Strava’s New Automatic Gear Tracking: Quick How-To Guide

May 17, 2023 by |Sports Technology News and Reviews|Comments (37)

Strava’s got a new update that allows you to automatically assign gear based on sport type. Meaning, now your mountain bike rides will automatically assign your mountain bike, your gravel rides your gravel bike, and your trail runs your trail running shoes. Heck, even my Cargo Bike races can automatically assign my Urban Arrow cargo bike.

Shane Miller of GPLAMA has a video above, showing how it works in both desktop and mobile. But, I’ll quickly run through the mobile side below.

To begin, there are a few minor notables:

A) Your watch/bike computer needs to correctly set the activity type (most do)
B) This works for BOTH free and paid Strava subscribers
C) That’s about it

For this, I’ll use examples of bikes, but this works the same way for running/hiking sport sub-types. In your app (on mobile or desktop, but I’ll show mobile), go to ‘You’ (on the bottom), and then ‘Profile’ up top, then scroll down to ‘Gear’, and you’ll be given a list of any gear you’ve created. Obviously, you can see I’m pretty horrible at remembering to tag bikes in Strava uploads.

clip_image001 clip_image001[6] clip_image001

Next, choose a bike. In my case I’m going to choose my mountain bike (Canyon Exceed CF SL 5.0) – for which you can see I rarely remember to actually tag the correct bike. Then choose ‘Edit Bike’, then at the top choose ‘Default Sports’, and select the sports you want. In my case I’m selecting Mountain Bike Ride and Gravel Ride. I don’t have a dedicated Gravel Bike, so if I am riding gravel, it’s probably gonna be this one. At the top, you’ll notice it’ll have updated the ‘Default Sports’ section. Then tap save. You’re done!

clip_image001[6] clip_image001[8] clip_image001[10]

You can rinse and repeat this for other types. For example, here I’ve got my Indoor Smart Bikes collection, tagged for Virtual Rides (Zwift/Rouvy/etc…), and my cargo bike (Urban Arrow), tagged for E-Bike rides.

clip_image001[12] clip_image001[14] clip_image001[16]

And again, you can do this same thing again for shoes. In that case, the sub-categories offered are:

– Run
– Hike
– Walk
– Virtual Run
– Trail Run

Bikes and Shoes are the only two Gear categories that Strava currently offers. So if you’ve got other categories like skiing or such, you can’t separate those out onto different skis. Further, this will *NOT* impact existing/older activities. This is only for newer ones. And finally, you can always change this on a per-activity basis from new activities. For example, if I ride on the Peloton Bike (for which I have a separate gear listing), then I’d manually change it to ‘Peloton Bike’ as the bike name. Same goes for if I do a gravel bike on something other than my mountain bike, in which case I’d update that.

Note that if you have slightly more complex gear association needs, you’d want to look at automated Strava solutions/apps ActivityFix or Strautomator, which can utilize other data bits to make more customized changes automatically.

Either way, cool stuff.

With that – thanks for reading!

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37 Comments

  1. Alex
    May 17, 2023 at 2:56 pm #1

    The bike gear thing they really should do is mileage notifications for tires, chains, etc the same way you can get mileage notifications for running shoes.

    Reply
    • Steffen
      May 17, 2023 at 6:04 pm #2

      Ray mentioned Strautomator, I think they have just what you’re looking for (wear / mileage notification for your components).

      Reply
    • HSTO
      May 18, 2023 at 4:09 pm #3

      ProBikeGarage does this as well and links to Strava automatically: link to probikegarage.com

      Reply
    • Sean
      May 18, 2023 at 8:28 pm #4

      I use ProBikeGarage specifically for individual component wear. It allows you to add service intervals. I use this for two things:
      1. Tracking mileage between rewaxing intervals for chains (I have 5 chains to rotate between two different bikes so cleaning is more efficient)
      2. Reminder to add sealant if I haven’t had a puncture after a certain time frame

      PBG is very good at iterations such as this. If you want to track tires/wheelsets/chainrings/cassettes etc. – you are only limited by keeping up when you put equipment on or take it off the bike – and log the appropriate bike on strava.

      If one of the other options does it as well or better I am all ears. One of the only things I’d want to add is automatically select the bike based on the power meter ID.

      Reply
    • Gudi
      September 20, 2023 at 4:42 am #5

      Hi Sean
      How do you rotate between chains in the app? I have two X01 chains, that I rotate every 300km.

      Reply
  2. Cody Custis
    May 17, 2023 at 3:01 pm #6

    I’m old. I quit using Strava to track gear when it wouldn’t let me create new shoes from in the app.

    (A bit of Google Fu shows that Strava finally added the feature back in September 2021, so I’d been happily ignoring Strava’s interface issues for half a decade.)

    Reply
  3. Christof
    May 17, 2023 at 3:49 pm #8

    That’s nice.

    I use Strautomator link to strautomator.com for this.
    It also comes with some other nice features.

    Reply
  4. okrunner
    May 17, 2023 at 5:19 pm #9

    This is great!! I noticed Monday it was already implemented.

    Ray,
    Can you convince Garmin to do the same? It’s been a regular pain in my back side to try to keep track of various shoes and bikes as Garmin and before Strava would not correct the mileage once you saved an event and then tried to go back and correct it a day or so later. For instance, my road bike shows a crap ton of miles that were actually put on my gravel bike.

    Reply
  5. Blair
    May 17, 2023 at 5:34 pm #10

    Hopefully this is kick in the butt Garmin needs to do the same to Connect.

    Reply
  6. Greg
    May 17, 2023 at 6:09 pm #11

    No Commute type. *sigh*

    Reply
  7. Dolan Halbrook
    May 17, 2023 at 8:21 pm #14

    I would love to see Garmin sell a cheap dongle that you could add to your bike (or even better, a bike mount) that would allow settings to be tied to it. So you could stick one on your mountain bike that would put the computer into “MTB mode” on every ride, and set the correct bike. For those of us who are constantly switching our computer between bikes, it would be a godsend.

    Reply
    • David
      May 18, 2023 at 12:58 am #15

      Garmin could do this tomorrow based on a number of things including profile selected, ant+/Bluetooth power meters or even their own their own Ant+ cadence/speed sensors a lot of us used to buy.

      Reply
  8. David
    May 18, 2023 at 12:54 am #16

    When will Garmin figure this out based on Profile selected and /or gear connected (Di2, power meter, etc)?

    Reply
  9. BjornatDCR
    May 18, 2023 at 1:02 am #17

    Thanks for the update Ray. I probably wouldn’t be aware this feature was implemented into Strava if it hadn’t been mentioned here.

    Reply
  10. Nick
    May 18, 2023 at 5:52 am #18

    Why can’t they do what seems so obvious and link the gear to the speed/cadence sensors, bluetooth module or power meters attached to your bike?

    Reply
  11. Qpop
    May 18, 2023 at 2:05 pm #19

    I really wish there was a way to get activity name from Garmin devices to Strava. Despite creating a new activity type for my Brompton rides I can’t find a unique bit of the .fit file to change the info on activityfix. Anybody solved this?

    Reply
    • ActivityFix
      May 18, 2023 at 4:10 pm #20

      E-mail me (activityfix@gmail.com) and I’ll see if there’s anything that can be done. Unless you’re running a workout the Garmin activity names just tend to be “___ Cycling” named after the town you started in and the type of riding you were doing (Road/Gravel/MTB). If you’re manually changing the name in Garmin and want it to transfer over to Strava, that isn’t possible with ActivityFix at the moment since I just use the data in the push notification sent when the activity is first saved (before you’re renamed it).

      Reply
  12. Aendy
    May 18, 2023 at 2:10 pm #21

    There is virtual run but not virtual ride. Where is the logic in that. I would say its more common to have a designats bike than shoes to your virtual sessions…

    Reply
    • Paul S.
      May 18, 2023 at 2:16 pm #22

      Look again. Virtual ride is there, on both the web site and in the app.

      Reply
    • Tim s
      May 24, 2023 at 1:41 am #23

      It didn’t show up on mine at first when I tried to add my Wahoo KICKR bike because my main bike had been selected for a bunch of stuff including virtual ride. I had to edit that bike, deselect virtual ride, and then create a new bike to tie it to virtual ride. It forced me to enter the weight of my Wahoo KICKR bike which was kind of funny tbh.

      Reply
  13. ts
    May 19, 2023 at 1:36 pm #24

    Finally, I don’t know why did this simple thing took so long to come out…

    Reply
  14. Travis
    May 19, 2023 at 2:05 pm #25

    Does Wahoo Bolt have a way to select an activity type?

    Reply
  15. Richard Shepherd
    May 20, 2023 at 1:46 pm #26

    Is there a way to set a bike for indoor ride rather than virtual ride? Sometimes I use my Garmin watch to record a rise on the Wattbike at the gym. These just get counted as “ride” so they add to the mileage of my road bike. I’d like all indoor rides to be able to be added to “gym bike” or whatever I call it. Virtual rides do work of course but have to come from a recognised platform such as Swift.

    Reply
  16. Gilbert
    May 22, 2023 at 11:52 am #31

    Ray,

    Can Strava or an integration partner dynamically change the front and rear wheels to a Wahoo Climb and Wahoo KICKR for virtual activities, then use my actual front and rear wheels for outdoor rides? It would help me track mileage/use for maintenance for each component.

    I have one bike now for riding indoors and outdoors…

    Reply
  17. Tom
    May 23, 2023 at 2:41 pm #32

    When I saw this I was hoping I could assign a power meter to a particular bike and use that to identify the gear used. It won’t help those with power pedals but seems like a no brainer if you have crank based power.

    Reply
  18. TR
    May 23, 2023 at 6:28 pm #33

    Now they just need to allow more than one bike (etc) be tied to a specific activity. They could then pop up a dialog on save to pick from them.

    Yeah, whine whine whine. But some of us have more than one road bike for example.

    Reply
    • Ray Maker
      May 24, 2023 at 6:20 am #34

      Yeah, ideally you could tie it to the sensor ID’s (either ANT+ or BT ID). One day…

      While I kinda understand why Strava would be hesitant to introduce such complexity, I do wish they made it available to 3rd party apps.

      Reply
  19. Julian
    May 24, 2023 at 8:08 am #35

    Can I tell it that I use my road bike but with a different cassette on my Kickr?

    Reply
  20. Kyle Hitz
    May 30, 2023 at 7:01 am #36

    Now if only we could get automatic “commute” sensing. I like to track my commute miles via strava and it would be really nice if you could select start and end destinations as a commute and it would automatically label rides and select gear based on rides that start/end at those locations.

    Reply
  21. abk
    June 9, 2023 at 6:55 am #37

    Grrr, I wonder I got caught by a bug when they deployed this. In about this timeframe at least three years of my mountain bike rides were reclassified as road rides, and any kayaking this year has gotten classified as SUP.

    Reply