Strava Premium is packed full of analytics and mapping features that's certainly worth the price for committed runners and cyclists.
Strava is free for runners, cyclists, and sports lovers who want a place to track, analyze, and share workouts — but you might be wondering if paying for Strava Premium is worth it.
Strava Premium is a paid version of Strava that offers additional features at an extra cost. It costs $11.99/£8.99 a month or £54.99/$79.99 for an annual membership.
We’ve been long-term users of both the free and premium versions of Strava using the app standalone and alongside a host of Strava-compatible smartwatches and sports watches including the Apple Watch. But is Strava Premium worth it?
While it won’t necessarily feel like an essential for some, we’ve outlined some features we think could be worth stumping up the cash for that monthly or yearly Strava Premium subscription.
Read next: Complete guide to Strava
Is Strava Premium worth it?
We’d certainly say that if you’re a passionate runner or cyclist, Strava Premium is worth it. The mapping, Segments, and Fitness and Freshness features make it an engaging and motivating platform — and a proper home for your fitness data.
However, the free features are still excellent, so unless you have a vested interest in poring over workout data, you might not need to pay.
What are the Strava Premium features?
So, what exactly are you paying for? Those premium features are essentially broken down into six different areas. There are features built around Strava segments, advanced training, route exploration, challenges, recording activities, and additional perks.
You can see all of the premium features listed here and you can also view them all from the Strava smartphone app by going to your settings in the You tab of the mobile app, then tapping Your Strava Subscription and select Explore All Features. That’s all once you’ve paid up for Premium.
For Segments fans you will then be able to do the following:
- View Segment leaderboards
- Filter search on Segment leaderboards
- Compare Segment efforts to other users
- View live Segment performance
Advanced training features:
- Set custom goals and view your best efforts
- View relative effort, fatigue levels, and grade adjusted pace
- Set custom heart rate zones
- View power training, pace, and workout analysis
- Follow training plans (runners and cycling only)
If you like to explore, route features unlocked include:
- Creating routes and storing for offline use
- Accessing personalised heat maps
- View suggested routes based on your current location
During activities, you will be able to view:
- Weather data and performance data like speed and distance in real-time
- Use Strava Beacon for live-location sharing
Strava Premium perks include:
- Access to Recover Athletics app for runners and cyclists to use for rehab and in between training
- Discounted membership to services like Open Breathwork & Meditation
- Change the look of the Strava app icon (for iOS only)
Six Strava Premium features worth upgrading for
Find new routes in new locations
Arguably one of the biggest pulls of Strava premium is the ability to make full use of Strava’s route creation and route discovery features. Along with letting you create routes based on data from other users or using heatmaps to view the most popular routes, you can also use those mapping features to locate Strava’s Segments to snatch from other users.
Strava also lets you sync created routes to compatible Polar, Suunto and Garmin watches for offline use, though that support currently doesn’t extend to Apple Watches.
An important thing to note about Strava’s premium-only mapping features is that they are primarily built for runners, walkers, cyclists, and hikers. If your sporting interests lie outside of that, it might not necessarily be a must-have feature for you.
Get your Fitness Score
One of our favorite Strava Premium features is the Fitness Score. Fitness Score is part of a suite of metrics that analyze Fitness and Freshness, including training load and effect.
Each workout will be given a Relative Effort score based on your heart rate, and you will be awarded points for each workout. Non-workout days will see your score decrease, so the Fitness Score is a neat way of balancing training and a great motivator for watching your fitness increase over time.
You can also quickly compare your fitness score over a month, three-month, six-month, and yearly intervals.
Analyze Matched Activities
If you like the idea of using Strava as a training tool and want to get a better sense if you’re making improvements on similar routes or courses, the ability to easily compare your stats is a feature we’ve enjoyed having access to while using premium.
When you complete a run or a ride on a course you’ve tackled before, Strava uses an algorithm to group together Matched Runs or Rides within the breakdown of your tracked activity. Strava will pick out previously tracked workouts on the same course, to give you a clear idea if you’ve got faster or lagging behind your previous pace. You’ll be able to view your previous efforts from the Matched screen to see how other metrics beyond time and pace matched up too.
It’s a simple feature, but a good one to know if you’re getting faster or slowing up when going all out.
Stay safe with Strava Beacons
If you do a lot of your runs, rides and treks solo and like the idea of friends and family being able to monitor your movements and seeing when you’re nearing the finish line or getting closer to home, Beacons is another useful feature that’s locked behind that premium subscription.
Beacons works by allowing you to share your live location to contacts that can keep an eye on your movements. It can be used with the Strava smartphone app and can also work with the Apple Watch, Wear OS smartwatches and with Garmin watches that offer Garmin’s LiveTrack feature.
Once you’ve set up your safety contacts to share your location, a link to access your live location is shared with those contacts. Beacons needs a cellular connection and updates your location every 15 seconds.
Beacons does not send an alert if you have to stop for some reason but do crucially allow those contacts to be Strava or non-Strava users.
Get more from chasing Strava Segments
If you’re already au fait with all things Strava then you’ll know about Segments. These are particular sections of popular routes and courses that you can tackle and attempt to record the quickest time or see how your efforts compare to the quickest recorded by other Strava users.
You can take on Segments for free on Strava and view details of your Segment-chasing performance in the post-workout breakdown. Premium users can also compare efforts on Segments against other Strava users and have better control of viewing leaderboards, whether that’s overall ones or ones you’ve set up to compete with other users.
In addition to comparing efforts, you can see how well you’re doing on a Segment during a run or ride. You can also see how you’re faring against the Segment King or Queen of the Mountain (KOM or QOM) or the Course Record (CR). It makes an already great way to keep that competitive spirit even more motivating when you’re not racing.
Find your next training plan
Strava Premium unlocks a host of more advanced training tools that include calculating your effort, digging deeper into power and pace data, and telling you how fit and fresh you are to train. Of all of those added tools, Strava makes it easy for runners and cyclists to start following a training plan.
For runners, there are plans available for race distances going from 5k up to the marathon and for cyclists, there’s a mix of climb, sprint, and indoor training plans to follow. These plans are provided in English, German, Dutch, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish currently. Plans need to be set up from the Strava web app annoyingly, but once you’ve picked your plan, plans are emailed to you the day before the planned workout.
You can’t pause plans, but you can rearrange days or skip days where you have planned training sessions. What’s nice about these plans is there’s no assumed knowledge that you’re going to know what a fartlek or a progression run is (there’s a glossary for that) and will help you understand your pace for different workouts to make sure you’re doing them correctly and to make sure you reap the full benefits of the session.
Take advantage of Strava’s Recover Athletics integration
Strava is about tracking and when you up that tracking and overall volume of training, stretching, and doing the workouts that will help keep you in shape to run, ride or trek become all the more important.
Strava’s integration with Recover Athletics isn’t a Premium feature Strava seems to shout about but is arguably one of its most useful. Once you’ve downloaded the separate Recover Athletics app it will prompt you to authorize sharing your activity data. Once you’ve completed the pretty painless setup you can pinpoint areas of the body where you’re feeling some soreness and the Recover Athletics app will provide a program to follow with visuals to explain how to correctly perform movements and exercises.
It’s a well-designed app and the ability to share Strava data to help assess your training load makes it a really useful extra tool at your disposal.
