How to use Strava to up your riding game

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Published: Wednesday, 18 September 2024 at 11:00 AM

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Pretty much anyone who steps out of their front door for exercise has heard of Strava. Since its founding in 2009, it has become the dominant app for recording fitness activities, with more than 120 million users worldwide. 

Cyclists love to use Strava to record where and when they ride, how far, how fast and other performance metrics. 

Strava also provides a means to track your performance over time and to compete against yourself and others. 

The app has developed its social side over the last few years too, enabling you to link up with other riders, message them, share rides, and add photos and videos to your ride record.

Here’s BikeRadar’s guide to the Strava app, how it works, the main functionality that’s useful to cyclists, Strava safety, Strava Heatmaps, its social side and much more. Based on our experience, we’ve also given you our top tips to get the best from Strava.

What is Strava?

Strava bills itself as the social network for athletes. It enables you to compete with others, even if you don’t know them and if they’ve ridden the same routes as you at different times. 

You can also follow your own times over a specific road or trail that forms part of a ride.

Strava enables you to share a record of your rides (or not), link up with other riders, follow their rides and give them kudos. 

How does Strava work?

Strava provides functionality to record your activities either in the Strava app or by uploading an activity from a cycling computer, cycling watch or another cycling app platform. 

There’s a whole range of supported activities, not just cycling. Strava is popular with runners, but you can also record hikes, swims, skiing, golf, yoga, pickleball – you name it.

You can use a smartphone to record activities directly in the app, but Strava also interfaces directly with third-party apps such as Komoot, Garmin Connect, the Wahoo Elemnt app and many others. 

This enables you to record an activity on other devices, including cycling computers and smartwatches. Link your third-party account to Strava and your activity will be transferred automatically to Strava once you stop. 

Some third-party apps, such as Komoot and MapMyRide, have activity recording functionality, which you can use rather than Strava to record your ride, then automatically upload your activity to Strava once you’ve finished.

You can also upload activity files in .gpx, .fit or .tcx format, or just manually enter activity details such as when, how far and how long.

How much does Strava cost?

Strava has two options. 

The free tier enables you to log activities and provides a record of your past exercise. 

There’s also limited analysis, which gives you summaries of your totals and fitness level rather than a fuller picture that you can analyse in greater detail.

Strava subscribers pay £8.99 / $11.99 a month, or £54.99 / $79.99 a year. Prove you’re a student and you can get 50 per cent off the annual plan price; there’s a family plan too. 

Subscribing unlocks much more functionality – which we’ll describe in more detail later – including route mapping, full segment leaderboards and a wider suite of training and progress logging.

What do I need to use Strava?

The Strava app will run on both Android and Apple smartphones. 

The phone app home screen gives you a scrolling list of your activities and those of riders you’re following. You can record an activity, manage your groups and group activities, and see your weekly activity totals and some best-effort data. You can also update your settings and privacy, and connect with other apps such as Garmin Connect. 

Subscribers get more functionality, and can track their activity totals and fitness level over time and view maps.

There’s also a web interface. This replicates much of the phone app functionality, with the exception of activity recording. It’s a bit easier for subscribers to map out routes on this platform than in the phone app.

A cycling computer or smartwatch is a good alternative to the phone app for activity logging. This enables you to leave your phone at home if you prefer and may provide a more accurate trace than the phone’s GPS chip. 

You can then upload your activity to Strava once you get home; this occurs automatically for many devices, if you link your device’s account to Strava.

Strava segments explained

The vast majority of modern activity-logging devices include a GPS chip. This will enable them to record where you’ve been and your speed throughout the ride. 

Once a ride is uploaded, Strava gives you overall stats for distance, time, elevation gain, speed and a range of other metrics. But it also sub-divides your ride into shorter stretches called segments.

You can use Strava’s functionality to define and name your own segments for parts of the ride, but Strava also shows you public segments defined by other users.

Over the 15 years since Strava’s inception, there have been millions of segments defined. 

That means that, although you can define a new segment, unless you’re cycling in Antarctica, you’re likely to find that someone has already defined a segment pretty similar to your new one. 

To help reduce segment clutter, Strava will alert you if there’s already a segment similar to the one you are about to create. 

Once a segment has been defined, if it goes uphill, Strava will automatically classify it from 4 to 1 then HC, dependent on how hard and how long it is. 

Although segments are usually public, you can set a segment you own to be private, so that only your times are logged. You can hide segments you’re less interested in; less popular segments will be hidden automatically by Strava. 

Strava matches your ride’s GPS trace to its known segments to determine the segments on your ride. In most cases, this works well, but occasionally, you’ll find Strava hasn’t matched a segment. This is usually due to drifting off course in your GPS trace and can depend on the device you’re using or factors such as tree cover that may reduce GPS accuracy.

It’s worth noting that a GPS trace may not be accurate over short distances, so times and leaderboards over segments of just a couple of hundred metres may not be meaningful.

If you consider a segment to be hazardous or otherwise inappropriate, you can flag this in the segment record using the Actions pulldown on the segment page. Possible reasons include an improper name, as well as physical hazards such as a dangerous descent, use of a footpath or poor road quality – the last of which might result in most segments in the UK being flagged.

How do segments enable you to compete?

It’s segments that support the competitive side of Strava, because you can compare your time over the segment with that of other riders and your previous attempts.

Strava subscribers get a full leaderboard for each segment, while free users get only the top 10. Subscribers can also set themselves a time goal for a segment.

Both free and paid users can select whether to see only men’s or women’s times alongside their personal times. Subscribers can narrow down their competitors by age group, weight class and people they’re following.

What is a KOM/QOM?

The fastest rider on the segment earns the KOM/QOM (king/queen of the mountain) title, even if there’s no hill involved. 

It’s worth considering you may be competing with riders in a group, with a tailwind or even on an electric bike. With so many cyclists travelling through many segments, it’s increasingly hard to take a KOM/QOM, so you may have to be satisfied with a personal best.

To help mitigate this, Strava has a Local Legend feature, which shows you the person who has ridden a segment the most times in the last 90 days and provides other stats for the segment.

Strava will send you an email if someone knocks you off the KOM/QOM pedestal, encouraging you to put in another attempt.

Alongside the other reasons noted above, you can flag a segment if you consider a recorded time to be false. There’s a cottage industry in Strava doping, where data is manipulated to improve segment times and Strava will also auto-flag a suspect activity.