Monitoring your progress can be a great motivator, causing you to push yourself. Especially when it comes to walks, it can be fun to log your various walks over time, try out different routes, and challenge yourself to walk further than you’ve done before.
Using the free version of Strava on your phone, you can easily monitor your activity, as well as utilize some great features. Let’s take a step-by-step look at how you can get started on Strava and begin recording your walks.
Recording Your Walks With Strava
Strava lets you track a wide range of exercises including walking, running, swimming, and cycling. You can also plan routes, join community challenges, add your friends, and much more. It comes with both a free version and a paid version and is available on your web browser, iOS, and Android.
Though the paid version of Strava offers more features, of course, the free version of Strava is pretty sophisticated and great if you’re new to exercise and are looking for a simple way to track your walking progress.
What’s great is that getting started with Strava is quick and easy! So, let’s dive in.
Make an Account and Create Your Profile
Once you’ve installed Strava you’ll need to create an account. You can use your Facebook account, Google account, or your email address to do this. After creating your Strava account, you can log into it both on your phone and also on your web browser on your computer.
After making your account, you’ll automatically be taken to a basic profile creation page, where you’ll input your name, birth date, and gender. You can add more detail to your profile in the main Profile section of Strava.
You’ll then go through a few introductory pages, after which you’ll be asked if you want to start recording your first activity now or later.
Choosing Later will take you to a few more tutorial pages, introducing you to syncing your contacts, searching for friends to add, and following athletes, then you’re free to explore the app.
There’s also a helpful Getting Started menu that you can use when you want to check out more of the app.
Choosing Let’s Go will take you to the record page. You can reach this page later by tapping the Record section at the bottom-middle of the app.
Record Your First Walk
Once you’re on the Record section, allow Strava to access your location; this lets it accurately track your walk, measuring factors such as your distance and speed. Then select your activity using the shoe icon at the bottom of the screen and selecting Walk.
When you’re ready, hit Start and begin your walk. Strava will be running in the background, allowing you to use your phone freely as you walk—for example, changing your music, making calls, or taking pictures of your walk, which you can then upload to your finished activity.
You can check your progress anytime throughout your walk, noting your distance and speed, which is perfect for any goals you’ve set. Tapping the location icon next to the stop button will take you to a map where you can view your current route and better visualize how much you’ve walked.
You can both finish and pause your activity, if you need to take a break, with the Stop button.
Once you’ve finished your walk, you can then save your activity with a number of optional areas to add. Here, you can give your walk a title and description, add images, rate how easy or difficult it was, and adjust who can see your activity.
Your saved activities show up in your Feed as well as in the Activities section under your Profile. You can edit or delete your activities at any time as well as add anyone else who’s walked with you as long as they’re on Strava.
Consider Joining Clubs and Challenges
A great way to keep yourself engaged and motivated on your walks is to join one of Strava’s numerous clubs and/or challenges.
Located in the Explore section, you can select walk-specific challenges and track your progress and overall stats, as well as see how your friends and people all over the world are doing, if they’ve taken part. Challenges can vary and result in different rewards for your efforts.
Joining local or global clubs can keep you closer to the walking community through reading posts, holding discussions with other club members, and participating in group events.
Follow Your Friends and Walk Together!
Another great way to keep up your walking progress is by working out with friends. Strava lets you follow and invite your friends through the Find and Invite icon located at the top right of your screen.
Here you can sync up your phone contacts or Facebook friends as well as search for specific friends. Also, the more people you follow, the more people Strava will recommend to you, saving you time and effort in searching for everyone you want to follow.
Track Your Walks With Strava
The free version of Strava is a great way to introduce yourself to the world of social fitness apps. If you find that this something you’re really enjoying, then you might get a lot out of subscription-based features.
Strava’s subscription is priced at $ 59.99 per year and $ 7.99 per month, but it’s not the only subscription-based social fitness app around. Whether Strava or another social fitness app, going premium might take your exercise to the next level.
