Strava Has Updated Its Strength Training Interface, and It Looks Like It’s a Significant Improvement.
Today, Strava announced a complete overhaul of its strength training app. This is one of the most extensive updates for gyms I’ve seen in the app—new features include 14 partner integrations, a dedicated training log, automatically populated muscle maps, and five new shareable features specifically for strength training. According to Strava, the update will roll out globally in the coming weeks, so you’ll be able to try out all these new features soon.
For anyone who’s ever dreamed of Strava treating strength training at least as seriously as it does running and cycling, the update looks promising. However, whether it will fully realize its potential is a question that will need to be answered through testing, given that most strength training apps look better on paper than they perform in practice.
Strava’s training log is getting a complete update, including muscle maps.
The main update is a completely redesigned training log, allowing you to record sets, reps, and weights directly in Strava. In theory, this could solve the problem for runners who use Strava for strength training but lack a reliable way to store this training data in one place with everything else.
For me, the most appealing feature is that every recorded strength training session will now automatically generate a visual muscle map, highlighting which muscle groups were worked based on the exercises recorded. This can be a great way to understand your workout balance, avoid overtraining, and ensure you’re not accidentally neglecting the same muscles week after week. Of course, the quality of the muscle map depends on the quality of the underlying exercise data, and how well various partner apps integrate with Strava can also play a role.
These partner apps now work with Strava.
Strava is launching with 14 partner integrations, collecting strength data from apps and devices across the fitness ecosystem. Initial partners include 24 Hour Fitness (coming this summer), Amazfit, Caliber, Coros, Fitbod, Garmin, Hevy, iFIT Personal Trainer, JEFIT, Liftoff, Motra, Remaker, Runna, and Whoop.
I’ll go into more detail about these integrations once I have a clearer understanding of what data each one transmits and how it’s displayed in Strava. But a few highlights stand out. The integration with Hevy seems particularly promising. Hevy is a well-established, specialized app for tracking strength training, and directly receiving detailed workout data from it into Strava could be a welcome addition for those who already use the app.
For Coros and Garmin users, the integration should mean that strength training data tracked on the watch will be automatically transferred to Strava, just like your runs are now. I’m curious to see how this will work in practice—how exercises will be classified, whether sets and reps will be displayed correctly, and whether muscle maps will be populated correctly based on data collected from the watch versus manually entered data.
The integration with Whoop is also worth noting, as Whoop recently added expanded strength training features . Given Whoop’s status as a launch partner, I think the two platforms complement each other in numerous ways—for example, Whoop’s recovery and load data sits alongside Strava’s activity log and social elements. And in this context, Strava is also adding five new sharing formats specifically designed for strength training, designed to bring the same social motivation to gym workouts that has always characterized its outdoor workouts.