Make Strava your practical companion for a morning run or bike ride. This popular exercise-tracking app has a thriving community of athletes – from amateurs and enthusiasts to pros – to keep you motivated. Keen to discover the distances you’re covering or improve on your personal bests? Learn how to get more out of Strava with these five tips.

Maybe you want to start a new habit, prepare for your local park run or reach new rock-climbing heights. Let Strava become your personal pocket-size motivator by setting goals in the app. Establish what you hope to achieve by choosing an ideal distance or time period. For instance, you may want to run 20 kilometres every week or train 12 hours per month.

Do you have any highly competitive friends or are you on a mission to build the dream team? Either way, you can create head-to-head challenges or group activities in the app – and invite your friends to participate. Training together may give you that extra boost of energy when you need it most.

If you run or cycle the same route often enough, some days you’ll feel like you’ve tackled your route faster than before. With Matched Activities, you can do away with any doubt and compare your present self to previous performances. By combining all your activities into a single graph, Strava displays your trends over time.

Incline training is not easy – and we don’t just mean from an athletic point of view. Trying to analyse your performance accurately can be challenging, but Strava can calculate a comparable pace on flat terrain for you with the Grade Adjusted Pace (GAP) feature. Uphill runs can elevate your heart rate and work towards enhancing your overall performance.

Find comfort in giving people you trust access to your route. Beacon provides trusted contacts a link to see your starting point and location. If something were to happen, they would be able to trace your last known location. You can activate this feature by tapping Record and then the Beacon icon on the far right.