The Best Apps for Cyclists

1

Strava

In addition to its inherent value, Strava is so ubiquitous that makers of most every bike computer and health app on the market will make their product Strava-compatible, allowing you to see Strava segments from your computer or account for calories burned riding in a calorie-counting app. It’s so easy to use, it’s almost harder not to.

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2

MapMyRIDE

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3

Wahoo Fitness

The Wahoo Fitness app is just one in a long line of Wahoo Fitness products that includes other apps, bike computers and sensors, and indoor trainers. Use it to track over 30 kinds of workouts, and pair it with other devices to monitor stats such as heart rate, cadence, and power. Essentially, it’s a great app for those who just want to look back at their routes and stats, including how much they ride (or workout) every week or month.

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4

Trailforks

Other apps make it possible to look at gradient changes throughout a trail; but Trailforks does show elevation profiles that help you approximate grade. Plus, its trail status updates are fairly regularly updated: As one Quora user notes, Trailforks is able to offer a wealth of information because it invites more community-moderated feedback. Users operate like a Reddit subreddit: Trailforks will give members of local trail systems admin status and verification stars, so they can vet new trail submissions and updates. In trail systems without admins, users up- and down-vote new submissions, with submitters earning ‘trust’ points for providing good intel. Apps like MTB Project offer similar functionality, but with slightly more red tape and no trust points.

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5

MTB Project

Though we’ve already awarded Trailforks our unofficial crown for best mountain bike trail database app, MTB Project comes in a close second, and it’s rapidly gaining momentum. A large part of this is the slick presentation MTB Project has put together, including an easy to use website, an intuitive app, and partnerships with brands like REI.

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6

Komoot

If you want to ride a very specific route, you can upload a GPS file to the web portal and then send it to your phone app, or select a fellow Komoot member’s activity and copy it right to the app for replication. It is possible to sync Komoot with a bike computer. It took quite a few steps to pair it with my Garmin, but once it synced, I had easy access to any of the routes I created in the app. Once in my Garmin, however, many of the features that make Komoot attractive to commuters are stripped away.

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7

TrainingPeaks

Almost anyone who has worked with a cycling coach in the last 10 years has used TrainingPeaks, and likely the corresponding app. For coaches and racers alike, it’s been the great for tracking fitness and facilitating online coaching by way of their website and their desktop client, WKO+. And with the advent of the smartphone, athletes on the go gained the same power of analysis in the palm of their hand. Full-time athletes love it because they can go on the road for a few days and leave the computer at home; coaches love it for the ease of communication and file sharing with their clients; and recreational athletes love it for the simplicity with which it lays out your weekly workouts.

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8

TrainerRoad

TrainerRoad hooks up with various sensors and smart trainers to give you targeted, exercise science-backed workouts. By following a detailed workout plan over the course of a few weeks, you can spend your winter months working on problem areas, or keeping strengths in check. (Some experts advise spending this time logging base miles, if you’re planning to race the rest of the year).

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9

Zwift Companion

But in addition to its uses during a workout, Zwift Companion is also your mobile Zwift HQ. Maybe you’re at work and you want to plan your evening ride or check in on what your friends were up to this morning. Zwift Companion provides all of this, showing you your overall ride stats, events lists, friends lists, and notifications on what’s happening in your Zwift community.

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10

Road ID

Hopefully your rides happen without incident, but it’s good to be prepared in case something does happen. That’s where the Road ID app comes in. You might already be familiar with the company and their safety bracelet, which tells emergency medical personnel who you are and who your emergency contacts are, along with their phone numbers. The purpose of their phone app is the same.

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11

First Aid American Red Cross

First Aid: American Red Cross includes 22 learning modules covering everything from muscle strains and insect bites to seizures and shock. Each module covers the ins and outs of physiological emergencies and their treatments in bite-sized amounts, using easy-to-follow steps paired with instructional videos and straightforward FAQs.

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12

Migo

Rather than checking each company’s proprietary app for bike locations, you can check Migo’s map of every company’s available units, and have it redirect you to the app of your choice (with a tip on how much time it’ll take to find the bike in real life). And if you’re nowhere near any bikes, you can compare rates with other forms of shared transportation like car share and public buses.

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13

Dark Sky

There are two types of committed cyclists: Those who watch the Weather Channel for fun and those whose nightmares are punctuated by ominously swirling weather radar. No matter whether you get excited or compulsively anxious about a life of variable riding conditions, you’re going to have to prepare for them. Most forecasts seem about as prescient as magic eight balls, but the Dark Sky Weather app takes an innovative approach to offer class-leading accuracy, smart features, and visuals that make it almost enjoyable to plan ahead.

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14

MyFitnessPal

The most valuable feature is that its searchable database of food is vast (it boasts more than 8 million entries), and complete—very few searchable food entries are missing key macro- or micronutrient info. MyFitnessPal has also solved one of the hardest things about food tracking: logging meals made from complicated recipes, or foods you didn’t even make. Free-version users can easily scrape recipes they’ve made from websites, and have their ingredients analyzed; or search for restaurants and meals they’ve eaten off of respective menus. The app creates restaurant-food recipes out of menu descriptions, so they’re not always perfect, but they ARE editable. And in the event you have a lot of data to add, MyFitnessPal is also available as a desktop site.

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15

Sleep Cycle

More than that, Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock boosts your shot at A+ Zs by collecting and displaying your sleep history in an easily analyzable way. The data in the free version serve mostly as a collective indicator of whether you’ve been getting quality sleep overall. It includes the past night’s data on time spent asleep; graphs of your sleep depth throughout the night; a rating of your sleep quality as a percentage, based on historical sleep data; how many ‘steps’ your sleep movements would equate to; and how much time you spent snoring. Sleep data from previous nights is limited to your sleep quality ratings.

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16

iNaturalist

As the most efficient way to adventure under our own power, riding lets us see and experience a ton in short amounts of time. So when we remember to unstick our noses from our stems, peel our eyes away from our bike computer screens, and look around, we’re apt to notice a lot of really cool flora and fauna. The iNaturalist app gives armchair naturalists the chance to not only document all of the wildlife we encounter, but also to have it identified and verified by volunteer animal and plant experts.

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