Strava has searched for ways both to quantify athlete efforts across different disciplines and to offer a higher level of training data analysis to its premium users. Suffer Score had been Strava’s go-to Premium metric based on heart rate, but now Relative Effort has taken over as a better cardiovascular intensity comparison, also giving a visual representation on mobile devices of your trending training efforts.
Strava Relative Effort premium member training metric
The idea of the new Relative Effort feature is to quickly show athletes how strenuous an activity was on a more level playing field. Personally, it will show more accurate comparison of running & cycling for example, better accounting for variation of time, distance & intensity across disciplines. With group activities, it is said to offer much improved comparison of how each athlete performed relative to their typical training efforts.
The impetus derived essentially from the limitations of Suffer Score which would exaggerate running efforts vs. similar effort cycling or swimming activity, and would also underreport the effort of shorter but very intense training. So the new, reworked metric was developed with sport-focused data scientist Dr. Marco Altini for increased precision in effort comparison.
