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[6]](https://media.dcrainmaker.com/images/2023/05/clip_image0016-2.jpg "clip_image001[6]")
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]](https://media.dcrainmaker.com/images/2023/05/clip_image0016.png "clip_image001[6]")
![clip_image001[8]](https://media.dcrainmaker.com/images/2023/05/clip_image0018-1.png "clip_image001[8]")
![clip_image001[10]](https://media.dcrainmaker.com/images/2023/05/clip_image00110-1.png "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]](https://media.dcrainmaker.com/images/2023/05/clip_image00112-1.png "clip_image001[12]")
![clip_image001[14]](https://media.dcrainmaker.com/images/2023/05/clip_image00114-1.png "clip_image001[14]")
![clip_image001[16]](https://media.dcrainmaker.com/images/2023/05/clip_image00116-1.png "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!
FOUND THIS POST USEFUL? SUPPORT THE SITE!
Hopefully, you found this post useful. The website is really a labor of love, so please consider becoming a DC RAINMAKER Supporter. This gets you an ad-free experience, and access to our (mostly) bi-monthly behind-the-scenes video series of “Shed Talkin’”.
Support DCRainMaker - Shop on Amazon
Otherwise, perhaps consider using the below link if shopping on Amazon. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but your purchases help support this website a lot. It could simply be buying toilet paper, or this pizza oven we use and love.
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.
Ray mentioned Strautomator, I think they have just what you’re looking for (wear / mileage notification for your components).
ProBikeGarage does this as well and links to Strava automatically: link to probikegarage.com
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.
Hi Sean
How do you rotate between chains in the app? I have two X01 chains, that I rotate every 300km.
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.)
You and me both! :D
That’s nice.
I use Strautomator link to strautomator.com for this.
It also comes with some other nice features.
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.
Hopefully this is kick in the butt Garmin needs to do the same to Connect.
No Commute type. *sigh*
Yeah, a separate commute type linked to the tick box for commute rides would be excellent. Hope they add that functionality.
And no indoor type. *sigh*
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.
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.
When will Garmin figure this out based on Profile selected and /or gear connected (Di2, power meter, etc)?
Thanks for the update Ray. I probably wouldn’t be aware this feature was implemented into Strava if it hadn’t been mentioned here.
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?
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?
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).
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…
Look again. Virtual ride is there, on both the web site and in the app.
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.
Finally, I don’t know why did this simple thing took so long to come out…
Does Wahoo Bolt have a way to select an activity type?
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.
I don’t see that at the moment.
I have the same problem. I use my KICKR Bike for TrainerRoad workouts and I still have to edit the activity because an indoor workout is not a “Virtual Ride” so the workout is added to my road bike and not the KICKR Bike.
You that is what I want too
I have used this for all sorts of automations on Strava. This may do what you’re looking for: link to activityfix.com
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…
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.
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.
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.
Can I tell it that I use my road bike but with a different cassette on my Kickr?
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.
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.