Strava is a free social network to record your activities on your cell phone, synchronize it with your watch, it also has a process which you can see your kilometers or total time; it is common to see cyclists and runners, but most sports can also be recorded.
This app also allows you to connect with your friends and also give them support from a distance through '' kudos '' or with comments. In my case as a coach also to see the sensations and rhythms of training. But you can also have a private profile, if you want no one to see your workouts and still keep your control. There is a '' premium '' version called '' Strava Summit '', which gives you generalized training plan, deep analysis and others.
But not all the news is good, it also has its bad things. I'm going to comment on them from my point of view:
Positive things:
Saving activities (my favorite): When saving your activities, put a name to it so that you can find them easily later. Sometimes we need to do the same route or we want to share it with someone else. It also helps you as a reference of how much you have improved in a certain time.
Is free: and who doesn't like free apps, especially something that helps us motivate ourselves in the exercises.
You can follow your friends, people in the same team and people who inspire you, inspire others, even if you are running in other countries you can make friends to go running together.
See maps and locate yourself on them: Strava has a '' heat map '' function where all the people who have run and recorded their routes with the app, stay there and can be seen. This helps us to see where we are or where we are going when training.
Records: You can see how many kilometers and hours per week, monthly or yearly for better handling of loads and give you a parameter of how to better plan your season.
We can compare ourselves to other people in segments when we do activities, be it friends or virtual competitions.
Negative things:
Competitiveness: It makes us compare ourselves with others, which is good but not in training. Remember that you do NOT always have to train hard.
It makes us sick: Believe it or not, this social network can generate some anxiety, low self-esteem and vice and even think that we are not good enough.
False reality: It gives us a sense of responsibility, that we have to post all our activities on strava, with decent paces and not slow run. Sometimes we think that by doing the same training as other people at a different pace we are not good, but remember that we have different processes and abilities.
You have to pay to create routes and to see more statistics, but we can still see it on our watch.
In summary, Strava can be an excellent app to save our progress in the long term, share with friends or people of similar tastes, motivate us and do not get consumed by it. If it consumes us, NOTHING bad will happen if we pause or stop sharing our activities and disconnect from our watch, the world is not going to stop!