Is Strava Premium worth the premium?

Training plans, Suffer Scores, Beacon and more

Strava

Published: March 31, 2017 at 5:00 pm

Love Strava? Want more features? Well maybe you need to upgrade to Strava Premium? But is it worth it?

What more can Strava do if you make the jump to Premium?

Get access to top training advice

Tracking your weekly and monthly mileage and hours spent in the saddle is a great way to ensure you’re working towards your goals. With Strava Premium — it’s currently £45 /$59 / €59 per year — more advanced tools become available.

Sign up for a training plan to get a schedule and riding advice delivered to your inbox daily. Goals can range from improving your climbing to nailing a 100-mile sportive, and plans are tailored to take into account the time you have to ride and the date you’d like to achieve your goal.

Leaderboard filters

Standard Strava lets you filter activities by date to see results for this year, month or day, the latter being useful to see how you did on a tough climb in a sportive. Strava Premium lets you filter leaderboards by age and weight category to leave out young whippets and get a fairer comparison for your performance.

Analyse this

If the stats provided by Strava for free aren’t enough for you, Premium provides even more data.

Heart rate monitor users get a Suffer Score, plus fitness and freshness indication. The harder you ride the higher your score — useful for letting you know you’ve had a good work out, but also letting you know when you should rest.

For power meter users, Premium unlocks a ton of useful info — from a breakdown to the time spent in different power zones on one ride to in-depth comparisons of your peak power output for different intervals over anything from the past six weeks to your whole time using the app!

Stay even safer

Beacon is a Premium feature available on your phone via iOS and Android, and compatible devices such as a Garmin Edge 1000, which can provide real-time info about your performance on a particular segment.

It also allows you to give up to three contacts live access to your ride. If your partner wants to be sure you’re safe they can keep track of your ride.

Take advantage of other riders’ efforts

If someone you’re following has discovered a great ride you want to recreate, if they’ve saved it as a route, Premium lets you download it to your GPS.