One of our leading performance sports coaches Dr. Kevin Sprouse, from Podium Sports, requested we build an integration with Strava; one of the world’s most popular and leading running and cycling apps.
Strava has many powerful features but the one Dr. Sprouse wanted was the infamous Relative Effort variable.
What is Strava’s Relative Effort?
Relative Effort measures how much cardiovascular work went into any activity that has heart rate data or Perceived Exertion
Why is it a powerful variable to measure?
A short and hard workout can require just as much effort as a long and leisurely one. Relative Effort makes it so you can compare the two!
Going even farther, different activity types are weighted so that your efforts can be compared across sports, and your values are personalized to your own heart rate zones. Now giving you the ability to compare with other athletes.
If your clients both ran their hardest 10K effort, their Relative Efforts would be similar even if their finishing times are different. Similarly, if one client rode a bike as hard as they could for the same amount of time, their Relative Effort would be comparable.
Bringing this data point gives you a comparable variable to assess one of the most important factors in sports performance, effort.
With Heads Up Professional, you can now import your clients Relative Effort variable from Strava to see how much effort they are putting in their training.
No more slackers or excuses!
With Heads Up, you can compare your athletes relative effort with their oura HRV and readiness, sleep metrics from oura, Garmin, Withings, Apple Health and dozens of more wearables and health apps.
Giving you context on performance like never before!
Example: Our VP of wearables Chuck Hazzard uses Strava’s Relative Effort & Oura’s AM Readiness to see his effort and recovery scores, helping him tune his training for peak performance.
Chuck typically only runs one long run 18+ miles on weekends, but you can see the one exception to that where he ran a tough mountain run on Saturday followed by a half marathon at race pace (good to run on tired legs from time to time).
If you have Heads Up ‘Signals’, seeing your team cohort analysis is even more helpful. The signals feature will allow you to run effort challenges, see your teams performance variables stacked against each other.
Create effort leaderboards. Identify team trends. Incentivize growth.
If you can’t improve what you don’t measure, isn’t it time to measure team effort?
On top of all this amazing technology, Heads Up Signals further unlocks the ability to create your own health and performance algorithms to run with your teams and clients.
The Strava integration is just one piece of the performance puzzle. Heads Up helps you put all the pieces together to unlock peak performance, health, and longevity.
Don’t just work harder, work smarter.
Get the cutting edge technology to unlock performance insights that help your athletes become champions.
Want to try using Heads Up & Strava? Try it out here for free.
