Cadence — steps and revolutions per minute in your .fit file
Cadence is one field name hiding two different measurements, and the running one is routinely reported at half its real value.
Open your file
Drop your file here
a .fit file from a watch or bike computer
No account. No upload. The file is read on this device and never leaves it.
Nothing has been sent anywhere. 0 requests to this site, for the page's own code.
Running cadence is per-leg, not per-step
FIT records running cadence as revolutions per minute — full stride cycles, which is one leg. So a runner at a brisk turnover writes a cadence field of around ninety, and the familiar steps-per-minute figure is double that. A reader that prints the raw field reports it as if you were barely moving; the steps-per-minute convention is something the file assumes you know, not something it states. This is the single most common cadence misread.
Cycling cadence is crank RPM, and it is direct
For cycling the same field means crank revolutions per minute, and there is no doubling — the number in the file is the cadence a cyclist means. So the identical field, cadence, is a per-minute count of two different things depending on the sport, and a tool that applies the running doubling to a bike file, or fails to apply it to a run, gets one of them wrong. The sport in the file decides which rule applies.
Read your cadence correctly here
This page reads the cadence field on your device and interprets it by the file’s sport — steps per minute for a run, crank RPM for a ride — so the number matches what you actually did. It runs locally and uploads nothing.
This is one field among many. Open your .fit file to see every field it holds, or the activity-type list for what each sport records.