post your opinion in the SRFLW Facebook group!
This is no longer related to weight loss, but more to running: at my current fitness level, I can improve my running performance by increasing my cadence. For this, rhythmic music is a perfect aid - although it’s not a new invention, think prisoners on the galleon and drums.
If you’re interested in my lifestyle change, or if you’re in the process of a lifestyle change yourself, join our little community: