Inside Strava’s push into strength training

Strava is about so much more than just showing off how fast you are—it’s for flaunting your strength to your friends, too.

The app has been beloved by runners for years, and as that community has grown, so has Strava’s business. Major brands now turn to the platform to build out their sports and other marketing initiatives, and last year, the company grew internally with the acquisition of the personalized training app Runna.

As of today, over 195 million people around the world use Strava, according to the company. Despite the growth, Strava’s marketing budget didn’t start out as particularly massive, CMO Louisa Wee told Marketing Brew. The app, which is social in nature, has continued to spread across the running community, and Wee and her team are now pushing to embed it in other segments of the fitness ecosystem, too.

“Strength training is growing as a part of people’s lives,” Wee told us at a Strava event hosted at Soft Bar, the cafe serving non-alcoholic beverages in Brooklyn that’s run by Summer House star Carl Radke. “People are choosing to live active lives that are just very diversified—more sports, more different sports…With those types of trends, it was really clear to us that we needed to support people in strength in a way that would allow them to enjoy what they do on Strava the same way [as running].”

Tell your (gym) friends

Strength training continues to be one of the top fitness activities and goals among US consumers, according to multiple industry reports, and it’s on the rise in the Strava app: According to the company, it’s among the fastest-growing activity types logged by users. To further encourage that behavior, Wee and her team are so far banking largely on word-of-mouth, which has long “carried the day” for the company, she said.

But the marketing team does have some plans to amplify the conversation around Strava and strength, including through the mid-August event at Soft Bar. While the gathering was fairly intimate, there was no shortage of cameras filming content for media outlets and social profiles.

Radke, who appeared onstage during the event, was joined by Summer House: Martha’s Vineyard alum and marathon runner Nick Arrington for a conversation about Radke’s sobriety journey and his path to fitness training, including starting the Soft Strides Run Club and preparing to run both the Berlin and the New York City marathons this fall. That marathon training includes plenty of strength work, Radke said—which is, like other activities, trackable on Strava.

“I really tried to diversify my workouts, and believe it or not, I’ve been tracking random Strava stuff like walking,” he said onstage. “I played golf on Monday—I tracked my 18-hole golf round. It’s been cool to find other ways to use the Strava app…and I like the accountability component of sharing your workout.”

Heavy hitters

Strava’s focus on strength training took off in earnest in May, when the company announced it would overhaul the “strength activity experience” on the app. The effort involves not only partnerships with influencers, but other fitness companies as well.

An integration with the gym workout tracker app Hevy, for instance, is designed to make tracking and sharing activities like lifts easier on Strava, Wee said. That’s currently somewhat of an obstacle for gymgoers, as there’s less of a set-it-and-forget-it method for recording sets and reps of different weight-lifting activities as there is for tracking activities like runs.

As the strength updates continue to roll out, Wee said her team will likely do a media push behind it, including, potentially, running ads or posting on Strava’s owned channels “around the right times of year,” she said. The hope, too, is that Strava users update people in their lives about the new utility.

“When people are thinking about doing those types of workouts, we will talk to our users,” Wee told us. “When it gets cold, people move indoors, so we’ll do a good job of talking about it then and putting the word out. But a lot of Strava is just driven by that…passion about [an activity], and [people] want to tell their friends and family about it.”