Strava’s New Quick Workout Feature: Does it Really Work?

Last week Strava launched their new ‘Instant Workouts’ feature, which hinges on Strava’s acquisition of Runna (and possibly their acquisition of The Breakaway, too). The app is for subscribers only, but it aims to provide the user with a weekly set of five workouts, in each of the four categories. But in addition, it will also automatically provide the user with a suggested route for each workout.

Conceptually, this sounds very interesting, and would be a reasonable first step towards true Runna integration (the company has repeatedly said, however, that it plans to keep Runna separate). However, at the end of the day, most of their users are within the Strava platform, not the Runna platform. And since this feature is for subscribers only, the goal is obviously to keep users registered, or convert.

Except, the problem is that the feature, as it’s currently used, is at a fairly dumpster-fire level. Sadly, I didn’t have my Dumpser Fire t-shirt with me when I photographed this. It’s in a moving box somewhere, and I’m not sure where. Perhaps a new era, the past perhaps was more subtle.

In any case, in the video, I go through everything well, but I want to highlight some of the features here. First, it will appear at the top of your app when you’re signed in, and the recommendations are updated every Monday. Within this, there is a set of four key areas: Save, Build, Test, and Restore.

The categories are self-explanatory, except that ‘Check’ is intended to be more than just checking routes, but other types of sports. Each of these four areas gets five workouts, mostly a mix of running and riding (at least for me). Maybe if someone didn’t run/ride, they’d get a skewed selection of other brands.

The first workout I was given was this crazy 500m. Which was pure madness. It was telling me to throw down 500m intervals at my “5K pace”, which is somehow defined as a 16 minute 5K time. These times are very fast, at 3:21/km (5:24/mi). And we’ll put aside all the nomenclature wonkiness of how this was written in the instructions.

I tried to figure out what the heck was pulling a 5KM time of 16 minutes from, and after some digging, it seems that running through the Oura ring in late October might be the culprit. That run had some pretty wonky GPS tracks, which overestimated the distance, making it look like I ran faster than I actually did.

But seriously, removing that run (and waiting a few days) did not cause the algorithm to be fixed (as other platforms do). And most notably, that one run happened about 3 months ago, with no other run supporting that amount of time. Surely all my other recent data (putting me in the 19 minute 5KM range) would have sorted things out by now, right?

But to be honest, that’s not the main issue here – we’ll get to that. First, we have included route suggestions for all outdoor workouts. These are terrifying. For this VO2Max 500m effort, he recommended technical trail running as my route (including canyons). For some 2hr+ walks, it’s recommended to do loops around the block. Like, I’m not kidding, I’m just making loops for my road.

Now, before we talk about one big issue, let’s briefly touch on cycling. From a workout recommendation perspective, this isn’t too bad. Mostly. For Build, these seemed to be on the bitter end, but most of them are probably doable (though, trails, scary neighborhood loops – ironically I literally live in a bike park with amazing trails).

One route that proved to be the most suitable was the ‘Recovery Ride’ which was 2.5 hours long (one titled “Hard Endurance Ride”), and included the “tempo” sections, seen above. They seem to be in conflict.

My biggest concern here is that I would argue that Strava is the king of creating great routes. The best methods in most cases. I use it almost every day for routing, and it’s the main reason I paid for Strava. Sure, every now and then on longer routes you get a random Uncle Strava Spice mixed in, but that’s (usually) part of the fun.

However, the biggest problem is that you can’t push workouts to any GPS watch. Or, for that matter, you can’t even see the darn workout in the app once you’ve started the workout. I’m not kidding. It gives you a very complex workout (with some weird wonky words), but the only way to see it once you’re doing the workout is if you take a screenshot before you start. Or, maybe print it out, old school style.

The company says in a Reddit post that pushing workout integration to Garmin & Apple devices is coming soon, though I question how true that “soon” part is. After all, everything I’ve heard indicates that the relationship between Garmin and Strava is very cold right now, following this past fallout. There’s no reason Garmin would need to move quickly to implement this, just to make Strava’s investors happy.

Look, I actually think this kind of feature could change the game for Strava subscriptions for a long time, but how they did it here is nothing more than media fodder to try to drum up interest before their IPO. This feature should have been fully implemented with ‘push workout to device’ included, and sensible workouts, with sensible words. Right now, none of those things seem to exist in most cases.

Strava has the power here which depends heavily on their route components. Almost none of the AI ​​startup competitors can do it, as they don’t have the literally billions of historical route/activity data that Strava has. And, like I said – it’s one of the most important and best pieces of the Strava platform. Hopefully, at some point they can put those elements together in the right way, and I’ll be the first to give them credit for it.

With that – thanks for reading (or watching!).

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