When I did the 10K training course in Vancouver, we had a half hour talk every week on a different topic. The most interesting to me were the ones on biomechanics and injury prevention, both of which said the same thing - to minimise your risk of injury, you should aim to run at 90 strides per minute, i.e: 90 left footfalls and 90 right footfalls, or 180 ‘beats’ per minute. The idea is that you’re taking shorter strides, and have a much lesser force going through your leg on each step, therefore reducing shock and the odds of injuring yourself.

I’d since heard and read the same advice a number of times, but never knew what bpm I was running at, so when I found some free metronome MP3s for download I decided to try them out with my iPod. I forgot all about it for a while, but finally got around to trying it today. I loaded the 170, 175 and 180bpm files onto my Shuffle, set it to loop and headed out for a 9km run.

Each file is between 2 and 3 minutes long, and just consists of a single beep at the given tempo, so you just try and sync your stride with whatever you’re listening too. I struggled to keep up at first, until I realised I’d started with the 180bpm file. I found 175bpm suited me the best, and 170 was a tiny bit too slow, so it was good to know I was almost at the recommended frequency. As the run progressed I found it easier to stick to 180bpm as well, and I also noticed that staying in sync with the metronome also helped keep me on a nice run pace too.

I’ve got the City2Surf on Sunday, so I might put a 175, a 175 and a 180 on the Shuffle and see how that goes…