Sometimes a little guidance goes a long way when it comes to maintaining or improving your fitness, and Strava’s latest feature aims to provide just that.
Yesterday, the app rolled out its new Instant Workout feature globally. Instant Workouts will analyse your prior activities and provide recommendations on what you can do next.
The feature trialled with a subset of users in November and is now available for more than 40 sports, including cycling.
It’s another piece in Strava’s broader development, which has seen the fitness app eye up big moves in its future.
Strava’s Instant Workouts
Strava says Instant Workouts are “intended to provide inspiration for athletes to stay consistent, especially for those who are looking to build an exercise habit or get back into things after a break.
“For users who have a regular workout routine, Instant Workouts can bring variety and fresh ideas to keep movement fun. And, since the suggestions are based upon prior activity, the more users upload, the more personalized the recommendations become,” Strava says.
The snag is the feature is only available for paid subscribers, with Strava costing £8.99 per month or £54.99 per year.
If that’s you, you can see the Instant Workouts feature in the carousel at the top of the app’s feed.
Instant Workouts enable you to select from four intents – ‘maintain’, ‘ build’, ‘explore’ or ‘recover’ – and will then suggest a variety of workouts across your chosen sports.
Alongside personalised activity suggestions, Instant Workouts will generate a route for activities that require one powered by Strava’s Heatmap, which shows where users have been active.
Strava will also tell you why it’s recommending a particular activity to help you “learn a bit more about certain types of workouts and how that fits into their own activity history”.
Why has Strava released Instant Workouts?
Over the last year, we’ve seen Strava undertake a period of “accelerated growth”, which has seen the app develop into a more advanced training tool.
Last year, Strava acquired The Breakaway and Runna, two apps that provide personalised training recommendations for cycling and running, respectively.
Now its Instant Workouts feature seems to build on those acquisitions, and Strava says some users will even see workout recommendations from its partners, including Runna.
Instant Workouts will also evolve in the coming weeks and months, fitting into a growth area for the app: uploads from Apple Watches. Strava revealed in September that uploads to the app from Apple Watches increased by nearly 20 per cent in 2024, which prompted it to redesign its app for the smartwatch.
Strava says you will be able to send workout recommendations to your Apple or Garmin device.
All these developments reflect Strava’s ambition to motivate people to lead active lives, but also Strava’s bigger ambitions.
Since he became Strava’s CEO in 2024, Michael Martin has been on a mission to add tools to the app to boost users and paid subscribers.
This appears to be working. Strava had 50m users in 2025 and saw a huge spike in downloads. It also closed a massive $2.2 billion funding round in May 2025.
All this success and growth has led Strava to seek a public offering, even if the app remains tight-lipped on when that will happen.