How to Share Strava to Instagram

Sharing your latest run, ride, or swim from Strava to Instagram is a perfect way to document your fitness journey and connect with your community. This guide will walk you through everything, starting with the simple, direct sharing feature and moving on to more creative strategies for crafting content that truly stands out in the feed. We’ll cover how to customize your stats, design on-brand graphics, and write captions that spark conversations.

Why Share Strava on Instagram? It's More Than Just a Map

At first glance, posting a map of your route might seem like a simple log of your activity. But thinking like a marketer or content creator, it’s so much more. A Strava share is a form of authentic, user-generated content that tells a powerful story about dedication, progress, and hitting personal goals. It’s a way to humanize your personal brand or business profile by showing the effort that happens behind the scenes.

For athletes, influencers, and fitness brands, these posts build a narrative. Each run isn't just a run, it's a chapter in a larger story of training for a marathon, exploring a new city on foot, or simply staying active. This type of content resonates with followers because it's real and relatable. You’re not just telling people about your commitment, you’re showing it, complete with data, maps, and personal reflection. This consistency builds community and positions you as a source of motivation and inspiration.

The Official Way: Sharing Directly from the Strava App

The simplest way to get your activity from Strava to Instagram is with the built-in sharing tool. It’s fast, easy, and perfect for quick updates, especially on Instagram Stories. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how it works.

Step 1: Open the Strava App and Select Your Activity

First, open the Strava app on your phone. Go to your profile or your feed and tap on the activity you want to share. This could be your morning run, a weekend bike ride, an open-water swim, or any other workout you’ve tracked. Once you have the activity open, you'll see your map, stats, and any photos you added.

Step 2: Find the Share Icon

On the activity screen, look for the share icon. It’s typically represented by an arrow pointing out of a box. On an iPhone, it is usually in the upper-right corner. On Android, it might be in a similar spot or hidden behind a three-dot menu. Tapping this icon will open up Strava's sharing interface.

Step 3: Customize Your Share Card

This is where you get to decide what your followers see. Strava gives you a few great options to customize the little graphic - or "share card" - your activity will appear on.

• Add a Photo: Instead of just showing a map, you can select a photo from your activity or from your phone's camera roll to use as the background. A great action shot or a scenic photo from your route is always more engaging than a plain map.
• Select Map Style: If you do decide to show your map, you don’t have to stick with the default look. You can choose from a variety of different map styles, such as a satellite image, a dark mode map, a terrain-focused view, and other cool designs using colors from your photos. Test them out to see which one best fits your aesthetic.
• Choose Your Stats: Do you want to highlight your speed, your elevation gain, or your total distance? Strava lets you edit which data points appear on the share card. You can pick what is most relevant to the story of that particular workout. If it was a hilly run, show off that elevation. If it was a personal best on a 5k, highlight your pace and time.

Step 4: Share to Instagram Feed or Stories

Once your share card looks the way you want it, tap the Instagram button. Strava will then ask if you want to share it to your Feed or your Story, and what happens next depends on what you pick.

• Sharing to Stories: This is the most common use case. Your custom Strava share card becomes an Instagram Story sticker. You can pinch to resize it, drag it around the screen, and position it wherever you want. From there, you have all of Instagram's creative tools at your disposal: add music, throw in a poll, type some text on top, or add a GIF. It’s a dynamic and temporary way to share your daily progress.
• Sharing to Feed: If you select this option, Strava's custom graphic is sent directly to the Instagram app to serve as the image for a new post. It behaves a lot like you had just selected a standalone photo from your library. You can then add a filter, write out your caption, add a location, and tag other accounts before you post it.

When to Use the Official Method

The direct-share function is ideal for fast, in-the-moment updates. It’s the go-to choice for an Instagram Story about your run an hour after you finished. It’s simple, authentic, and gets the job done without overthinking brand design or layouts.

Level Up Your Content: Creative Ways to Share Strava Data

While the direct-share feature is great, leveling up your content helps you build a more polished brand and tell a deeper story. It’s all about taking the raw data from Strava and presenting it in a way that feels unique to you. Here are three effective methods to move beyond the basic share.

Method 1: The Screenshot and Graphic Design Approach

This method gives you complete creative control over the look and feel of your fitness posts and is perfect for maintaining a consistent aesthetic on your Instagram Feed.

• The Process: Start by taking a high-quality screenshot of what you want to feature from the Strava app. This could be the map of your route, the detailed elevation chart, or your split times.
• Actionable Advice: Open a free design tool like Canva or an app like Adobe Express. Start with an Instagram post square (1080x1080px) or portrait (1080x1350px) template - you can create one that matches your brand’s fonts and colors. Add the screenshot you took from Strava along with a compelling and high-quality photo from your activity. By combining the screenshot alongside a great original photo you provide visual interest and data, telling a complete story.
• Why it Works: It makes your fitness content feel cohesive and intentionally designed. If someone visits your Instagram profile, they will feel more uniformity vs. just randomly posted unedited map screenshots.

Method 2: Video and Reels - Bring Your Activity to Life

Video is the most engaging format on social media right now, and your workout activities are perfectly suited for dynamic Reels or Stories. They capture the energy of a workout way better than a static image could.

• Actionable Advice: Instead of a photo, capture short video clips during your activity (if you can do it safely!). A few five-second scenes showing the trail, your sneakers on the pavement, or the view from a hill are more than enough. Next, in an editing app - Instagram has a built-in Reels editor which works just fine - combine those clips with your key activity stats as text overlays on the screen. For example, an opening shot of a beautiful trail, followed by a text overlay that fades in saying something like: “Morning trailblazer run complete. 6.2 miles. 1,029 feet of elevation climbing.” Set it all to a trending and high-energy music track to grab the viewer's attention.
• Why it Works: Videos tend to get better performance and reach from the Instagram algorithm, and they are great at storytelling and evoking emotion - the struggle to get up a hill and the triumph of finally getting there. A quick edit for an Instagram Reel can do this in an exciting and fast-paced way, attracting more viewer engagement.

Method 3: Third-Party Apps for Stunning Visualizations

Some tools are designed to pull in your Strava data to produce truly unique and impressive pieces of content.

• The Process: Many third-party apps, like Relive, connect directly to your Strava account to pull in data. With the Relive app, for example, it can create an amazing 3D video flyover of your activity route using satellite imagery, showing key moments along your path and photos. Other services like VeloViewer are great for cyclists wanting to make beautiful heatmaps of their rides.
• Actionable Advice: Connect your Strava account, let the app pull your data from that activity, and then export the video to share on Instagram. This requires very little design skill on your part and results in a very professional-looking video.
• Why it Works: These videos are highly shareable and stop the scroll. People who have never seen them before can grab their attention quickly. This is perfect for sharing milestone activities - like running your first marathon or an epic cycling adventure through a mountain pass.

Best Practices for Writing an Instagram Caption

No matter how you choose to visually share your activity, an intentionally written caption ties everything together. A great caption is what turns your data into a story with personality and meaning.

Tell a Story, Not Just a Stat

Don’t just copy and paste “Run. 3.2 miles.” Share what it felt like. Talk about how you felt throughout the workout: the hill that was hard to climb, the beautiful sunrise you witnessed, or the friend you shared it with. For example: "Felt strong on the hills today, but that last mile was a grind. But the sunrise was worth it!”

Use Relevant Hashtags

Hashtags make your content discoverable. Use a mix of broad and niche hashtags to reach a wider audience and also connect with communities that share your specific interests.

• Activity-specific hashtags: #running, #cycling, #trailrunning, #swimming
• Platform-specific hashtags: #stravacycling, #stravarun
• Community/Location hashtags: #runnersoflondon, #yourlocalrunclub
• Motivational hashtags: #runspiration, #noexcuses #keepgoing

Ask a Question to Drive Engagement

Turn a one-way communication into an interactive conversation by asking a question at the end of your caption. This prompts other people to leave comments and reply. Try something like "Where's your favorite spot to run around here?" or "What's the next city I should run in?"

Tip: A Cohesive Fitness Content Strategy

Now you have the pieces - creative visuals and compelling captions. Tie them together to form a cohesive fitness content strategy. Don't just post the exact same Strava card every day. Instead, mix up your content. Use some of the quick Story shares from time to time, then some beautifully designed Feed posts with templates, and some engaging Reels with video.

The data is just the starting point. The story you tell with the photos, videos, and captions is what will connect with your audience.

Final Thoughts

Sharing Strava to Instagram is straightforward with the direct post options, but creating stand-out pieces of engaging content involves going a step further - that’s when you will use design templates on Canva, make engaging and quick video edits on Reels, or use your captions to find and tell better stories in order to connect with other people and brands within your community or city.

As you begin creating a higher volume of more styled fitness content, a lot of pressure begins to build to keep your posting schedule consistent, and you can often fall behind because of the amount of effort planning takes. We at Postbase built our easy-to-use platform with this very problem in mind when it came to content workflow and creation. We designed a clear visual calendar as well as a solid and reliable content creation and scheduling platform built specifically for social media formats such as Story posts and short-form videos like Reels. This gives our users confidence knowing whatever they create and plan will actually go live exactly where and when it's scheduled to. Our product lets users better plan Story content, edit a photo or even a quick video clip in advance, and trust us to handle it from there. If turning your workout log and story into a well-managed and consistent flow of branded content is your goal, you should consider using Postbase for your daily or weekly post scheduling as a simple-to-use automation platform. Take a quick look and hopefully you too find us intuitive with our post and story creations, as we are dedicated to saving time from small business content creation marketing processes.