Anyone and everyone wants to give you training advice these days, with almost all of the best sports watches and apps offering guided workouts as part of their features.
Strava has now joined in with the launch of Instant Workouts, a new feature that suggests workouts to do each week based on your training history and fitness goals for that week.
The feature will suggest workouts for over 40 different sports each week, and is only available for Strava Premium subscribers, so you’ll need to pay $11.99 per month or $79.99 per year to get access to Instant Workouts.
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How does Instant Workouts work?
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Within each category you get five workouts to consider, along with step-by-step instructions on what you’ll do and an explanation of how the workout will boost your fitness.
Instant Workouts currently appear at the top of your feed when you log into the Strava app as a Premium user, and once you click through to the main page you get four different fitness goals to focus on for the week: maintain, build, explore and recover.
Maintain, build and recover are pretty self-explanatory and involve doing roughly the same level of activity as in the past, a little more, or a little less, while explore challenges you to try new sports, routes or workouts.
Within each category you get five workouts to consider, along with step-by-step instructions on what you’ll do and an explanation of how the workout will boost your fitness.
For now you’ll have to track and and follow the workout in the Strava app, but Strava has said that updates lined up for the ‘coming weeks and months’ will mean you can send the workout to a Garmin or Apple watch to follow on your wrist.
I’ve been using Strava for a long time and have logged over 3,500 activities and over 21,000 miles of training with the app, so I was eager to see how it used all that data to create suggested workouts for me.
Here’s three things that have impressed me about the Instant Workouts feature so far.
It’s accurate in assessing your running speeds
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Strava’s Instant Workouts are very exact in the speeds they ask of you during sessions. For example, in a 500m rep workout it tells me to do the reps at my current 5K pace of 4:53/mile, which is more or less exactly what I would shoot for in an ambitious 5K attempt.
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It also gives a pretty accurate range for my easy, VO2 max and tempo paces, based on what my coach gives me for those types of runs.
Given the vast amount of data Strava has on my running, I expect accuracy in this area, but it’s still good to see realistic paces suggested, because if those are wrong the feature would quickly become a bit useless for runners in my opinion.
It suggests routes for your workouts
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With each outdoor workout it suggests, the new feature also gives a route for you to try based on Strava’s popularity heatmaps, and how far it expects you to run or ride during the session.
When I look at these routes near my house, an area I know very well indeed, there are some changes I’d make to run on flatter roads for fast sessions, but the routes given aren’t bad and if you’re training while travelling they will be very handy indeed.
It will be interesting to see if the integration with sports watches includes sending these routes directly along with the workout, so you can follow both the instructions and the directions on your wrist.
It suggests a variety of different sports
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Strava can clearly tell I’m a keen runner above all, but even if I choose the maintain or build workouts for the week, it doesn’t only suggest runs.
Along with hard running sessions, it also suggests strength and yoga sessions to support my training, bike rides to build my endurance, and even trail runs designed to explore the area around me.
This keeps your training varied and also means that the feature has some value even to people like myself, who already have a coach providing all my running workouts for the week. I can use the supportive strength, bike and yoga sessions from Strava, even if I don’t use the runs.
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