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Strava is not just an app for tracking your workouts—it’s also one of the most popular platforms for athletes to connect with each other. Unfortunately, the app has a long way to go on the Apple Watch.
I recently began training for my first full marathon, and my running group decided to encourage each other using Strava. I downloaded the app for my Apple Watch, but soon found it to be far worse than Apple’s native Workouts app. On the watch, Strava offers a rather basic UI, doesn’t seamlessly sync audio to to my AirPods, and is missing several features that I rely on, such as pace alerts to stop me from running too fast or too slow.
If these sorts of limitations bother you too, there’s a way to keep using the Apple Watch Workouts to track your fitness, and sync that data to Strava, so you can enjoy the social aspects of that app. Here’s what to do.
How to connect your Apple Watch to Strava
You can easily set up a two-way connection between your Apple Watch and Strava. This means that when you record anything on the Workouts app, it’ll show up in Strava, and when you log something using Strava, it’ll show up on the Fitness app on your iPhone.
To get started, open Strava, go to the You tab, and hit the gear icon in the top-right corner. Go to Applications, Services, and Devices and tap Connect.
This will take you to the Health app’s permissions screen, where you can grant Strava access to the data you want to sync. If you allow Strava permission to read Health app data, it’ll be able to pull data from the Workouts app on the Apple Watch. Letting Strava write data to Health app sets will allow syncing with the Fitness app on your iPhone.
Automate sync between Apple Watch and Strava
You can also automate this entire process if you want to sync every single workout from your Apple Watch to Strava, and vice versa. To do this, go to Strava settings > Applications, Services, and Devices > Health and enable Automatic uploads and Send to Health.
If you don’t want to automate this process, you can manually import each workout from this page. It will show you all the workouts you’ve logged in the last 30 days and you can tap the Import button next to any workout you want to bring to Strava.
Since I set up my automation, logging runs to Strava has become a breeze. I get to enjoy the benefits of being in the Apple ecosystem—logging workouts on the Apple Watch Workouts app, listening to music from my iPhone, and receiving interval alerts via my AirPods. At the same time, all of my workout data is automatically shared with my running group via Strava.