As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.How to Hack Strava and stalk people on Strava that you see in outside. If you pass someone on the road or trail, you can usually find them on Strava!

Use tips and tricks of Strava stalking in this video to see whats up and who is out there. So much more than a basic fitness tracking app, Strava lets you transform every inch of the planet's navigable terrain into a racetrack and turn boring sessions into competitive time trials.

Essential reading: The best running apps

The app's success is owed not so much to the wealth of data it shows about your training but to the community it has created – and it even rivals the best GPS watches for accuracy and data. We're not talking about friendly Facebook Groups of affable athletes; these people aren't your friends, they're your adversaries. By chalking up each of its 1.2m active users' successes and failures on virtual leaderboards Strava has achieved gamification on a grand scale, encouraging even the most casual partakers to turn their local multi-use towpath into a time trial.

You'll find everything you need to get started at strava.com. We'll get into hardware later on - for now, the free smartphone app is all you need to record a basic route and pit yourself against the community.

Build better run and cycle routes

If you're struggling to find new places to run the Route Builder can do it for you. You pick the start and finish points on the map and Strava will suggest routes based on data where most users run, helping you find those paths and trails that don't show on Google. You can even find flatter routes by hitting the Min Elevation tab on the toolbar, which is great for people whose home is sandwiched between hills, although not so good for your basal metabolic rate.

To get the most from Strava you'll want to use a heart rate sensor to add in all that lovely biometric data. If you're running or cycling with your phone, you'll need to invest in a Bluetooth chest strap or optical heart rate band. To pair it start a workout from your phone, choose settings and then External Sensors. Turn on the Bluetooth sensors control and then pair up.

Alternatively, you could hook up a compatible GPS sports watch that works with Strava. The TomTom Spark and Garmin Forerunner 235 will all automatically push workouts to Strava.

One for Premium users, the Suffer Score shows how hard you worked in your session. It's a neat feature, as it's one of the few tools that crunch the numbers of your heart rate and feed it back in a positive way. To access it you'll need to have a heart rate sensor hooked up to Strava, which will then gauge how much of your run was spent in specific zones. The higher the number, the more you suffered.

Just like the good old days of Google, Strava has its own Labs section for beta features and cool moonshot ideas to try out. Just head to labs.strava.com and login and you can access a bunch of funky tools. Notable features are Project Kudos, which measures all the thumbs up you've ever received and Clusterer, which shows popular routes on a mad-looking Tron map.

A big part of Strava is its social aspects, and with so many global users, the chances are a fair few of your existing, real life human friends will already be using the service. You can add them by heading to Profile and clicking the Search friends icon. From there you can connect up Facebook or search your contacts for Strava users. Alternatively, type someone's name in at the top. When they're added their activity will appear in your news feed, and you can give them kudos on activity and leave comments.

The Segment Explorer lets you discover new places to run or ride, anywhere in the world. Segments aren't long routes - they're generally short 1 to 2 mile stretches created by Strava users that get fused together as you progress to form a single activity containing multiple mini races

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