Cadence to Power Relationship

Generally, the more power you’re producing the higher the appropriate cadence will be. For me that roughly shakes out as >110rpm for sprinting, ~100 for threshold, ~90 for tempo, ~80 for noodling along. Add in a gradient or a stiff headwind and you can knock ~10 off those numbers (because of inertia). Stick me on a TT bike and you can knock ~5 off those numbers (though I don’t really sprint or noodle on my TT bike).

The question really is whether you actually need to train this or whether the body just figures it out for itself and self-selects an appropriate cadence. My experience has been the latter. But the caveat is that I’ve been riding bikes a long time and have tens of thousands of miles racked up in all sorts of different terrains and conditions. I can see how somebody new to cycling might struggle to work efficiently at higher or lower cadences, and also how this might be exacerbated if they do a lot of training indoors where they’re not being exposed to hills and winds. So it might be worth spending time on high and low cadence drills if this is a limiter for you. But in my view the goal of this training would be to get comfortable at a sufficiently wide range of cadence (e.g. 70-110rpm) that your body can then self-select from within that range. As opposed to aiming for a target number (20 years ago people noticed that Lance Armstrong was cycling up hills at ~110rpm and there were a lot of people asking whether they needed to train to ride up hills at 110rpm. The answer for amateur riders is almost certainly no…).

There are also benefits to training at lower cadence in terms of muscle recruitment and building fatigue resistance. Slightly different conversation though.