Strava Features Complete Overview

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What is Strava?

Strava is a feature-rich platform that enables athletes to connect with one another, find motivation, explore new places, and memorialize and track your athletic journeys. Whether you're here to track your own progress, keep up with your friends, or compete in our virtual competitions and leaderboards, there is something for everyone. We've compiled this comprehensive list of our features and tools to help you navigate and get the most out Strava.

Feature and Tool Glossary

Organized into sections, use the links below for quick access. 

• Activities
• Record and Upload
• You/Your Profile
• Athletes
• Segments
• Achievements
• Training
• Challenges
• Routes
• Subscription
• Community Safety
• Miscellaneous

Activities

Activities of all sorts can be memorialized on Strava as part of your athletic lives. Whether they are short, long, indoor, or outdoor, all are welcome to be tracked and analyzed. See more information for run and ride pages.

Upload via Strava app: Use our mobile or watch apps to record and upload directly to your Strava account. 

Upload by file: If you have an activity file in GPX, JSON, TCX, or FIT format you can upload them to your Strava account.

Create a Manual Activity: If you did not record an activity with a device, you can create an entry manually to account for relevant metrics like length, time, elevation, etc. A map will not be generated or displayed for these entries due to the lack of GPS data, however, you can add a photo or video to your manual activity.

My Activities: A place to view and filter your activities by various metrics or keywords.

Activities Detail Page:  After an activity is uploaded, you will see a holistic view of your activity complete with stats, a map, and additional features. 

• Title: We’ll provide an automatic title based on time of day and sport, however, we love when our community gets creative!
• Description: Text field used to describe or provide additional context to your activity. You even have the option to @ mention other athletes if you like. 
• Private Notes: You can use this space to document details about an activity that you want to only be visible to you. Some people like to keep track of their nutrition or other personal information that influenced their activity.
• Type of Activity: Strava supports a variety of sport types from foot to wheel, indoor to outdoor. In many cases, you can use additional subtypes to designate it as a workout, race, indoor activity or commute. 
• Gear: You can add bikes or shoes to your profile and track distance over time to help you stay on top out when to replace certain items. You can even opt to receive an email notification when you reach a certain mileage on your added shoes to remind you it's time for a new pair. Shoe notifications are managed from the gear page and can only be done from the Strava website.
• Social Sharing: You can share your details about your Strava activity on social apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Most social apps installed on your phone will support this sharing feature.
• Matched Activities: Strava subscribers can benchmark themselves against past performances on their most common, personalized routes. This feature is currently available for select sports.
• Sharing activity with friends: Invite a friend who was with you but didn't record their activity on Strava. You can invite friends regardless of whether they're already on Strava.
• Kudos: Kudos are a quick thumbs-up you can give to your fellow athletes to congratulate them.
• Comments: Athletes can leave comments on activities, posts, achievements, completions, Challenge, Race or Goal entries, etc .
• Group Activities: This automatic feature detects if you recorded your activity at the same time as other users on the same route. When a group activity is detected, your activity becomes linked to any matching activities.
• Photos & Videos: Add videos and photos any time after completing an activity.
• Flyby: Flyby is a Strava Labs tool that lets you playback your activity, as well as those near you, on a map and timeline.
• Weather: Your activity page will display the weather during your activity using data from Dark Sky.
• Map Types: The activity’s polyline will be displayed as a gradient of color based on the chosen data.
• Stats
• Most or all of: Speed/Pace, Elevation, Distance, Time calculated off GPS data, Heart Rate, Cadence, Power.
• Charts & Graphs for data analysis.

• Tools
• Refresh Activity Achievements: Regenerate your achievements for any activity if they do not appear or are incorrect.
• Edit activity map visibility: Hide portions of your activity map from other Strava athletes.
  • Create Route: Automatically create a route from an activity.
  • Correct Distance: If you suspect there is a problem with the distance recorded by your device you have the option to override your device's distance with the Strava post-upload approach. 
  • Correct Elevation: Same as above but for elevation.
  • Create Segment: Create a segment from a portion of your activity.
    
  • Flag: This tool removes the activity from segment leaderboards if the activity is deemed inauthentic or problematic by the community. 
  • Delete: Delete an activity from your Strava account.
    
• Split: Use the activity split tool to split one activity into multiple ones.
• Crop: The crop tool can be used to trim unwanted, inaccurate, or motor-assisted parts of an activity.
• Edit: This actions opens a variety of tools to help correct or add various metrics/data/images to your activity. 
• Achievements: See various achievements depending on what you’ve accomplished. 

Record and Upload 

Strava accepts properly formatted workout files in FIT, TCX, GPX, and JSON. 

Mobile app

• Recording: Use the Strava iOS or Android apps to record an activity. Choose from tons of sport types, wait for GPS (if outdoors), and hit record!
• Beacon: A practical safety feature that allows you to share your real-time location with your family and friends when recording with the Strava mobile app.
• Live Segments: See a live bird's eye view of your progress towards benchmarks on a segment.
• Audio Cues: Start, stop, pause, splits, live segments.
• Bluetooth HR Connection: The Strava mobile app (version 169 or higher) currently supports Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) heart rate monitors.
• Phone Widgets
• iOS: Use the widget to track their weekly mileage. Strava subscribers can track the progress of their weekly goals. 
• Android: Start a recording, show basic stats, and show daily progress. 

Apple Watch: Record your activities using the Strava app for Apple Watch. 

Android Wear: Record your activities using the Strava app for Android Wear. 

You/Your Profile

The profile page is a great place to see a summary of your activities.

Privacy Settings: Settings to control how you show up on various surfaces across Strava, such as your profile, activities, group activities, flyby, metro/heatmap, among others. 

Trophy Case: Where completed challenge badges are displayed.

Gear: Ability to track mileage on shoes or bike components. Receive notifications when your shoes reach a certain distance. 

Personal Heatmap: Strava subscribers can create personal heatmaps to visualize the ground they’ve covered worldwide.

Stats:

• Yearly & All-Time Stats: Personal stats including averages for the last four weeks, totals for the year, and all-time totals. These stats are currently only available for running, riding, and swimming activities. 
• Estimated Best Efforts: Estimated Best Efforts calculate your fastest times for benchmark distances such as 1 mile, 5km, 10km, and half marathon. A Best Effort for a given distance can be calculated at any point in your activity and is not related to your splits.
• All-Time PRs: PRs, short for Personal Records, are manually entered data that will appear on your profile page under My Stats. PRs can be linked-to official race results and Strava activities, shown in blue on your profile.
• Biggest Climb: The biggest single, uninterrupted climb segment that you have completed. In order to qualify to be your Biggest Climb, that climb segment must be matched to your ride. 
• Longest Ride: This stat links to the longest ride (in distance) you’ve completed on Strava. 
• Last 4 week stats: Your average distance per week and your average time per week for runs, rides, and swims are displayed based on your last 4 weeks of activities. Fun fact: we take these average values to estimate your moving time for routes.

Export: There are two ways to export your data from Strava: bulk export all of your data in the manner in which it was uploaded, or download individual activities from each activity detail page in GPX, TCX, or original file format. 

Notifications: Receive email, web, mobile or push notifications for various events. 

Strava Widget/Embeds: Individual activities, a list of your recent rides or runs, or a summary of your last week of running or riding can be embedded on your blog or webpage. 

Performance Settings

• Pace Zones: Understand your pace zones to better align your workouts with your goals. Edit your profile to add a recent race or time trial and Strava will create custom pace zones for you. Pace data is bucketed into these zones using Grade Adjusted Pace (GAP), showing you how long you spent in each pace zone.
• Heart Rate Zones: By default, we determine your heart rate zones by estimating your max heart rate based on your age. For those athletes who know their specific heart rate zones, we allow you to customize them to fit your specific physiology. Heart rate data is bucketed into zones, showing you how long you spent in each.
• Functional Threshold Power (FTP): Your Functional Threshold Power (FTP) is the maximum average power that you can hold for one continuous hour. Strava uses FTP to help give you insights on how you're trending in terms of fitness, freshness, fatigue, and more.

Athletes

Followers & Following: Following is a way for athletes to subscribe to other athletes' activities on Strava.

• Favorites: You can add an athlete you follow to your favorites if you would like to see their new activities towards the top of your feed. 
• Notifications: You can opt to receive a notification each time an athlete uploads an activity. 
• Blocking: Prevent another athlete from seeing your activities or following you.
  
• Mute Athlete: You can mute an athlete you follow to hide the athlete's activity from your feed. You will no longer see their activities, posts, challenges, or club joins. Strava will not let the athlete know that you have muted them.

Pros: Strava Pros are professional athletes who are passionate about Strava and our community.

Verified Athletes: The orange verified athlete badge certifies that profiles of certain notable public figures are authentic. 

Find and invite friends (web, iPhone, Android): Strava gets even more fun when you find and invite friends. Following friends opens up a world of social interaction and gets the competitive spirit going. You can invite friends via email or Facebook.

Suggested Follows: Strava will recommend people you can follow. Look on your Dashboard for the Suggest Friends list on the right side of the page.

Mentions: To mention an athlete in a comment or activity description, enter the ‘@’ symbol and begin typing the name of the athlete you wish to mention.

Segments

Small sections of your GPS-based activities where your time is recorded. Athletes can compare themselves against other athletes (subscribers) or against yourself (free) on portions of your route. 

Creation: Strava users can create public or private segments to mark noteworthy parts of their activities. 

Leaderboards and Leaderboard Filters: On segment leaderboards, athletes can compare themselves on portions of their activities against other athletes on Strava. Comparing segment times on leaderboards is for subscribers only.

Your Segment Results: My Results will list all of your segment efforts in ascending order by segment time. You can compare your time, speed (or pace), heart rate, power, or the date the segment was completed to track your progress. 

My Segments: Athletes can create segments based on existing GPS activities. Segments can be created as public or private segments and will be saved in the ‘Created Segments’ tab under ‘My Segments’.

Starred Segments: Athletes can star their favorite segments and they will saved under ‘My Segments’ in their Strava profile. Starred segments will be used as Live Segments in the app and on compatible third party devices for subscribers.

Segment Detail Page: The segment detail page shows a complete overview of the segment's map, elevation profile, stats, current leaders, and all eligible competitors.

Compare Efforts: A tool that allows Strava subscribers to compare performances on segments.

Achievements

When you upload an activity to Strava, you may be awarded “achievements” for outstanding performances. These achievements can be a crown, a trophy, a medal, or a laurel crown.

Local Legend: The laurel crown indicates that you are the Local Legend of a segment. To earn the Local Legend achievement, you must match to the segment more times than any other athlete in the past 90 days.

XOM: King of the Mountain (KOM) or Queen of the Mountain (QOM) indicates that you have the fastest time on a segment. 

CR: Stands for ‘Course Record’ in which you are awarded a crown. The crown indicates the fastest overall performer on a given segment.

PRs: These medals are awarded to signify your personal best on a segment. They come in gold, silver, and bronze for your top 3 fastest times.

Best Efforts: Estimated Best Efforts calculate your fastest times for benchmark distances such as 1 mile, 5km, 10km, and half marathon. Best efforts are calculated based on your total elapsed time.

Training

Strava has a variety of tools to track your training, fitness, fatigue, freshness, and progress towards goals.

Training Log: Visual representation of training data week over week. Ability to filter by sport type, time, distance, elevation, or relative effort. 

Training Calendar: Visual representation of training data month to month with overall totals. 

Goals: Available on both web and mobile, you can create goals for distance, elevation, time, segments, and power for all applicable sport types.

Relative Effort: An estimate of your activity’s effort based on Heart Rate data, power data or Perceived Exertion.

Fitness and Freshness: Measuring training progress over time based on HR/Power data.

Power Curve: For Cyclists only, maximum power sustained over a given time interval.

Training Plans: Cycling & Running Plans - Free for subscribers.

Challenges

Strava offers several types of challenges as a fun way to motivate people to push themselves and accomplish a specific goal. Challenges can last a day, several days, or even an entire month. They can have individual or group goals, and you may see challenges that ask you to meet a certain distance, elevation, time goal, match a segment or be active for a certain number of days.

Strava Challenges: Monthly Challenges based on time, distance, elevation, activities.

Sponsored Challenges: Athletes can get rewards (gift cards, discounts, merch) from sponsors for completing challenges. A digital trophy will be awarded upon completion.

Group Challenges: Create custom challenges for athletes up to 25 participants.

Badges/Trophies: Receive a digital completion or milestone badge on your profile.

Clubs

Clubs: Any of our supported sports can be a club on Strava— from friendly groups and casual clubs to racing teams.

Verified Clubs: The verified badge allows athletes to quickly identify authentic clubs on Strava.

Club Leaderboards: The club leaderboard shows a ranked list of club members with sortable stats for the current and previous weeks. The leaderboard will be customized based on the club's sport type. 

Events: Create recurring or one-time-only club events and attach a Strava Route.  

Posts: Communicate with other club members by posting important information, discussion topics, etc. 

Routes

Create routes from activities, suggestions, or from scratch with Strava's powerful route builder. 

Route Builder: Subscribed athletes can create a route of their own with various tools and filters such as “Most direct” or “most popular” route. Subscribers can save and download or export their routes to follow on their compatible devices.

Offline Routes: Routes will be available to download to your phone for offline use. Star a route to save it and find it in the Routes section under your Profile.

Trail details: Aggregated and anonymized athlete data help users understand when the best season would be to participate in a hike, understand average completion times, and which days of the week are busiest. 

Create routes from activities: Subscribed athletes may view activities other athletes have completed and create routes directly from within the Activity map.

Share Routes: Your publicly available routes are shareable using the “Share” button while viewing the route. You can also copy the URL of the route you are viewing to share with others.

Use Route (Follow Route) on mobile: Subscribed athletes may select one of their saved routes to follow while completing their activities outdoors. 

Trail Networks: When subscribed athletes are looking for a new trail activity such as a Trail Run or Hike, Strava will show areas of interest - or trail networks - for suggested routes of various skill level and desired experience. 

Route Suggestions: Suggested routes use the data we have available. They may not be perfect and conditions may change, so always use your best judgment, be safe, and follow the rules of the road or trail.

Points of Interest: Points of Interest are community-powered local hot spots that help you get around and make your runs, rides, and hikes safer and more fun. Hot spots could include bike shops, cafes, water fountains, restrooms, photo spots, and other popular sites.

Heatmaps (Personal & Global): A personal heatmap is an imprint of your cumulative experience on Strava. Displayed as a heatmap, you are able to see where you have completed various activities most frequently or where you haven’t visited at all. You can use your Personal Heatmap as a layer when creating routes using the Route Builder. 

A Global heatmap is available for viewing on the web, in the Maps Tab, or while using the Route Builder. It allows you to see all the previous publicly available athlete activity within the last year. The Global heatmap only displays public data and is updated on a monthly basis. Areas with low activity count may not appear on the Global heatmap.

Beacon: You can use Strava Beacon when recording with the Strava mobile app to share your real-time location with your family and friends.

Driving Directions: Subscribed athletes will see a prompt for driving navigation from their current location to the location of the route starting point. 

Start Points: Using aggregated and anonymized community data, subscribed athletes will be able to find popular start points among athletes for various sport types.

Saved Routes: Routes you saved in the Route Builder, Maps Tab, or another athlete’s activity will be available here as well as any Routes you uploaded as a GPX file.

Subscription

Get even more out of Strava by subscribing to our paid plan. Read about our subscription features here. 

Subscription perks: Subscribers can take advantage of a variety of discounts ranging from cycling insurance, to nutrition, to training plans. 

Gifting: Buy a one-year subscription for a friend or family member. You can gift a subscription to anyone, whether they are currently on Strava or not.

Free Trials: Trials will be available from time to time. Keep an eye out for yours!

Student Discounts: Strava offers a 50% discount on annual subscriptions to students.

Community Safety

Privacy Settings: If your activities take place in areas you consider sensitive (near home, workplaces, friends’ houses, or other sensitive locations, etc) or if you simply want an elevated level of privacy, use your privacy controls to limit your exposure.

• Profile privacy: Control who sees your profile details. 
• Activity privacy: Your activity privacy controls allow you to restrict access to your activity details page to everyone, followers, or just you.
• Map visibility settings: You have the ability to hide portions of your activity map from other Strava athletes. 
• Grouped Activities: Set your Group Activity privacy controls to “Everyone” if you don’t mind other athletes seeing you were part of a group. Set your Group Activity privacy controls to “Followers” if you prefer that only your followers or those you follow can see you were part of a group.
• Flyby: Flyby is a Strava Labs tool that lets you playback your activity, as well as those near you, on a map and timeline. Flyby is off by default, however you have the ability to opt in if you want your activities to be included in Flybys.

Reporting: We rely on our members to behave in accordance with our Community Standards and adhere to the Terms of Service, but unfortunately they sometimes do not. Because of that, we have a community reporting tool you can use to report violations of these standards and terms.

• Segments
• Videos
• Photos
• Profiles
• Comments

Flag: A community tool to flag segments or activities

• Activities as invalid or erroneous: This tool removes the activity from segment leaderboards if the activity is deemed inauthentic or problematic by the community.
• Segments as hazardous: Flagging a segment as hazardous is a way for a Strava member to alert the community of potential concerns.

Miscellaneous

Posts: Post stories, questions, gear tips, race reports, recommendations, workouts, and more in addition to activity uploads in your Strava feed.

TDF Hub: The Tour de France (TDF) and Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift (TDFFAZ) will live on a unique Strava content experience dedicated to telling stories of the Peloton through their daily activity breakdowns of key segments, uploads from each stage, and access to unique athlete experiences

Recover Athletics: Subscribers have access to the Recover Athletics mobile app, which helps thousands of runners solve nagging pain and prevent injuries through different stretching and exercise routings. 

Feed: See friends’ activities and other events in your feed. 

• Feed ordering: Order items chronologically or algorithmically.