You Can Hit 200 BPM But Not 140 — How to Fix It
You can play slow with your full legs. No problem. You can switch to ankle technique and rip past 200. But somewhere in the middle — right around 120 to 150 — it all falls apart.
There's a specific physical reason that hole exists. A lab actually measured it last year. And there's a complete three-part fix.
THE GEARBOX PROBLEM
Think about driving a car. The gearbox gives you six gears, and each one is built to run best at a certain speed. Use first gear to do second gear's job and it might manage — but it taxes the whole engine. Push first gear to do third gear's job and it fails.
Your legs are the exact same. You've got a gear for slow, a gear for fast, and a hole where the middle gears should be.
To fix it, you have to understand what each gear actually is.
THE FAST GEAR IS A PHYSIOLOGICAL REFLEX
Your top-end speed is you tapping into an automatic reflex.
You've seen someone at a cafe bouncing their leg a hundred miles an hour under the table without thinking about it. That fast, automatic shake is an ankle tremor. In 2025, researchers wired up 18 professional metal drummers and measured exactly what ankle technique is doing. Their finding: when you play fast with your ankles, your body is running a physiological tremor — the same involuntary oscillation everyone has, except - trained to a high degree of control. Most of the loop is a reflex. That's exactly why, once it kicks in, it feels effortless and almost plays itself.
Here's the problem: a reflex like that has a favorite speed. The drummers in the study were most comfortable right around 189 BPM, inside a narrow band topping out near 220. Go below 140 and the tremor switches off completely — the reflex needs the speed to keep bouncing.
So if your fast playing is built entirely on this tremor, you can rip at 200 and still completely fall apart in the middle range.
THE SLOW GEAR IS BUILT FOR FORCE, NOT SPEED
Your slow gear is the upper leg piston — hips, hamstrings, quads. Powerful, controlled, the same muscles you walk and run with. But it's biologically built for force, not speed.
How fast can the big leg engine actually go? Usain Bolt hits about four and a half steps per second at a top sprint. World-class track cyclists cap out around 120 to 140 pedal strokes a minute. Put those numbers on drum pedals — two feet, playing 16th notes — and you get 67 to 70 BPM. And those are elite athletes we're talking about.
One caveat: runners and cyclists drive their full body weight through a stride. You're moving a pedal a couple of centimeters. Strip away the load and the big motion, and that's why almost any beginner can play 60 to 70 BPM double bass in their first week. With solid training, you can roughly double that threshold — it's where most genuinely consistent drummers land. But don't let "double it" sound small. Doubling your leg speed is serious work. And pushing full leg past that, towards 170, means asking your legs to oscillate at elite human level. That's why so many drummers grind full leg for years and never reach 170.
There's one exception: Chris Turner of Oceans Ate Alaska plays 220-plus on upper leg alone. But he's the Usain Bolt of drumming — there is only one of him. For the rest of us, chasing that is too much work to sustain, especially if you want to be enjoying double bass well into your 40s and 50s. I'm turning 40 next year. I'd rather work smart.
THE HOLE
Your slow gear tops out around 135 to 140 BPM. Your fast gear lives comfortably above 189 and gets impossibly hard the slower you drive it.
Two gears. They hardly touch. That's your hole.
THE THREE-PART FIX
We have to build the bridge across the hole. This takes two exercises and produces 3 fixes.
Fix 1 — the ankle side. Instead of relying on the automatic tremor, which only fires up high, you build a controlled version of the same motion: an ankle rotation. Start dead slow down at 60 - 80bpm, where the tremor would never fire on its own, and consciously drive the motion. This can only be done with the heel down floor exercise. Then raise it — to 140 bpm, 160 bpm. I took mine to 200 bpm. Same rotation, now controlled at every speed instead of only in the tremor's comfort zone.
Fix 2 — the leg side. Train your upper leg piston to 140 BPM. Before you protest: we're only asking for 140 on a smaller movement, which is comfortably inside the biological limit. That's why I prescribe floor hip exercises, take that up to a controlled 140 BPM from the upper leg alone.
Fix 3 — the overlap. This one happens as a result of the first two. The controlled ankle rotation now reaches down into the mid-range hole. The trained piston reaches up into it. The two gears finally overlap, and your body can do what it always needed to do at every tempo: pick the smartest blend of upper leg and ankle for the job, instead of being forced to rely on either gear alone.
The hole is gone. And that's how you can play any tempo more easily. You have a complete gearbox that's efficient for every job.
WHERE IS YOUR GAP?
Every drummer's hole sits in a slightly different place. Before you train the bridge, find out exactly where yours is.
Take the free AODB Speed Audit. Two minutes. You'll get your current level and true BPM on screen, and the diagnosis and fix.
Take the Speed Audit: https://bit.ly/doublebass-speed-audit
Practice + Patience = Progress
Wei Lung