HRV4Training meets Strava

Blog post by Marco Altini.

​We are happy to announce that we've just completed integration with Strava. 

In this post I'll go over the integration and explain what you'll get and how we used data gathered from Strava to improve your experience, provide more details on your trainings within the app and how we plan to use the data for research purposes as well.

How does it work?

The Strava integration in HRV4Training is rather straightforward:

• You need to authorize HRV4Training to retrieve your trainings from Strava. You can do so from Menu / Settings.
• As soon as you authorize HRV4Training to retrieve your trainings, we will read yesterday's training, you can double check from the History page.
• Every day when you measure your HRV in the morning, the app will check if there are any trainings from the previous day on Strava, and pre-populate some of the Tags for you (see later). You can edit your Tags if you disagree with what is pre-populated. You will also be able to see your training summaries in the History page in HRV4Training.

On your side, apart from linking Strava from Settings the first time, you will have only to make sure that your data is on Strava before you take your HRV measurement on the following morning, otherwise HRV4Training will have no way to gather your data.

Get objective training data, a more meaningful History & Tags autocomplete

As shown in the images above, after linking HRV4Training to Strava you will be able to see your trainings under history, and get the trainings summaries (pace/speed, distance, time, heart rate, etc.) by tapping the training icons.

We will also pre-populate some of the training Tags so that you don't have to manually do it after taking your HRV measurement. While some information is straightforward to add, for example training distance, other data might be a bit more tricky. For now, apart from recording all extra parameters above (pace, time, heart rate, elevation), we will also pre-populate training intensity, training distance and sport type. We discuss here only training intensity.

Training intensity

For the ones that want to know how we pre-populate the training intensity tag. Here is a quick summary:

• If you are a Strava premium user, and train with a heart rate monitor: we will use Strava's suffer score to determine training intensity (thresholds are currently 60 - 120).
• If you are not a Strava premium user or do not train with a heart rate monitor: we will compute your average pace, training time, distance and elevation from your historical data and determine training intensity based on how much you deviate from your normal on a given training day. For example, if your pace is 1 standard deviation faster than your normal pace, and the remaining parameters are within small variations, the training will be labeled as intense.

​We'll be gathering feedback on this method and see what you think and what improvements we can make. Obviously, feel free to edit your training intensity if you don't agree with what was pre-populated.

Research opportunities & data products

As I often try to stress, one of the main goals of HRV4Training is to gather a unique dataset including physiological, lifestyle and training data, so that we can better understand these complex relations and provide better guidance at the individual level.

We submitted our first research paper a few weeks ago (you can find the abstract here), looking at the relation between self-reported training load and acute physiological responses. Collecting objective training data will open additional possibilities. For example, while we've been looking at providing you with features based on the latest research, we were limited on the ability to track longitudinally performance and related within-individual changes in HR and HRV, since we did not have reference points as typically collected in well designed research studies (e.g. the 3000 m run in the first study described here). However, by gathering actual training summaries, we will now be able to better track objective physical condition and performance and potentially build new individual models. As we experiment on these aspects, we will also be providing you with updated features, as usual.

Limitations

The current Strava integration supports the following modalities:

• You train once per day, and the sport you do is one of the following: running, biking, swimming, walking, skiing or hiking.
• You train multiple times per day, doing the same sport (e.g. you run twice).
• You are a triathlete and train multiple times per day with any combination of running, biking and swimming activities.

If you do any of the above, the app will be able to correctly pre-populate your history and tags. Other combinations of trainings at the moment are not supported, but should be very infrequent. If you run into any issues let us know.

Why Strava?

Mainly because of the broad userbase it serves (from the occasional runner to the professional athlete) and the effort they are making to use their data to provide actual useful insights and data products, similarly to what we try to do in HRV4Training.

Here are some more details, just my personal opinion, after trying most apps:

• If you are a professional: you might be on TrainingPeaks or have some other way to track your trainings, possibly Garmin. Still, among the "apps", Strava seems the only one that is used by semi-professional or professional athletes, at least due to the competitive aspect. On a side note, we are also integrating with TrainingPeaks (pushing HR and HRV to their platform), while we will not integrate with Garmin in the near future, since Garmin does not have any free APIs.
• If you are not a professional: you should use Strava. If you are using HRV4Training the odds that you are serious about your trainings and have an interest in data as well as analytics are high. I'll give you a simple example that should be sufficient to clarify the difference between Strava and e.g. Runkeeper or other basic running/biking apps. If you go for a e.g. 8 km run using Runkeeper, the app will compare it with all your past e.g. 7-12 km runs, therefore giving you worthless information. Was it the same route? What was the elevation gain? etc. No point comparing apples with pears. Strava will automatically detect the exact route among your historical data and provide you with meaningful comparisons to let you understand more about your progress (plus sub-segments).  
• Suffer score: Strava's suffer score is a smart way to determine training intensity with respect to heart rate zones, and works pretty well at least for certain sports. It's never easy to summarize a workout with a single number, but we believe the Suffer score is well representative of a workout intensity and therefore can be valuable information in HRV4Training.

So if you are not a Strava user, give it a shot. If you have a lot of historical data from another app, just use this amazing service to move your trainings to Strava.

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