Strava releases group fitness challenges and personalized segment recommendations

Strava has been my go-to app for outdoor workouts for many years, and today the company has launched two exciting features.

The maps tab is seeing a visual refresh and segments and routes are now in a single place. The maps tab also has a new segments recommendations function to help you plan a workout. The included recommendations are:

• Visit popular spots: A sample of the most popular segments in the area.
• Discover new places: Popular segments in the area you haven’t worked out in yet.
• Break your record: A segment where you’re close to beating your personal record.
• Climb the leaderboard: A segment where you’re close to breaking into the top 10 spot on the leaderboard.
• Go for a workout: Find nearby tracks, areas for interval training, and other areas where the other users train.
• Become a legend: A segment where you’re close to becoming the Local Legend.

The full experience is for paid subscribers only.

Group Challenges

The second new feature is a group challenges option that enables athletes to create challenges and compete with friends. Group Challenge organizers can choose a challenge goal and create a Group Competition (max. 25 people) using one of the competition formats below:

• Most Activity – Set a goal for time, distance, elevation gain, or loss. The goal sets a milestone for the group to reach to complete the challenge. The leaderboard ranks athletes by their overall activity.
• Fastest Effort – Average pace across a specific distance from running, virtual running, or wheelchair. Setting a race distance gives others in the challenge a guide on how far they plan to travel. This is the distance all efforts will be measured over, and the leaderboard will rank runners by their average pace during workouts.
• Longest Single Activity – Single activity recording of your longest distance across any sport that supports distance. You can set a minimum distance to help others in your challenge understand how far they need to go, how the leaderboard ranks are determined, and provides a level of difficulty for the challenge.

The minimum number of days in a challenge is one and the maximum is a year. Workouts uploaded with privacy settings set to “public” or “followers-only” will count toward a Group Challenge. Although challenges are available to paid subscribers and free users, there is a maximum challenge limit of three for non-paid users.