Here's something a lot of masters cyclists have never properly examined. Look at the cadence number on your last few rides. For most riders sitting around the 35–55 mark, the average cadence on a steady ride lives somewhere between 78 and 84 rpm. That's not a coincidence and it's not optimal — it's the cadence you fell into in your twenties or thirties, when the body could happily produce force at lower rpm without paying for it. The body riding the bike now isn't that body anymore.
The fix isn't dramatic. It's small. Five to ten rpm higher across most of your riding. The cardiovascular system absorbs the change without complaint. The joints, tendons, and connective tissue thank you for it. And the small efficiency gain shows up across thousands of pedal strokes on every long ride, every climb, every event.
This is one of those cycling fundamentals that's quietly different for masters cyclists than it is for younger riders. Most cadence advice on the internet is written from the perspective of a 25-year-old with healthy knees and a forgiving back. The 50-year-old version of the same advice has different numbers and different reasoning behind them.
What Cadence Actually Changes
Two things, mostly.
Force per pedal stroke. Power equals force times cadence. For the same power output, a higher cadence means less force per pedal stroke. So 200 watts at 95 rpm requires meaningfully less force per stroke than 200 watts at 80 rpm. Less force per stroke means less load through the knee, hip, and lower back — and less muscular fatigue per kilometre.
Cardiovascular vs muscular load. Lower cadences shift work toward the muscular system — recruiting more type II (fast-twitch) fibres and producing more local muscle fatigue. Higher cadences shift work toward the cardiovascular system — heart rate runs slightly higher at the same power, but the muscles are doing less per stroke. Across a long ride, this trade-off matters.
For a younger cyclist, the muscular system has plenty of margin. Force production at 78 rpm doesn't break anything. For a masters cyclist, the muscular and joint margins are thinner, and the cardiovascular system is generally still highly trainable. So shifting work toward the cardiovascular side is usually the right move.
This is one of the points John Wakefield made on the podcast about how Bora-Hansgrohe coach their athletes through different career stages. The young pros can grind. The 35-year-olds in the same team are deliberately encouraged to spin more, both for sustained performance over a stage race and for joint preservation across a career.
What the Pros Actually Do
The reference data from World Tour racing is consistent. Pro cyclists self-select cadences of 85–95 rpm on flat sustained efforts and 80–90 rpm on climbs of moderate gradient. Time trialists sit higher — often 95–105 rpm. Sprinters obviously go higher again on the actual sprint, but their endurance riding sits in similar ranges.
What's interesting is that the elite climbers — the riders the masters cyclist on Strava is silently comparing themselves to — climb at higher cadences than most amateurs realise. Pogačar, Vingegaard, and Roglič climb at 80–95 rpm on most gradients. They don't grind. They spin. The amateur version of the same effort tends to be 65–75 rpm on the same gradient because the rider is in too heavy a gear, fighting the bike instead of dancing on it.
The lesson isn't to copy the pro cadence directly. The lesson is that "ride at whatever cadence feels natural" isn't a position the pros take. They train their cadence. They settle into it deliberately. Most amateurs have inherited their cadence by accident.
The Age-Specific Argument
Three things change with age that affect cadence selection.
Connective tissue stiffens. Tendons, ligaments, and the elastic structures around joints become slightly less compliant. Sustained high force per stroke loads them differently than at 25, and the wear adds up.
Recovery from muscular load slows. A muscular session at 78 rpm leaves more residual fatigue at 50 than at 25 — same kilometres, same watts, more recovery cost. Higher cadence reduces that cost.
Type I (slow-twitch) fibre dominance grows. With age, type II fibres are preferentially lost unless specifically trained. Higher cadence riding fits the type I-dominant physiology better and is less punishing of the muscle composition you actually have.
None of this means masters cyclists should never ride at lower cadence. It means the default cruising cadence should be higher, with deliberate low-cadence work used as a training session rather than the everyday norm.
What Numbers to Aim For
The working ranges for masters cyclists, by terrain and effort:
- Flat steady-state riding: 90–100 rpm. If you're below 85, you're under-spinning.
- Easy zone 2: 85–95 rpm. Slightly lower than tempo simply because power is lower.
- Sustained climbs (3–6%): 85–95 rpm. Spin, don't grind.
- Steep climbs (7%+): 75–85 rpm. Cadence drops naturally; the principle is still "highest you can hold cleanly."
- Sweet spot intervals: 90–100 rpm. Higher cadence makes the effort feel more sustainable.
- VO2max intervals: 95–105 rpm. The intensity benefits from higher cadence.
- Sprints: 100–120 rpm. Maximum effort, peak cadence range.
- Low-cadence torque intervals (specific session): 50–65 rpm. Deliberate, controlled, never the default.
If your typical Saturday ride sits at an average cadence of 78 rpm, the move toward 88–92 is the move most masters cyclists need to make. The change is small but the cumulative effect across years is large.
The Retraining Period
This is the unglamorous part. Cadence isn't a switch you flip — it's a motor pattern that's been wired in for years. Changing it takes deliberate practice over four to six weeks.
The simplest approach:
Week 1. Indoor sessions only. Set a smart trainer or use a head-unit cadence display. Do every ride with conscious cadence in the 90–95 rpm range. It will feel twitchy, breathless, and inefficient. Push through.
Week 2. Continue indoor. The legs start to settle. Breathing pattern adjusts. The cardiovascular system catches up. You stop noticing the cadence as much.
Week 3. Add outdoor rides. Cadence drift will be larger outside. Glance at the head unit every few minutes and bring it back into range.
Week 4–6. The new cadence becomes increasingly automatic. By week six, most cyclists find themselves naturally spinning higher even when they're not paying attention.
After six weeks, the new motor pattern is in. Most cyclists never go back to their old cadence — once you've felt the difference on a long climb, the choice is obvious.
Why Indoor Is the Easier Place to Learn
Outside, your cadence drifts under conditions you don't fully control — wind, gradient changes, traffic, group dynamics. It's harder to maintain a deliberate higher cadence over the duration of a real ride.
Indoors, you control everything. You can set a target cadence, glance at the screen, and stay disciplined. After three or four weeks of indoor practice, the pattern transfers to outdoors more easily than if you'd tried to retrain on the road.
This is one of the useful applications of a smart trainer for masters cyclists. Beyond the structured workout side, it's a controlled environment for relearning the cadence habit that's been off for years.
When Low Cadence Is Right
Don't ditch low-cadence work entirely. Torque intervals — 50–65 rpm at moderate to high intensity for 4–8 minutes — are a useful training stimulus, particularly for building force production and recruiting type II fibres. The low cadence training cycling torque intervals post covers the protocol in detail.
The mistake isn't doing low-cadence sessions. It's making low cadence the default for every ride because your gear selection has been off for a decade. Use low cadence as a deliberate training session, once a week or once every two weeks. Use higher cadence for everything else.
How to Diagnose Your Cadence Problem
A few signs the cadence habit is off:
Average cadence on long rides under 82 rpm. Almost certainly under-spinning.
Climbs feel like a grind in the legs rather than the lungs. You're forcing too much per stroke.
Knee or lower back niggles after long rides. Often a force-per-stroke issue.
Difficulty maintaining intensity on the third hour of a sportive. Muscular fatigue accumulating because each stroke costs more than it should.
Cadence drops dramatically when you fatigue. Marker of an unstable cadence pattern that breaks down under load.
If you've ticked two or more, the retraining is worth doing.
Where Cadence Sits in the Bigger Picture
Cadence is one of those small fundamentals that affects every other metric. The same power becomes harder or easier depending on cadence. Joint load, breathing pattern, fatigue accumulation, fuel use, and recovery all interact with cadence in ways most cyclists never quite see.
For masters cyclists trying to make the most of limited training hours, the cadence fix is one of the cheapest leverage points available. No new kit. No new sessions. Just a deliberate change to the cadence habit — and a few weeks of patience while the body relearns.
This is the kind of detail that separates structured masters training from guesswork. The pros are deliberate about cadence. The athletes John Wakefield and Tim Kerrison build their training around are deliberate about cadence. The self-coached amateur who's never thought about it is leaving a meaningful chunk of comfort, durability, and probably a small amount of speed on the table.
If your training has stalled and you can't figure out why, the Plateau Diagnostic walks through the four-question audit that points you at the actual limiter — including the small foundational habits like cadence that quietly cap progress for years. Four minutes, free.
A Practical Plan for Next Week
If you want to start now, here's the rhythm:
- Look at your last five rides. What was the average cadence on each?
- Pick a target — 5 rpm above your current average is a reasonable first move.
- Set the head unit to display cadence prominently. If you've got a smart trainer, even better.
- Do every ride for the next two weeks at the new target. Indoor preferred for the first week.
- After two weeks, raise the target by another 3–5 rpm if you're still under 90.
- After six weeks, check the average cadence on your standard Saturday ride. It should be 8–12 rpm higher than where it started.
For more on the broader cadence question, the optimal cycling cadence guide covers the wider science. The low cadence training cycling torque intervals post covers the deliberate low-cadence sessions that still belong in the plan. And the masters cyclist guide to getting faster after 40 puts cadence in the bigger picture of training in your forties and fifties.
Most masters cyclists are riding at the cadence the 28-year-old version of themselves chose. The 50-year-old body has different needs. Spinning a touch higher across the next year of riding is one of the smallest changes that pays off the longest.