- Strava needs no introduction,
but I will give it one anyway.
Part activity tracker, part social media network,
part route planner, part archive of billions of bike rides,
my own personal favorite bit, Times Up Climbs.
You will, I'm sure, be familiar with the fact that
both the website and the app are free,
but there is additional functionality available
if you pay a small subscription
and become a member of Strava Summit.
Now, you might be wondering what that functionality is,
given that the free version already has a ton of features.
So, Strava have asked us to help explain.
And in this video, we're going to go through
the most popular ones.
The most popular feature amongst Summit members
is to do with leader boards.
Now, it's no surprise, really, is it?
Sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea
and checking Strava is right up there as
one of the top post-ride activities
and leader boards are certainly one
of the things that me hooked.
But, there are times, perhaps on really popular segments,
where you actually want to know how you're fairing
relation to rides that are similar to you,
perhaps in age or in weight.
So in Strava Summit, you can do exactly that.
With filtered leader boards.
So, for example, you might remember a video,
not too long ago, where I tried, in vain, to reclaim a KOM
by basically throwing money at the problem
and building the fastest bike I could.
Now, in that instance, if I go on to
filtered leader boards, I actually get the crown.
Yes!
Despite their popularity, for me filtered leader boards
are not the most useful of the post-ride features.
Instead, I think it's Strava Summit's ability
to help you analyze your rides form a training perspective.
Now, a lot of us, I guess, wear heart rate monitors,
certainly with a rise of the wearable
that you can sync with a head unit,
or the companion app.
And if you do record your heart rate,
then Strava Summit allows you to see, post-ride,
just how long you've been spending
different heart rate zones.
Now, armed with the knowledge that variety is the key to
training, you can see at a glance,
whether or not you're ticking the relevant boxes
for you and your training,
or whether you're stuck doing junk miles.
So are you going hard enough, and easy enough,
or are you just somewhere in a rut in the middle?
If you have a power meter as well,
then Strava will also give you a similar break down,
but explain watts, as opposed to beats per minute.
Now, from your heart rate, Strava can then also generate
a figure called relative effort.
And this is basically a measure of how hard your workout
or ride, has been.
If you're familiar with the old Strava suffer score,
then it's basically evolution of that.
And it's a measure of the amount of cardiovascular work
that has gone in to a given activity
that is transferable across disciplines,
and the relative aspect, also the fact that it's unique
to you, so it doesn't take into account how fast you went,
just how hard you've worked.
What it means, is that you can quantify how much a workout
has taken out of you and how it calibrated it
across thousands of different activities.
Strava say they been able to tweak the algorithm,
so that it actually is appropriate for both
short intense efforts, as well as
longer steady efforts as well.
And, as well as being able to see it for an individual ride,
you can also see it plotted over the proceeding weeks
and months and how a given week actually stacks up
in terms of the effort that it's taken out of you.
Next up, live segments.
Now this is really cool.
It works on the phone app, although I know some of you
do ride with your phone attached to your handle bars,
of interest to most of us I suspect,
is the way it integrates with major GPS head units.
Basically, what you do is you have to start a segment.
When you do so, details of it automatically upload
to your device which means that
as you approach it in real life,
your screen will change and instead of your normal data,
it will display the segment.
It will display your current time on it,
your predicted finish time, and also your current time
relative to either your personal best,
the personal best of someone you follow,
or the best time of all time.
It's a fantastic pacing tool,
it really will help you get the most out of yourself
and also, I find it great for eking out a
little extra motivation when the pain is really setting in.
The next one is a bit of a tribute to the social nature
of the Strava platform.
Unless someone's got their privacy settings locked down,
one of the beauties of it is that
you can see where their riding.
You can see where millions of people are riding, in fact.
Now, in the route planning section,
Strava's algorithm automatically takes all of that data
into consideration and it directs you onto the most popular
sections of road or path, the theory being
popular equals good, I guess.
But, with Strava Summit, you an additional option
and that is that you can download a GPX file of
somebody else's route that you like the look of.
That might be a local pro, it might be an influencer,
could be a friend or a colleague.
In this case, I'm going to take Dr. Oliver Bridgewood GCN.
His post-work spin yesterday.
Now, you do need the desktop version open to do this,
not on the app.
But, you'll see when you click on activity,
in the corner of the map screen there,
there's a little GPX download icon,
so we hit that, download the file,
then upload it to your chosen device.
If you ride by yourself, it has always been essential
to let someone know where you're going
and now the technology allows, it's a great idea to
actually let them know you're live location.
This is something that I genuinely do
every time I ride these days.
There are a few different options for it,
but Strava Summit has one that is dedicated
for cyclists and runners.
It's called Beacon.
Basically, every time you start to record an activity,
either on the app, on a garmin or on an apple watch,
it gives you the opportunity to send a message
to up to three contacts.
Now, they then receive that text, which has a link on it
through to your activity.
They can view it, even if they don't have
a Strava profile of their own.
Simple, but there is also additional functionality as well,
like telling them your battery life
and indeed, the last time you had phone signal
for if you're really getting out there.
The last ever Summit addition is the fitness
and freshness tool.
So if you're using the heart rate monitor,
so that Strava can calculate your relative effort,
and ideally if you're using a power meter as well,
so it can calculate your training load,
it can then plot a graph of your form over time.
Now, the fitness element is calculated via
Strava zone algorithms that's based
on well established work from the likes of Erik Banister
and Andy Cogan, fitness you can see remains
relatively constant over time.
Now, the freshness curve, meanwhile,
well similar, is of course modeling your fatigue
and that is more responsive.
You can see after just a few hard days,
it will move significantly, but then equally,
it will also come back down very quickly
after you begin to ease off.
And it's a pretty good way of seeing just how tired
you might actually be following the
training that you've done.
When you combine the two then,
you get that squiggly line on top, which is your form.
There is, of course, no point being screaming fit
if you're absolutely knackered.
And so your form then shows you when you've got the balance
right, perhaps in the lead up to an event
because if you get too fresh,
then you will begin to lose fitness.
and so this is designed, I guess to take the
guess work out of peaking for an event or a goal.
As well as being useful for people like me,
who tend to do very similar riding all the time,
give you an indication of whether
or not you should be changing things up.
So those are your key Summit features.
There are plenty more, like personalized heat maps,
which are pretty cool, giving you a record of
where you've been and how often on Strava,
plus training plans and indeed, your power curve as well.
If you would like to go and check it out for yourself,
then Strava are very kindly offering a free 30 day trial
to anyone go heads there after this video.
The link to do that is in the description just down below.
Now, in the meantime, if you would like to
see me turn myself inside out to try
and reclaim a KOM, then you can get through to that
video just down there.
Otherwise, give this one a big thumbs up.