Insider Journal

Hello Everyone. I’m Jane, I work at Strava, and I love e-bikes!  Today we’re going to talk about why e-bikes are so great, the best way to use Strava with an e-bike, and lastly, chat with Mona and Erika, both Strava employees and e-bike enthusiasts. Before we jump into any of that - let’s talk statistics. According to statista.com, the global e-bike  market in 2021 was worth more than $26 billion and is forecasted to roughly double by 2027. E-bikes are becoming increasingly popular worldwide.  We’re also noticing that more Strava members are using e-bikes. The share of cyclists on Strava with an e-bike ride increased 26% in 2022 compared to 2021.  Europe in particular, is embracing e-bikes. So what’s the big deal? Well, e-bikes have a number of benefits.  Benefits of E-bikes: *Convenient Commuting The pedal assist and increased speed makes e-bikes an excellent option for commuting or just helping you get outside to move y

Greetings! What do backcountry snowboarding and dog ownership have in common you might ask? Both have grown increasingly popular in recent years! I’m here to share some tips for maximizing safety and stoke when venturing into the backcountry with your pup.First, meet Lily! My beloved 5-year-old husky/shepherd mix who loves nothing more than a good romp through the snow. Cold Weather and Long Days  Lily’s athletic build and thick fur coat make her well-suited for snowy backcountry adventures. It’s important to make sure that your dog is able to handle cold weather and long days of strenuous exercise. Shorter-haired breeds can benefit from a doggie jacket to help them stay warm in the snow.  Train, train, train! This is arguably the most important piece of advice, but it’s imperative that you’ve developed a strong bond with your dog through consistent training. Training your dog to obey voice commands and stay away from the edges of skis/snowboards is crucial to ensuring a sa

Strava is proud to announce that our Live Segments can now be ridden in the virtual world on Rouvy! This exciting new feature marks the first time that Strava Live Segments have been available for athletes recording a virtual activity. Find a supported route on Rouvy with Live Segments to compete against the King or Queen of the Mountain (KOM or QOM) or your Personal Record (PR) if you’ve ridden the segment in the past. While previously the changing of seasons meant that competing on Live Segments would need to cease until the return of warmer weather, the inclusion of Strava Live Segments on Rouvy means that your training and competition can continue all year long.   What is Rouvy? Rouvy is an indoor riding app which allows athletes to ride virtually on real world routes through the power of augmented reality and 3D avatars. Learn more about Rouvy on their website at https://rouvy.com/. What are Strava Live Segments? Live Segments give athletes the ability to compete on Strava se

At Strava, our mission is to help people live their best active life. For many of us, one of the goals of being active is to maintain or increase fitness. In this article, we'll talk about your Strava Fitness score (available to Strava Subscribers), how we calculate it, and how it can help you analyze your progress. How to view your Fitness Score: Mobile App: You>Progress>Scroll down  You'll be able to view your Fitness score graph over a number of different timeframes and see how your score has increased or decreased over that time period. In the example above, we're looking at fitness over 6 months and we can see it's increased by 2% over that time period. Web: Training>Fitness & Freshness A couple of things to note about viewing fitness on the Web.  You'll notice the web view shows a change of -7 in fitness. This value differs from the value you see on Mobile, because the Web view value is derived from fitness changes over the last 7 days. The Web

If you are a football/soccer player or enthusiast, you may find this article interesting. Do not worry if you are not an expert in football, I still miss a few offsides when the referee blows his whistle; or, mix-up some professional players' positions but, as with most things in life, it only takes a little bit of passion to get you somewhere— and, if a person is determined enough, those times spent on street matches with careless abandon for any rule may have been the first crucial step to develop the skills they need to get hired by the best football clubs in the world. Given a few more years of hard training and experience, they could be on their way to winning their first Ballon d’Or. The funny thing about football is that you do not really need a very high budget to play it —where I am from, kids learn how to play it in plazas, rules are secondary, and being the top scorer is what matters the most. Nevertheless, over time they learn that one of the most important elements in foot

If you ride with SoulCycle, your Strava journey just got more complete. Now you can now sync SoulCycle rides to Strava and connect your entire active life.Don't forget to join the SoulCycle community to stay in the loop on their official Strava Club For more information on how to connect and more details about this integration, please visit our Knowledge Base article: SoulCycle and Strava Now every time you hit the studio, you'll be able to relive it on Strava.Questions? Drop us a reply below and we'll be happy to help out.

We are happy to announce a new integration that allows F45 members to connect their Lionheart devices to their Strava account via the F45 Training app.  F45 Training is a global fitness and lifestyle community that brings you a complete wellness solution from functional training and HIIT, to nutrition, challenges and accountability. Workouts will automatically upload to Strava, displaying class type and location. Paired with Lionheart, members can track F45 points. Synced activities will include a photo that can be grouped with other athletes who attend the same class as you if they have also set up their app and enabled Group Activities Privacy Controls. Read more about how to set up the new F45 integration here and check out the F45 Training Strava Club to connect with others. And learn how to get a free F45 class here!

Howdy! I’m Clyde and I work on the Community Management team at Strava. I’m also a runner, and like most runners, I have been injured. I’ve always been excited to see more injury and recovery-related features on Strava so when Strava acquired Recover Athletics, I was thrilled I was able to be part of the Community Management team working with Recover. So what's Recover? If you don’t know, Recover is an app meant to help you reduce the risk of injury via personalized routines based on your activity data and an in-app soreness tracker. It provides athletes with warm-ups, drills, general strength routines, lots of prehab activities, and post-activity recovery routines. As hard as I fight it, I continue to grow older and I’ve learned (the hard way) that I need to take better care of my body. I have had to manage a few injuries that require consistent care and this app has helped me keep those injuries at bay through a series of mobility and strength routines and post-activity reminders. T

Any parent will tell you that life changes when you have kids. Exhilaration, joy, exhaustion and increased stress are just some of the experiences reported by parents of young children.   Life can go from ordered and structured to seeming unpredictable and out of control. Many parents report feeling low on both time and energy - two things generally needed for a fitness routine. How then, is it possible to build or maintain fitness while parenting a young child?   We recently caught up with Stephen and Stephanie at their home in Colorado. Stephen works full time for Strava and Stephanie is a mental health therapist working in both private practice and hospital settings. Both are avid Athletes who love the outdoors, and are the parents of one year old Willa. They agreed to share their experience and their tips around staying active and fit when you have a young family. Can you tell us a little bit about your Athletic lives before becoming parents? Stephen: We both ran 5-7 day

New to Strava?  Welcome!  Our mission is to help people live their best active life. Our Getting Started with Strava series is designed to help you get the most of your Strava membership and Subscription. If you've been tracking activities using another App or platform, read on - in this article, we'll provide some tips for importing your historical activity data into your Strava account.   The first step is to determine if your activities are located on a platform that you can connect directly to Strava.  If they are, some of these integrations are designed so that at least a portion of your previous activities will sync automatically.  Some examples of these are Garmin and Apple Health.  Visit this link for the complete list of available integrations.    If you still have un-synced historical activities after setting up any available integrations, the second step is to see if you can get your activity files in one of

Listen up! This one’s important. Well, all of our privacy tips are important, but this one applies to anyone who uses Strava, no matter what you’re here for. Yep, we’re talking about how your Profile and Activities show up (or don’t) on the internet to logged out viewers. Read on to find out what shows up by default, what options you have, and what someone sees when they view your profile or activities without a Strava account. Profile Page Like many other apps, Strava allows you to share your Profile information with people even if they don’t have a Strava account, or if they are logged out. We allow this but we don’t require it. You can use your Privacy Controls to choose the option that suits you. Public profile: If you have Profile Visibility set to “Everyone,” your Profile page will appear in search engine results—even to someone logged out or without a Strava account. Please note, this is the default setting for Strava users unless you’re under 18. To see your full profile, the v

We are happy to announce a new integration that allows Ladder app members to connect to their Strava account via the Ladder app. Currently, this app is only available on iOS and not Android. Ladder gives you a strength training plan that fits into your schedule, every single day. And now you can automatically send your Ladder strength workouts to Strava, combining your running, cycling, and hiking data with your strength training data. Read more about how to set up the new Ladder integration here. FAQs: Do I need to change my activity type? All activities will be uploaded to Strava as the "weight training" activity type.  Can I use the Ladder app on Android? The Ladder app can be used on an iPhone or with an Apple Watch, not Android.  Can I record my heart rate during my activity? For your heart rate to be recorded, the Ladder app must be installed and opened while recording your activity on your Apple Watch.  What dictates the stats shown on the image sent from Lad

New to Strava? Welcome! Our mission is to help people live their best active life. Our Getting Started with Strava series is designed to help you get the most of Strava. In this article, we'll talk about achievements.  Competing with others on Strava through achievements can be a fun and motivating experience. If you prefer focusing solely on your own progress, achievements can also be utilized for personal goals. When you upload an activity with GPS data to Strava as a subscriber, you may be awarded “achievements” for outstanding performances. They include KOMs/QOMs/CRs, Overall Top 10 Leaderboard Placement, Personal Top 3 Placement, and Local Legend. Crowns are awarded to the fastest athlete to date on a segment’s overall leaderboard. A trophy is awarded when you place near the top of an overall segment leaderboard. Trophies exist for 2nd place to 10th place all-time efforts.    Medals are awarded for your best personal performances on a segment. If you clock

Nausea, fatigue, moodiness, these are just a few of the physical signs that come with pregnancy. Trying to maintain your fitness routine while pregnant can be quite challenging. With a number of colleagues at Strava who have experienced pregnancy, we took a poll to find out their experiences. Here’s what we found:        We also asked employees to share their best tips on fitness and pregnancy. Here's what they had to say:                       Can you relate? We would love to hear your experiences and tips! Drop us a reply below. Postpartum? Check out this post about how one mom incorporated running after giving birth. 

New to Strava? Welcome! Our mission is to help people live their best active life. Our Getting Started with Strava series is designed to help you get the most of Strava. In this article, we'll talk about tracking performance. Strava provides a variety of features to track your performance against yourself and others. Whether you’re interested in tracking distance, time, speed, or other data points, we provide numerous tools and features to help. This article isn’t intended to be a comprehensive description of all our tracking tools; today I’m going to talk about my 3 favorites: segments, goals and relative effort.   Segments Segments are available for GPS based activities and define a portion of a route – such as a climb, or a section of a trail or road Each time you complete a segment, your time is recorded and your speed is calculated. If you're recording heart rate and/or power meter data, we’ll also show your average heart rate and power output With a Strava subscription, you

Strava integrates with a wide range of devices and platforms.  Today we're going to talk about the Strava/Apple Watch integration and share some commonly asked questions.You can record and upload activities from your Apple Watch to Strava one of two ways: using the Strava watch app or the native Apple Fitness app. With the Strava watch app, activities are synced directly to the Strava mobile app on your phone. Using Apple Fitness, activities are stored in Apple Health and synced to Strava once a connection between the two apps has been established. 3rd party activities (from Zwift, for example) uploaded to Strava can be synced to Apple Health, however 3rd party activities synced to Apple Health will not be available for import to Strava. If you are using the Strava watch app and have a Strava subscription, you will have access to Beacon functionality, which when enabled will automatically send a text to your chosen safety contact during your activity.Frequently Asked Questions:I want t

Polar is officially joining the crew of partners that will now be able to sync Strava Routes to their devices! Athletes with a Strava Subscription can sync their Strava Routes to the following Polar watches: Grit X Grit X Pro Grit X2 Pro Pacer Pro Vantage V Vantage V2 Vantage V3 V650 V800 The unique thing with Routes on your Polar watch is that it allows you to follow a route in multiple directions (forward and reverse) and even start your route part-way through in both directions.  This allows for more flexibility in how you want to follow a route to best suit your needs.  If you have a Polar Vantage V3 or a Grit X2 Pro you can also download offline maps that will allow your device to also guide you to your Strava routes, or the nearest point if you start mid way through. You can read more about the offline map features here on Polar's website: https://support.polar.com/en/polar-maps For more information about how to sync your Routes to your P

We are happy to announce a new integration that allows you to connect the Open app to Strava. The Open app allows you to access thousands of on-demand and live broadcasted breathwork, meditation, and movement classes.  Find out more here. You can connect the Open App to Strava and share your classes in two ways: Share media to Strava activities that are already synced to your account.  This will append media to existing Strava activities, to provide a more holistic view of all the activities you complete in your training. Create a new activity on Strava from classes recorded with the Open app.  The new activity will still include that amazing media from Open. Read more about how to set up the new Open integration here. Questions?  We would be happy to hear from you.  Drop us a reply to this article, or if you prefer, you can submit a support ticket and someone from our Support Team will be in touch.  

More than 10 years ago, I joined Strava to help bolster the app’s core functionality, such as mobile GPS recording (still new at the time) and much more. As we grew, my role evolved as we shifted our focus to our external API. A deeper investment in our developer ecosystem enabled us to evolve our services and establish a model where connecting to Strava was indispensable to growth, especially for tracking apps. As a result, today, we have over 85,000+ applications in our connected ecosystem, including partners like Garmin, Oura, Peloton, Zwift, Whoop, VeloViewer, and many more. Over a decade later, I am proud to have collaborated with an incredible team to transform Strava into the unifying platform for all GPS devices, workout and fitness apps, and other tools serving our global community of active people. Of course, none of these milestones would have been possible without you – the developers building the amazing apps that connect to our API. Not much has changed since we set on o

Strava challenges, perhaps one of the most popular and long-standing features of the Strava product! When I first started working at Strava, challenges mainly consisted of cumulative challenges referred to as the MTS (Monthly Training Series), Strava Races (10k, half marathon), the Gran Fondo and a few hosted by some of our partners. Back then, we only had run or ride activity types and in order to participate your activities had to be public in order to reflect on the challenge leaderboard. At one point we even offered the opportunity to purchase unique gear like cycling and running kits for those who completed them. Shout out to anyone who remembers the rainbow of jersey colors (and the one athlete our distribution center accidentally shipped several boxes of foam swords to - are you still out there?). At that time, Strava Challenges seemed pretty far out of reach for me - more of a weekend warrior type who was maybe able to get in a few miles a week on the bike with friends.

New to Strava?  Welcome!  Our mission is to help people live their best active life. Our Getting Started with Strava series is designed to help you get the most of your Strava membership and Subscription. In this article, we'll talk about recording and uploading swimming activities to Strava.     How to Record: The Strava Mobile Phone Apps do not support swimming, but many swim and multi-sport devices are compatible with Strava.  Visit this link for a list of some compatible devices   Additionally, the Strava app for Apple Watch can record swimming activities but without GPS (distance and pace will not be reflected on the activity.)  For Athletes using Android watches running the Wear OS3 App, the Strava Wear OS3 App can record outdoor, GPS based swims. It doesn't support indoor swimming.   Insider Tips: GPS/Outdoor swimming: It is important to note that water can impact the ability for your device to connect and recor

New to Strava?  Welcome!  Our mission is to help people live their best active life. Our Getting Started with Strava series is designed to help you get the most of your Strava membership and Subscription. In this article, we'll talk about recording and uploading your virtual activities to Strava.   What is a virtual activity?  Indoor training with virtual GPS has become popular in recent years.  Virtual training platforms have revolutionized and gamified the way Athletes and fitness enthusiasts engage in indoor riding, running and rowing.  They make working out indoors fun, because you can train and compete (with others and yourself) in an engaging virtual world.   Virtual Ride/Run/Row activities are activity recordings that contain GPS data, distance, elevation, and time data from a simulated route.  Requirements: a smart trainer a subscription to a virtual training platform a connection between your training platform and your S

You are a new mama and everything is evolving, reevaluating and it is not all rainbows and sunshine. You scour the internet for hours, Google searching every little thing, pretty sure my search history for the first few months looked a little alarming. And of course the newborn fog, sleep deprivation, and suffering postpartum anxiety…That being said, getting back on the bike and picking up running again were what helped keep me going.  Bug was born in June of 2018, and the next day I muscled up a half mile walk down to our neighbors house. And no, I do not recommend that to new mamas but please listen to your body! A few days later I was back up to my mile loop and Bug was loving her stroller. But it hasn’t been an easy journey. Running was always my escape but now I felt like I not only had to relearn how to run but also now had this adventure of navigating running with my new little shadow. Our stroller became my freedom. Forcing me to get out of the house and paving the road b

Group Challenges When Strava launched Group Challenges in 2021, I was extremely excited -- Up until that point, my friends and I had been tracking monthly challenges in a spreadsheet where we each logged if we had worked out that day and for how long. It was very motivating, though incredibly tedious. That all changed once we were able to make a Group Challenge on Strava (where we’re all recording our activities anyway), and it made our lives instantly better while pushing us toward our individual goals. How to access the feature Mobile: Groups > Active > Create a Group Challenge(Not available on web) How we use Group Challenges I predominantly go on walks, weight lift, and do indoor activities like pilates, yoga, and boxing. So my Strava activities look much different from my friends who cycle, run, or do team sports. This also means that the way that I set goals tends to be different from folks who may have a mileage or elevation goal. Overall, I'd say I’m not a particularly at