There's a number you're probably not paying much attention to, and it might be the easiest thing to change in your training without adding a single extra hour on the bike. Cadence — how many times per minute you turn the pedals — sits quietly in the corner of your head unit, largely ignored. Most riders glance at it occasionally, then go back to watching power or speed. That's a mistake worth correcting.
The research on cadence is more nuanced than the cycling world usually suggests. It's not simply "higher is better" or "grind it out like the classics riders." The optimal cadence depends on your goals, your intensity, and how long you're riding — and learning to manipulate it deliberately is one of the more underrated skills in training. Let's be honest: most recreational riders never think about cadence at all, and they leave real performance on the table because of it.
Why most riders end up at the wrong cadence
Left to their own devices, untrained cyclists typically settle somewhere between 60 and 75 rpm. It feels natural. The leg muscles do more of the work, the cardiovascular system isn't being asked to spin the engine fast. From a pure muscular-efficiency standpoint — meaning the amount of oxygen your muscles consume per unit of power — a cadence around 60 rpm is actually more efficient than 90. This is where a lot of confusion comes from, and it's why the conventional wisdom keeps getting tangled up.
The problem is that muscular efficiency and cycling performance are not the same thing. At 60 rpm, you're producing high force per pedal stroke. Over the course of a four-hour ride, that repeated high-force contraction fatigues the fast-twitch fibres, accumulates local muscular lactate, and significantly increases your risk of bonking or falling apart in the final hour. You're being metabolically efficient in a way that doesn't actually help you go faster for longer. The muscles fatigue before the cardiovascular system does. You've optimized the wrong thing.
Higher cadences shift the load away from the muscular system and toward the cardiovascular system. Yes, your heart rate goes up a little — typically 5–7 bpm at comparable power output — and oxygen consumption increases slightly. But the cardiovascular system is far more trainable and far more resilient over long durations than the neuromuscular system. This is why trained cyclists overwhelmingly gravitate toward 85–100 rpm: not because it's the most efficient use of oxygen, but because it's the most sustainable use of their legs over time.
What the intensity actually demands
The optimal cadence is not fixed — it shifts with the demands of the effort you're making, and this is something most training articles completely ignore.
For zone 2 riding — the range that matters most for most amateur cyclists — somewhere between 80 and 90 rpm tends to work well. You're keeping muscular stress low, staying aerobically engaged, and building the fat oxidation capacity that zone 2 is supposed to develop. A 2024 study in Frontiers in Physiology found that at lower intensities, there's meaningful individual variation: some riders are genuinely more efficient at 75 rpm, others at 95. The practical signal is wherever you can hold a full conversation without your legs complaining first. If your breathing is easy but your quads are already grumbling at 70 minutes, cadence is the first variable worth adjusting.
At threshold and sweet spot efforts — the 88–95% FTP range — cadence tends to creep up naturally in experienced riders, and for good reason. At these intensities, muscular fatigue accumulates quickly at low cadences. Spinning faster helps distribute the work more evenly and delays the buildup of local lactate in the working muscles. If you're doing sweet spot intervals, aim for 88–95 rpm. Lower than that and you're asking your legs to do too much of the carrying.
Sprint efforts are a different world. Research consistently shows that maximum neuromuscular power output peaks somewhere between 100 and 130 rpm. At very high cadences, the force required per stroke drops dramatically, and the fast-twitch fibres can contract more frequently without the kind of fatigue that comes from grinding big gears. If you're doing sprint intervals or short neuromuscular work, don't be afraid to push above 100. It'll feel chaotic at first.
Long climbs deserve a mention here, because they cause more cadence trouble than almost anything else. Gravity pulls most riders toward mashing — big gear, low cadence, maximum force. But the riders who survive Alpine stages aren't grinding at 55 rpm. They're spinning at 70–80, keeping cadence higher than feels natural because they know the descent, the valley, and the next climb are still ahead. It's a hard habit to build. Most riders don't start building it until they've blown up on a long climb and had time to think about what went wrong.
Training your cadence on purpose
Most training plans spend exactly zero time on cadence. Workouts specify power and duration. Cadence is left to instinct. The result is that riders never develop the neuromuscular coordination to spin efficiently at 95 rpm — they get cardiovascularly gassed not because the effort is too hard, but because their pedaling stroke is mechanically inefficient at higher rates. The hips rock, the foot pulls through at the wrong angle, and the whole system wastes energy it doesn't need to.
High cadence work is a real training modality and it deserves time in your plan. The simplest approach is overspeed drills: drop to an easier gear than you'd normally use and spin at 100–110 rpm for 60–90 seconds, keeping your upper body quiet and your hips from rocking. Do this four to six times during a zone 2 ride, with easy spinning between each effort. The goal isn't power production. It's neuromuscular coordination — you're training the motor pattern, not the metabolic system. After a few weeks of this, 90 rpm starts to feel like a perfectly normal place to be.
Low-cadence strength work has legitimate uses too, particularly in the off-season or early base phase. Pedaling at 50–60 rpm at moderate resistance recruits more type-II muscle fibres and builds a kind of cycling-specific strength that gym squats don't fully replicate. The catch is that this kind of work should be used deliberately and sparingly. It's stressful on the knees and very easy to overdo, especially if you add it on top of volume you're already not recovering from.
If you want structured guidance on where to fit cadence work within your broader training — not just tacking drills onto existing rides but actually sequencing them intelligently — LeCoach builds these into your weekly plan automatically based on what phase of training you're in. It's one of those details that makes the difference between training that builds something and training that just accumulates hours.
Finding your cadence, not someone else's
There's a version of this article that tells you to immediately raise your cadence to 90 rpm and never look back. That's oversimplified. Research confirms that cadence preference has a meaningful individual component — some riders genuinely are more efficient at lower cadences, and forcing them to spin at 95 rpm creates more cardiovascular cost than it saves in muscular fatigue. If you've been riding for years at 75–80 rpm and you feel strong, well-recovered, and you're not leaving performances unfinished, that's data worth respecting.
The useful exercise is experimentation with intent. On your next few rides, hold a fixed power and ride at three different cadence ranges for ten minutes each: 70–75, 85–90, and 95–100. Track perceived effort, heart rate drift, and how your legs feel at each range. You'll likely find that one range feels sustainable and one feels like you're fighting your own body. That's the signal worth acting on — not a round number from a coaching article.
The goal isn't to have the highest cadence on the group ride. It's to arrive at the end of a hard day feeling like you distributed the work intelligently — muscles and cardiovascular system each doing their share, neither one emptied before you're done.
Sources
- Haase, R.F. et al. (2024). Understanding optimal cadence dynamics: a systematic analysis of the power-velocity relationship in track cyclists with increasing exercise intensity. Frontiers in Physiology. doi:10.3389/fphys.2024.1343601
- Fernandez-Pena, E. et al. (2023). Effect of gear ratio and cadence on gross efficiency and pedal force effectiveness during multistage graded cycling test. Sports, 11(1). doi:10.3390/sports11010005