There are plenty of new fitness apps appearing, almost on a daily basis. Strava is one of the original apps that has stood the test of time. The app is aimed at runners, cyclists and active people in general.

Strava is intuitively easy to use and its free to sign up, and you can obtain additional features if you sign up to the Premium service such as live performance feedback on your activity, detailed post-analysis after every activity, create teams to compete in and also stay safe when you’re out running or cycling with Beacon’s live location tracking.

Strava Premium also includes personalised coaching. Offering the opportunity to set personalised goals, such as entering the amount of miles/kilometers you want to cover within a specific period, Strava will keep track of your progress. You are also able to stream videos as part of the coaching process, so it will talk you through the workouts for a particular event. In order to access these you’ll need to visit the Strava website and you can customise the training plans on there.

If you used a fitness tracker such as watt meters for bikes or heart rate monitors, Strava will work with the majority of these as it supports bluetooth and ANT+. If you’re a Premium member you can see the data from these third party devices and you can create charts such as heart rate charts and how long spent in each training zone while on your run.

What you do find through Strava is a superb GPS tracking system. Say you’ve just climbed a particularly challenging hill on ride or run, you can then check what other people’s times are on that particular stretch, then you can return more motivated and with the aim to beat the competition! 

They are also in the process of adding features for such as enabling users to share information about their respective sport in a no nonsense matter.