We all want to become better cyclists. Whether you’re looking for how to ride faster and increase your average speed on a solo ride, looking to improve your climbing and establish a PB on your local steep hill killer or trying to build up your bike endurance for big mile days.
We turned to a cycling coach to extract the most useful training features on Strava and asked him to explain how to get the most out of them.
Andy is a sport and exercise scientist, a fully qualified and experienced cycling coach for ATP Performance, a personal trainer and a gym instructor. He spent 3 years on the road riding for a UCI cycling team and 7 years as a BC Elite rider.
Prime
Saving a little in one of the best cycling apps is still a lot cheaper than hiring the ear of a personal cycling trainer. But to get the most out of what you’re paying for, you need to understand how features can benefit your ride.
These features are all available with Strava’s Premium subscription at £47.99 or $59.99/year, or £6.99 or $7.99/month.
1. Strava Fitness and Freshness
(Image credit: Strava)
This is similar in principle to CTL (Chronic Training Load), ATL (Acute Training Load) and TSB (Training Stress Balance) in TrainingPeaks. In Strava, it’s called Fitness, Fatigue, and Form. Fitness is your total fitness level and varies depending on your training impulse or training load. The higher the load/impulse, the higher the training stimulus and the more your physical condition increases. However, it also significantly increases your fatigue, with Strava suggesting that different training loads take different times to recover. So if you have a race on a Sunday, based on Strava’s suggestions, you should do no more than 250-400 training load in the 3 days leading up to the event, to ensure you are properly recovered on time.
When you have a rest day, fitness decreases a bit, but fatigue decreases much more. The result of this is increased form. That’s why pros train a lot before a bigger race, but then have an easy week or two to get in better shape. Using Fitness, Fatigue, and Freshness/Fitness metrics can really help you plan your training and better understand the impact the training you are doing is having on you.
2. Strava Power Curve
(Image credit: Strava)
The Power Curve in Strava is similar to the Critical Power Curve in Zwift. You can see your peak power performance over all the durations you’ve ridden in the last six weeks, then compare it to your history for the current year, previous years, or custom dates. For example, if you want to see what your power PBs were in 2022 compared to 2021, you can easily do that and see where you’ve improved and track your fitness gains.
Using this along with knowledge of the target breeds and their requirements, you can see exactly where you might need to improve. Suppose we have a two minute Hill Climb event to prepare for, then using the power curve we can see what our current two minute PB power is compared to previous values and try to increase it. This can be applied to any duration to suit any event and is personally my favorite workout analytics tool on Strava.
3. Strava Workout Log
(Image credit: Strava)
While a bike training plan is useful for organizing your future sessions, the Training Log is a great way to see what you’ve done over the weeks, months or years of your training and exactly how it breaks down. The training calendar only displays total volume per month and/or specific activity types, while the comprehensive training diary displays more detailed and specific metrics such as training stress, duration or distance sessions by increasing the size of the circle that represents this activity. The type of activity is differentiated by the use of color.
The training diary is a good way to keep track of what you’ve done and the distribution of training intensity, making it an effective training analysis tool to track training gains. fitness and how you got them.
4. Strava Segment Rankings
(Image credit: Strava)
We’ve all heard of the Strava term “KOM” or “QOM” (king/queen of the mountain) on local group rides. Strava has become incredibly popular for its competitive leaderboards and “segments”. The fastest driver in the segment has bragging rights to be the QOM/KOM.
Leaderboards on Strava offer a fun way to track your fitness gains and progress over time, especially since you can compare against your peers, as well as “compete” against yourself. Maybe there is a local climb you want to set a particular time for? Segment leaderboards let you see how you did on previous attempts, as well as dive into the analysis to see where you were faster or slower than on other attempts. You can also create your own segments to match the routes or road segments you are testing yourself on. This makes Segments a pretty good workout analysis tool on Strava.
Free
The following features are all available on Strava without paying a premium subscription.
5. Strava Training Schedule
(Image credit: Strava)
Just like the Premium Training Diary, the Free Training Calendar has many of the same features, but with less depth of analysis. You can see your total annual workload in hours, distance and activities and personal bests for the year, as well as the hours per month as well as lines representing each activity. Once you click on a month, you can see activities for each day. This lets you see a breakdown of when you exercised and when you rested, which is important. For further analysis, you can open each activity and see the distribution of power, heart rate, cycling speed and cadence, etc. This should be more than enough for most people to track and analyze their training, especially if they take notes on rides/activities to get more details in the training log without buying a subscription.
6. Strava Personal Segment Ranking
(Image credit: Strava)
Although Premium is necessary to see the full comparison of your efforts against other people and get rankings in the leaderboard, the free version still offers users the most useful part of segments for training analysis. In the end, what matters most is how you compare to yourself. If you go faster than before, you gain fitness. Using segments to set benchmarks is a great way to track fitness. You can use a particular climb and evaluate your progress based on how your performance times change over weeks/months. Day-to-day may not show much variation, but long-term progression is a great training analysis tool for detecting fitness gains.
If you own a Garmin device, you will have access as standard to the brand’s free training software – here are five free fitness features on Garmin Connect you should take advantage of
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