Strava is a ride-logging app used by a huge number of cyclists (it also tracks running and other activities). You can use it to record the basics of your ride: where, how long and how fast. It also lets you compete with other riders over shorter sections of your ride, called segments, and rank your performance both post-ride and in real time.
There’s loads more to Strava, though, and plenty more you can get from using the app. Here’s Cyclist’s run-down of the major Strava functionality and its key features, along with a few key pointers to get the best out of Strava.
How much does Strava cost?
There are two account levels in Strava, free and subscription, with a subscription currently costing £6.99 a month, although if you pay annually that reduces to £4 a month. We’ll run through what a free account offers first, then the additional functionality available to paying users.
Strava key features
- Most functionality is free to use
- Ride-logging app for smartphones
- Interface to bike computers
- Analyse your performance
- Define and compete on shorter segments of a ride
- Leaderboards for fastest riders of segments
- Follow your performance on a segment as your ride with Strava Live
- Strava Beacon lets others to follow your ride
- Social interaction with other riders
- Paid subscriber account lets you set goals and track your training and performance in more detail
- Route building for subscribers
Strava free account: What’s included?
Activity logging
The nub of Strava is its activity recording functionality. You can record a ride (or other activities like running) on Strava itself via the phone app. It’s a nice, clean interface, with a record button at the bottom of the screen and a map displayed of your location.
You can reride a previous route from Strava, but you need a Premium subscription to use Strava’s route-building functionality.
You can hook up one sensor at a time, like a heart rate monitor, and the app also includes Strava Beacon, which lets you broadcast your location to up to three designated contacts as you ride.
Interfaces to other accounts
As well as Strava’s own activity recording, you can link your Strava account to accounts associated with pretty much any other device, such as Garmin Connect or Wahoo Elemnt. That means that you can log your rides on a cycling computer or a smartwatch and they’ll be automatically fed through to Strava once you finish and upload them to your third party account.
Whether you use Strava’s phone app or a GPS device, you’ll have a record of your activity in Strava, its distance, elevation gain, moving time and a handy map of where you went. Your Strava account will show a string of these activities, either on a computer via the web or a tablet or smartphone, once you’ve downloaded the Strava app.
You can drill down on your performance, so that if you’ve got a heart rate monitor and/or a power meter you can see your speed over the route, along with other metrics like temperature, heart rate, power and cadence. If you don’t have a power meter, Strava will estimate your power output.
Strava will also interface to indoor training apps like Zwift and Wahoo X, letting you log rides on the turbo. Zwift even includes Strava Segments (see below) in its training game.
Strava Segments
Segments are what really make Strava. They’re shorter sections of any given route which you can time yourself over. You can define a segment yourself using Strava’s Segment Builder to adjust its start and end point, but on any given route you’re likely to find dozens of segments that other riders have already defined, ranging from a few hundred metres up to kilometres in length. There are so many segments out there that Strava lets you star segments that you’re particularly interested in.
There’s also a Segment Explore function letting you find and investigate stats for segments on a map.
If you do create your own segment, it’s worth making it half a kilometre or more in length, as GPS inaccuracy means that times over shorter segments may not be accurate. You can make a segment public so that anyone can ride it or keep it private.
Segments allow you to compare your time to other riders and also to your own previous attempts. The prize is a King of the Mountains (KOM) or Queen of the Mountains (QOM) on a specific segment, and the ultimate let-down is an email from Strava to say that someone else has just taken your KOM/QOM, which also exhorts you to go out and take it back. That may be a tall order – read our piece on why KOMs/QOMs are increasingly hard to obtain.
A free account will display the top ten men’s and women’s times on a segment and the Local Legend award, given to the cyclist who’s ridden the segment the most times in the last 90 days.
You’ll also get a ranking of your own times over a segment, with segments where you’ve ridden one of your three fastest times flagged on your feed. A free subscription only gets you your top ten efforts though.
If a segment is potentially hazardous – there are some that riders have defined that take in steep downhill bends or cross main roads – you can flag them up as dangerous.
If someone posts a seemingly unrealistic time on a segment – for example, if they’ve accidentally left their computer recording in the car – you can flag the effort as potentially suspect too.
Segments aren’t just about competing against others though; they’re a really good way to measure your own performance over time. You can also use them to set up intervals and compete against yourself.
Strava Live
If you can’t wait until you get home to find out how you placed on a segment, Strava Live gives you a provisional placing on your cycling computer. Strava Live operates for popular segments and also those that you’ve starred, although it won’t work for downhill segments, however slight the gradient.
You’ll get an alert on your computer when you approach a segment and you’ll see your progress on a map. Once you exit a segment, you’ll see the time you’ve achieved.
Subscribers get more info on Strava Live segments, which we’ll explain below.
Privacy: Is Strava safe?
Strava has upped its privacy management. You can just leave everything open for all to see, but there are options to narrow things down too. You can make your rides private, as well as your segments.
An important privacy option is to hide the start and end points of rides. This lets you, for example, make your route in an area around your home invisible to others.
Thieves have in the past used riders’ start and end points for their rides to target their homes for theft. Strava activities have even been used to pinpoint secret military bases. Strava has now updated its privacy functionality to avoid this, if it’s used correctly.
You can also hide the start and end of any ride regardless of where you’re riding.
Strava social
Strava bills itself as the social network for cyclists. You can follow other athletes, including some pros, grant them access to follow you and Strava will suggest friends to follow. You can look at where they’re riding and compare your stats to theirs. There’s a search function to track them down and you can give them kudos or comment on their rides.
Strava lets you add photos and comments to an activity, so you can annotate your ride, as with Komoot.
Strava also lets you set up clubs or join existing ones, with league tables of club riders, how far they’ve ridden and how fast. You can also set up or join a challenge on Strava, which often sets a distance to ride in a time period and will award you a badge when you succeed. There’s a menu of open challenges to join, often sponsored by charities or cycling brands.
If you’re passed by (or pass) another rider, Strava’s Flyby function lets you see who they were (if they were on Strava) and where they were going. You need to opt in to Flybys if you want to participate.
Strava subscription account
Subscribe to Strava and you open up a lot more functionality, turning it into much more of a training tool rather than just being usable for ride logging. In a lot of cases, you open up more data for functionality that is already there for a free account.
For example, you can see all your efforts on a particular segment and compare them to other riders, letting you see where you or they got ahead. You can also narrow down efforts on a segment by factors including sex, age range and weight class, so you’re comparing yourself to a more comparable subset of riders, or narrow your view to riders you are following.
Strava will also give subscribers a view of their efforts over time on a specific segment, so that they can see any trends in their performance.
There’s more detail on Strava Live segments too, with riders able to see their progress as they ride the segment relative to their previous best and the segment leader.
Route planning functionality
A Strava subscription opens up a range of other functionality too.
Perhaps the most useful is the route planning tool. This allows you to plan a route in Strava to follow. Strava has a huge number of users, so you can choose to follow routes based on heatmaps of the most popular cycling routes around you, which will usually bypass busier roads and can help find routes you didn’t know existed.
Broader, stronger coloured routes indicate greater cycling traffic. You can also see your own heatmap of where you ride most often.
You can specify that you’d prefer to follow tarmac or unpaved roads too, opening up more options for gravel or mountain bike rides. If you don’t like hills, you can ask Strava to find a route between two points with minimum elevation gain. Conversely, you can find the route with the most climbing. Strava knows about features like blocked off routes too.
Strava’s maps include points of interest like cafes, stores and start points for trails. You can either follow a planned route on the Strava phone app or upload it to your GPS device.
Goal setting
Strava also lets paid subscribers set themselves goals, based on how fast they want to ride a segment and in what timeframe. These can be supported by one of Strava’s range of training plans, which also include target dates.
There’s a lot more information on activities you’ve performed, based on a calendar view and you can delve down into your performance. Fitness and freshness measures your training load and how it’s affecting your fitness and allows you to identify if you’re overtraining.
Power meter users can review their critical power curve and how it’s changing over different time periods, giving them an indication of how their fitness is developing.
How to get the best out of Strava
There’s a lot in Strava and it’s easy to get obsessed with segments, KOMs/QOMs and what other people are up to. Have they put in more rides than me this week? Who’s out after my KOM today? Are they motor paced?
So here are ten key tips to get the most from Strava.
1. Follow the pros
Strava is a great way to follow your favourite pro riders and see their stats. It’s a humbling experience to see just how many watts they push out for how long, but it might spur you to take on that tough interval workout you’d rather skip this week.
2. Seek out that obtainable KOM/QOM
Somewhere near you, there’ll be a segment that not many people ride. Find it and it could be yours. There’s no point in trying for the KOM/QOM on Box Hill, but longer segments are often not followed in full by many riders, so there may be an opportunity there. If you can’t see one, create one yourself.
3. Set up some off-road segments
If you’re a gravel rider, an off-road KOM/QOM is easier to obtain and keep, as there are more routes to choose from and mountain bike riders in general aren’t as fast as you (uphill, at least…). So set up some gravel segments and you’re more likely to get and keep the top spot.
4. Become a local legend
If you don’t think you’ll get near that KOM/QOM, then maybe the Local Legend title is the one to go for. You’ll get billing next to the segment details for everyone else who rides it if you’ve ridden a segment the most times in the last 90 days and maybe some extra Kudos too.
5. Take advantage of the Strava perks for subscribers
Strava has a perks programme for its paid subscribers. Wrecked your cycling computer? If you’ve signed up for free with Sundays Insurance via Strava you’ll get up to £350 to replace it. Mechanical on your ride? Sundays will pay up to £30 to cover a taxi fare home.
Perks also include, for US riders, a discount at Competitive Cyclist and, in the UK, a discount on Tribe nutrition.
6. Join a few challenges
Keep an eye out for Strava challenges from your favourite brands. Le Col, for example, is big on these. You don’t need to be a customer of the brand, but joining a challenge is a great way of motivating yourself to get out riding. Who knows, you might win some cycling gear for completing the challenge.
7. Get into Strava art
There’s a cottage industry in setting up and following routes on Strava that turn into something interesting when you view the map of where you’ve ridden. Planning your Strava art is a fun evening activity and another spur to head out there, which should take you on some new roads you wouldn’t normally have ridden.
8. Tag riders in your comments
As with other social media giants like Facebook and Twitter, you can tag people in comments if you want to share a particular ride with them just by typing the ‘@’ symbol before their name to mention them in the comments section. A quick route to extra kudos.
9. Study your heatmap
There’s something peculiarly satisfying about browsing the heatmap of where you’ve ridden. It will probably be a spindly web that starts off intense yellow near home and gradually degenerates to thin orange threads around the edges. A good way to reminisce about or plan those huge summer rides when it’s cold and dark out.
10. Don’t take it too seriously
Ultimately, you don’t know what the majority of riders are up to, how they train and how they’re riding. Strava is a great way to monitor your performance, just don’t expect that you’re always competing on a level playing field.
Need a device to log your rides? Read our buyer’s guide to the best GPS bike computers