Strava review part 1

Welcome to 5.14 Fitness,

In today's post I will be writing about a fitness app that is ,in my opinion, highly effective and fun. If you like this, then I will add more posts about other top apps that are great for fitness and health. There are many, however I will pick the ones that I feel are best for a wide range of people and interests.

Now,the app I am going to be writing about is called Strava, and you may have heard about it. When it comes to fitness apps, it is one of the most popular out there. It has over a million downloads on Google play, and has a 4.6 star rating.

Strava is an app for mainly the Cardio activities of running and cycling, however it can be used for workouts as well. Strava records when you run or cycle and tracks exactly what you do and when you did it. It then gives you all the Statistics you want about your activity: how fast you went, how long you took, how many calories burned and so on... It gives information that is very useful, and can portray it all in a graph for you. And now the best part, with a simple click your data is uploaded to your feed, available for all your friends on Strava and  people round the world to see and compare to their own.

Just like Facebook or twitter, Strava has an activity feed page, which shows all your friends recent activity, how they did, and gives you the option to like or comment on it. This is great for morale, as not only friend but those like you can give you praise and support through this. This can be a really good boost for morale. This links to a great feature that makes Strava a really great app for running and cycling. For every route you run or cycle, there is an accomplishment and reward scheme that gives you prestigious rankings like 'king of the mountain'. This means of all those following the route, you were the quickest. Things like these make going for a run or cycle competitive and gives you more energy to go outside and attack your exercise. There are many accomplishments that gives you rewards for great work and commitment, all of which make Strava an app that is different from others.The activity feed page is good, and easy to navigate and see everything you want.

Away from the social aspect, Strava sets goals for you based on your information and these are a basis for when you run or cycle. Of course, you can change these goals at any time. The goals aspect of the app is quite weak compared to other apps I have used , and it is not prominent on the app- it doesn't come up at any point on the home screen. Then again,this is improved when you go premium;however, this costs 37 pounds ( 59 dollars ) and therefore may put you off. For more information, Premium will be discussed more in the next post.

Going back to recording activity, as soon as you open Strava you are presented with a button. Hit this button, and Strava starts tracking your location with Gps and internet ( if wanted to use ). Strava tracks how long you have been , your distance , you split pace and where you are instantly, so whilst you are out you can see all this information. Once you are done, you press the button again and it stops tracking you, ready to publish your run or cycle and give you all the data about it.  The layout of all this is quite simple, so will not confuse . Due to this, the information displayed during your run or cycle is quite simple and not much data is shown. Afterwards, there is lots of data to look at.
As soon as you finish, it gives you options on what to call your exercise, what to tag it as and what to describe it as.  You can choose who you want to see this, and it can be all your friends to just yourself.
Running and cycling is not the only things that you can add to your log. You can , with a click of a button,, add a variety of sports including workouts and weight training. You can add how long you did this for and add a description. Despite this being a good feature, logging in activity's other than running and cycling is not as satisfactory, as no data is produced. You can not specify what you did in the workout , therefore there is not much use in logging it in . If this is improved, and made more prominent, then Strava will be a lot better for those who do more circuit training and weight lifting.

In the next post, I will explain about the Strava website, the other features the app offers, the premium version, and the overall conclusion- including the pros and cons of Strava.
Hope you enjoyed this review, thank you very much for reading, and please check out all the other posts. Thank you again !