Strava have today announced two new in-app features - ‘Fitness’ and ‘Perceived Exertion’. Both are designed to help athletes achieve their personal best, by better capturing their efforts and tracking progress over time.

Here’s what we know so far:

What do the new features do?

The Fitness tool is a new analysis tool, which will help athletes understand how their workouts are adding up over time. The daily Fitness Score is charted on a graph to provide a high-level view of individual fitness trends over time. Athletes will be able to zoom out to analyse their fitness trends over a one-month, three-month, six-month, one-year and two-year period.

The Perceived Exertion tool allows athletes to manually note how intense they found a run, ride, swim or gym session on a scale of 1 to 10. This new metric serves as a reliable way for athletes to keep an eye on how things felt, rather than relying on heart rate as a metric

Will all runners be able to try the new tools?

At the moment, the Fitness tool is only available for Strava Summit members. The Perceived Exertion tool will be available for all users.

What do the experts say?

There’s been a lot of discussion in the running world around the idea of running to feel. Endurance coach and scientist Megan Roche said of the new tools, “these features are great ways for an athlete to capture their effort and take a look at patterns over time so they can see how they’re progressing. Whether you’re an athlete training to PR a marathon or just want to run or ride a few times a week to stay fit, Fitness and Perceived Exertion can help motivate you to get out the door and go.”

James Quarles, Strava’s CEO said, “Strava is committed to helping the world’s athletes stay active and better track their progress over time. Summit continues to offer the best training and analysis tools to pursue your goals and avoid overtraining.”

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