Originally Posted by
RollCNY
Cadence sensor great, but don't kill your self over the people saying 80 or 90. Figure out what your current natural is (mine was 60) and try to improve on it incrementally. If you force yourself to make too big of a jump too soon, you just waste energy. It took half a season for my average to go from 60 to 70. But all the advice about shifting to keep your target cadence is spot on.
I was saying 80-90 because that's the aerobic range, very similar to what people do when they're out for a jog. That's the cadence range I try to stick to when I'm riding for speed or fitness.
Now, a lot of the time when I'm on my short ride to work and back, I'm probably in the 60-70 range instead. I'm just not riding that hard, and that's more of a walking pace -- indeed, 60 rpm, or 120 beats per minute, is the default tempo for playing marching music (Sousa, King, etc).
When a rider is mashing a tall gear and pedaling slower than that... that's when they worry me. That's like climbing stairs with a heavy load or doing leg presses the entire time. If they're just tooling along on the boardwalk, that's fine; but if they're trying to climb or put out a lot of power, they're probably going to hurt themselves.