high cadence

Cadence is highly individual.  There is a benefit to "expanding your toolbox" by training at cadences outside your comfort zone, but it is generally wrong to make a blanket statement that X cadence is best or more efficient for everyone.

If you spend enough time training at various cadences, your body is smart enough to know which one is working best for you...and the message to your fingers whether to shift gears or not should happen without you ever knowing what your cadence number actually is.

This is the old 'moving bricks' analogy. 2 people, 2 piles of bricks. Guy 1 moves 10 bricks at a time, which is a big load on his arms and is slower to move, but takes fewer trips. Guy 2 moves 2 bricks at a time, which he moves much faster but takes many more trips. They are both the best technique. Guy 1 relies on more muscle strength and Guy 2 relies on his cardio. Similar to cadence. You have a slower cadence so you are relying more on muscle strength to get the job done. Someone rolling at 95 rpms is taking the load off the legs and relying on their heart to get it done. Both work. The only thing I would add is that at greater fitness and higher speeds (when you are pushing all out to break away or bridge a paceline gap check your cadence) that higher cadence prevails.

Everything written above is on the money......but there IS value is spending some time each day spinning as fast as you can.  Go to your easiest gear and see how many RPM's you can get to before you start bouncing all over the place.  Work on increasing that number for a few minutes each day.....it will make you a better overall cyclist as it increases.

Agree. Despite what the internet loves to yell, there IS technique in cycling. Just like a hula hoop, coordinating the muscles to fire in a precise progression takes work and time. high cadence riding, one leg drills, rollers, etc all have great value.

Think some of it may get caught up in descriptive semantics and settling down some triathletes who can get a little extremist. I mean the mindset of if something is good, then more of it is better. But then regularly going through entire sessions doing drills of some sort isn't really productive. Get the effort level where it should be for the workout, then if one is so inclined, add in little bits of this other work within that. One of the things with cycling is that the pathway is fixed, so it's really fairly simple and doesn't really need the same attention that the others do. There still are benefits from it, just no need to go crazy with it. Pedaling fast and/or riding rollers can really take care of a lot with this.

And to say it again with the others, none of this says that average cadence really needs to go anywhere. Just smoothing things out for the touch of efficiency and getting the coordination down so that it's not limiting. Think we did have an example of that in another recent thread. Best power came at at a little higher cadence than was truly comfortable maintaining. One that hasn't come up is that I've had better saddle comfort when I do enough to stay smooth at fast cadences. I'll still tend to average in the 80's most of the time, but can stay smooth for some time up past 120. Maybe well past 120 depending how much I work at it.

If you have a power meter and can try riding same power at difference cadence and you can see how it effects your HR. For me riding with higher cadence raises my HR. Over my tri career I have focused on cadence and changed what I did. There was a time that most of my time trials and shorter races my cadence was in the 95-100 range. Later in my career I did more low cadence work which I found easier to do as my HR is lower for same power for IM distance focus.