Jan 10, 2026
3 min read
Like Garmin's daily recommended workouts or Fitbit's Premium Health Coach, Instant Workouts use your fitness level and fatigue in conjunction.
Strava has challenged Garmin and Fitbit with personalized instant workouts, and I'm intrigued
Like Garmin's Daily Recommended Workout or Fitbit Premium Health Coach, Instant Workouts uses your fitness level and fatigue for context.
What you need to know
- The new Strava Instant Workouts feature analyzes past activity data and creates personalized workout recommendations every Monday.
- This feature works for 40+ sports and automatically creates outdoor GPS maps based on Strava heat maps.
– Maintain four types of “intention” training, Build, Explore, and Recover.
- It's only available to Strava subscribers, and the option to push instant workouts to your Apple or Garmin watch is "coming soon".
When I interviewed Strava executives last year, I asked if they would offer users personalized workout recommendations. Judging by their stats, they play coy. But admitting they wanted to make Strava more "predictive," this week Strava Instant Workouts has arrived to fulfill those ambitions.
The function is quite simple: every week the Strava algorithm analyzes your recent activities and creates a series of sample workouts adapted to your abilities.
You can choose to "maintain" your current average pace or distance, go longer than usual, "build" your fitness, "explore" new sports, or "recover" with light workouts.Each category will have several training cards for you to choose from, which will show you more information about pace and route.
Strava began beta testing this feature for running and strength training in November - and users reported they were 85% satisfied with it - but now the feature has been expanded to more than 40 sports.
Strava Athlete Intelligence will label each workout as easy, moderate, or difficult and provide "a rationale for the benefits of that type of workout."
For outdoor activities, Strava will automatically create a possible route based on its Heatmap, which tracks where other users traditionally like to run.Whether you're unfamiliar with an area or just craving something new, this feature sounds really helpful, and you can save the route for later.
Of course, to follow this route, you'll need to use the Strava app during the activity or push the route to your smartwatch.Strava says "the ability to send workouts to your Garmin or Apple device and advanced step-by-step guidance" are coming in the coming weeks and months.
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For the past year, Strava has had two programs, long-distance and long-distance (Runna), but Avent's registers are the first to get buses.
How Strava Instant Workouts compares to Garmin Connect, Fitbit and other fitness apps
I plan to try Strava's instant workouts in the next few weeks, to see how useful and unique they are.On paper, they're an attractive alternative to options like Garmin's daily workouts, though not to long-term plans like Garmin Coach, Peaks Training, or Runna Strava plans.
Garmin's daily suggestions for runners or cyclists are based on targeted exercise intensity information that encourages you to do more low aerobic or anaerobic exercise to maintain good intensity over the long term.Strava relies on athletes to decide when to push harder, relax or sustain, and gets more suggestions each time.
Garmin recently expanded its indoor strength training offerings on the Venu 4, and it's worth noting that only a few Garmin watches have general offerings.While Strava workouts are aimed at more sports and can only be "pushed" to Apple and Garmin watches, you can easily recreate a "30-minute run" on your fitness watch.
As a side note, I'm curious to see how well the Strava heatmap generated routes work.Garmin's own Trendline popularity routing didn't produce courses that were particularly useful or smart for me;I make my own paths, if I use them.
You should also compare Strava Instant Workouts to Fitbit's new Personal Health Coach, which makes custom workout recommendations across several exercise modes.
The new Fitbit app, currently available to the public, allows you to talk to the LLM “Trainer” about your training goals.At this point, a weekly training session is automatically created.You only see one per day, but you can “edit” the plan at any time and change your specific workout for the day.
Fitbit doesn't have a GPS-equivalent heat map, but its "artificial intelligence" analytics try to resemble Strava's athlete intelligence, only designed for conversation rather than Strava's per-exercise summary.
Finally, it's no surprise that Strava has challenged other apps with its own custom workouts.ES knew it had to do with long-term training on your phone would have to do with long-term training on your phone.More convincing for expensive athletes.
Michael is Android Central's resident expert on wearables and fitness.Before joining Android Central, he freelanced for several years at Techradar, Wareable, Windows Central, and Digital Trends.Explaining his love of running, he established himself as an expert in fitness watches, researching and evaluating models from Garmin, Fitbit, Samsung, Apple, COROS, Polar, Amazfit, Suunto and others.
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