What is Strava?
Strava is the Swedish verb to “strive” and the company classes Strava as a community for athletes. While the numbers are rather small in terms of major social networks – which can boast hundreds of millions of users – Strava holds up well against other fitness platforms.
Strava is entirely focused towards athletes. Much of what Strava offers is about the analysis of your performance and importantly, keeping track of your training. The social aspects of Strava really hang off your activities, but in short, it’s a tool for those who exercise.
Usefully, it is a universal platform that all athletes can use, regardless of which device or platform they used to capture their sports data with originally.
Who uses Strava?
There are some activities that Strava really favours and that’s cycling and running.
While you can record other activities – from hiking to yoga – Strava is at its best when analysing performance and providing interesting comparisons for routes – which really appeals to cyclists and runners.
With lots of users pouring in lots of data, Strava is great for viewing routes, comparing Segments (parts of a route), but essentially, keeping track of your own performance and training goals.
Strava main features
The main elements of Strava breakdown as follows: recording your activity, your feed, your training and performance, routes and segments, and finally challenges. Strava also has a heatmap of your training – which found fame when it hit headlines and caused a greater focus on privacy across the platform – while some features are more prominent on the website than they are in the app.
Activity feed
The activity feed is basically the home screen of Strava, where you’ll see posts detailing the activities of the people you follow, as well as your own. Rather than scrolling through a collection of manual posts or shared memes, most of these are often synced from users’ training devices – be that Apple Watch, Garmin, Fitbit or others.
Manual posts can be created, but these aren’t so common; you can also post photos but again, photos are associated with activities.
Activities can be recorded in Strava itself as well as manually added and for those with no tracking device; recording in the Strava app is often a useful route.
You can comment on an activity, give kudos and share posts – and one of the great things that Strava offers is the ability to share group events or include other users on your activity if they didn’t have anything to track it with themselves, or if you just happen to be exercising with someone else.
You can tap through into an activity to get more detail about it – beyond speed or distance, you can look at power output, heart rate, speed, or any other metrics the original athlete shared – as well as examining the route. You can save routes other users have shared so you can use that route yourself, if you’re a subsciber.
The Strava smartphone app also has a friend finder on the Feed page – it’s a social network after all and making connections is part of what you’re supposed to do.
Groups
The Groups section in the app covers a range of features which expand on your Strava experience. It covers Challenges (in the app – the website has a separate tab for Challenges) and club search. Originally these were in a section called Explore – which still exists on the Strava website – but that was dropped in favour of boosting the mapping offering in the app.
Challenges will let you sign-up to various things to try and get you motivated, like a distance, climb or duration goal for a week or month. Some of these are sponsored with some rewards, like a discount at a store for taking part in a particular challenge. It’s a bit of fun.
There are clubs you can find and follow, some of these are commercial companies sharing content – a little more like you’d find on a Facebook page, for example, but there are also some more local clubs that will share routes and events, like organised rides – and again, you can steal a club’s planned route if you want to have a go on your own.
Mapping and routing in Strava
Maps and routes are one of the major elements of any sports-based service, and during 2021, Strava updated its app to introduce a Maps section and expand the mapping features to more closely reflect the functionality of the website.
As we’ve said, routes are logged against activities, mostly from athletes syncing rides from GPS devices, be that a Garmin watch or a Wahoo bike computer. We’ve also mentioned that you can log activities through the smartphone app, using it as a tracking app – and this is popular with athletes who strap on an armband or handlebar mount the phone, open the app and hit record.
The maps in Strava come from Mapbox and are custom for Strava, including satellite, hybrid and standard views, the latter showing plenty of mapping features like isobars and some terrain shading, so you can see terrain features at a glance.
In the smartphone app
The maps you get in the Strava app feed are mostly for reference – you can view, you can change what you see, but you can do a lot more with them if you are a subscriber, which is there the Maps section comes in. The Strava app will let subscribers discover routes in the Maps section. The app will not only suggest routes, but let you create them too.
Starting with creation, you can select the type of route you want – ride, run, walk – the length of route as well as being able to specify if you want it to be hilly or flat, paved or off-road. Three routes are then suggested for you based on your criteria, along with the details – distance, profile, estimated time and the option to change waypoints with a couple of taps.
