Strava has been a running and cycling app for over a decade. That identity is changing.

On February 19, 2026, Strava pushed an update adding five new sport types: padel, basketball, volleyball, cricket, and dance. That puts the platform past 50 total sport types, up from the original two it launched with. But the real signal isn’t the number. It’s what these five sports have in common: none of them are endurance activities. None of them involve a GPS track along a road or trail. Most of them happen on a court or a field.

Strava is telling non-endurance athletes that the platform is for them now. Whether it actually delivers on that promise depends on what the tracking looks like and whether these sport modes are real features or checkbox additions.

I’ve spent two weeks logging activities in all five new sport types. Here’s what each one actually does.

Quick Verdict

Sport	GPS by Default	Tracking Quality	Who Benefits
Padel	Yes	Solid	The 30M amateur padel players worldwide
Basketball	Yes	Basic	Pickup ballers who want session logs
Volleyball	Yes	Basic	Outdoor/beach players mostly
Cricket	Yes	Basic	Huge potential, limited execution so far
Dance	No	Minimal	Studio dancers who want calorie estimates

Best for: Team-sport and court-sport athletes who already use Strava for other activities and want everything in one place Skip if: You expect sport-specific analytics (shot tracking, rally counts, batting stats). Strava doesn’t do that. Free tier: Activity logging, social feed, basic stats Paid tier: $11.99/month or $79.99/year for segments, training log analytics, route tools

Why These Five Sports, Why Now

Start with the business case.

Strava has roughly 135 million registered users. The vast majority signed up because they run or cycle. But the platform’s growth in those core sports has plateaued in mature markets. North America and Western Europe are saturated with running apps. The next 50 million users aren’t going to come from more marathon runners joining Strava.

They’re going to come from sports that are growing fast in regions where Strava hasn’t fully penetrated. Padel is the obvious headline here. An estimated 30 million amateur players worldwide, concentrated in Spain, Latin America, the Middle East, and increasingly the US and UK. It’s been called the world’s fastest-growing sport for three years running, and that label is backed by participation data, not just hype.

Basketball and volleyball are global sports with massive player bases that have never had a natural home on Strava. Cricket has 2.5 billion fans worldwide and dominates in India, Pakistan, Australia, and the UK. Dance is a different play entirely, less about competitive athletics and more about capturing the studio fitness crowd that Peloton and Apple Fitness+ have been targeting.

There’s also the IPO angle. Strava has been rumored to be exploring a public offering. Adding sport types that expand the addressable market from “endurance athletes” to “anyone who does anything athletic” makes the user growth story more compelling to investors. More sport types means more potential users means a bigger TAM slide in the pitch deck.

That’s the corporate logic. What matters for actual users is whether these sport modes do anything useful.

Padel: The Strongest Addition

Padel gets the most complete treatment of the five new sports. GPS tracking is on by default. The activity screen shows elapsed time, estimated calories, heart rate (if you’re wearing a connected device), and a map of your session location.

The map tracking works well enough for outdoor padel courts. You get a location pin showing where you played, and if you move between courts at a multi-court facility, the GPS trace shows that movement. For indoor padel (which is the majority of play in many markets), the GPS just pins your location. Not useless (it’s a record that you were there) but not insightful.

What’s missing: No rally tracking, no point scoring, no match structure. If you play a two-hour session with three matches, Strava sees one continuous activity. There’s no way to segment it. The calorie estimate is based on heart rate and duration, same as any other generic activity type.

For padel players who also run or cycle and are already embedded in Strava’s social ecosystem, having padel show up in their activity feed alongside their other training is genuinely convenient. Before this update, you’d log padel as “Other” or “Racquet Sports,” and both felt like afterthoughts. A dedicated padel mode with its own icon and category is a quality-of-life improvement, even if the analytics aren’t deep.

If you want actual padel performance tracking (serve speed, court positioning, shot analysis), you need a sport-specific app. Strava isn’t trying to be that. It’s trying to be the social layer that connects your padel sessions with the rest of your athletic life.

Basketball: Session Logging, Not Game Tracking

Basketball gets GPS tracking enabled by default. You get a map pin, duration, heart rate data, and calorie estimates. That’s it.

No shot tracking. No game scoring. No play-by-play. This is a session log, not a basketball analytics tool.

Where it’s useful: Pickup basketball. You show up to the gym or outdoor court, play for 90 minutes, and want a record of the session in your training log. Duration, heart rate, and calories give you a rough picture of training load that integrates with your weekly totals. If you’re managing volume across multiple sports (running three days, hoops twice a week), having basketball sessions counted properly in your training load matters for recovery planning.

Where it falls short: Organized basketball. If you play in a league, you want game stats. Points, rebounds, assists, shooting percentages. Strava doesn’t even try. That’s the domain of apps like HomeCourt (which uses your phone camera for shot tracking) or ShotTracker.

The social element is the differentiator. Post a basketball session to Strava and your running friends see it. Get kudos from people who didn’t know you played. It’s lightweight but it’s what Strava does well: make all your activity visible in one social feed.

Volleyball: Best Outdoors

Volleyball’s implementation mirrors basketball. GPS on by default, basic time/HR/calorie tracking, map pin.

For beach volleyball, GPS tracking makes more sense than for indoor gym volleyball. You’re outside, the GPS fix is clean, and if you play at different beach locations the map history is a decent log. Indoor volleyball at a gym still gets a location pin, but the GPS data doesn’t add much.

The gap: Volleyball has its own analytics ecosystem: stat tracking for kills, blocks, aces, digs. Apps like VolleyStation and iStatVball handle this. Strava isn’t competing with those. If you’re a competitive volleyball player, you’ll use a stat app during games and maybe log the session on Strava afterward for the training log integration.

For recreational players who play twice a week and also run or cycle, having volleyball as a proper activity type instead of a generic “Other” makes the training log cleaner. Small improvement. Real, but small.

Cricket: Massive Market, Basic Execution

Cricket is the most interesting strategic addition. The sport has an enormous global player base, particularly in India, where Strava has been growing but hasn’t dominated the way it has in Western running markets. Adding cricket as a native sport type is a clear play for the Indian and South Asian market.

GPS tracking is on by default. You get the same basics: duration, heart rate, calories, location map. Cricket sessions can last anywhere from a 90-minute net practice to a full five-day test match, so the duration tracking at least captures the time commitment.

What cricket players actually need: Ball tracking, run rates, bowling speed, fielding metrics, wagon wheel plots. None of that exists in Strava and probably never will. CricHeroes, CricClubs, and the ICC’s own digital platforms handle match analytics. Strava’s cricket mode is a training log entry, not a performance tool.

The potential: if Strava can get even a fraction of India’s cricket-playing population to log their sessions, the user count growth is significant. India alone has hundreds of millions of cricket participants at various levels. Even casual players logging weekend matches adds up fast.

Dance: The Privacy-First Outlier

Dance is the odd one out among the five new sports, and Strava made one smart decision with it: GPS tracking is disabled by default.

That matters. Dance happens in studios, homes, and clubs. Recording a GPS trace of someone’s dance studio location, their home address, or a nightclub isn’t the same as mapping a running route through a public park. Strava recognized this and made location tracking opt-in rather than opt-out for dance.

With GPS off, you get: duration, heart rate, and calorie estimates. That’s enough for fitness tracking purposes. A one-hour dance class with a heart rate monitor gives you legitimate training load data. For people who treat dance as their primary exercise (and there are a lot of them), having a dedicated activity type that counts properly toward weekly fitness metrics is an upgrade over logging it as “Workout” or “Other.”

Who this targets: The studio fitness and dance fitness crowd. Zumba, barre, hip-hop fitness classes, ballet-based workout programs. These people are active, they have fitness trackers, and they’ve been underserved by apps that treat everything as either running, cycling, or generic exercise. Apple Fitness+ and Peloton have been capturing this audience with their own closed ecosystems. Strava adding dance suggests they want a piece of it through the social-tracking angle rather than content delivery.

What the Tracking Actually Looks Like

I logged at least two sessions in each sport over two weeks. Here’s what the data looks like in practice.

Heart rate integration works well across all five. If you’re wearing an Apple Watch, Garmin, or any Bluetooth HR strap, the heart rate data is continuous and accurate. This is the most valuable data Strava collects for non-endurance activities. A two-hour basketball session with heart rate data gives you genuine training load information.

Calorie estimates are rough. Strava’s calorie calculations for these sports use HR-based estimates, which are better than duration-only estimates but still imprecise. Expect 15-25% variance from reality. Good enough for general tracking. Not precise enough for nutrition planning.

GPS maps for court sports are… maps of courts. You get a dot on a map. If you play at the same gym every week, your GPS data is the same dot every week. The map feature makes more sense for outdoor court sports or cricket grounds where you might play at different locations.

The social feed works exactly as you’d expect. Post a padel session, your followers see it. The activity cards show the sport icon, duration, and a snippet of stats. For Strava’s core social function (sharing what you did), the new sports integrate without friction.

The Bigger Platform Story

Strava adding five non-endurance sports at once isn’t an isolated product decision. It’s part of a pattern.

The February 2026 update also included workout sync to Apple Watch and Garmin, a rebuilt Route Builder, and ML-powered leaderboard fraud detection. Together with these five new sports, Strava is making two simultaneous plays: deeper integration for its existing endurance audience and broader appeal for athletes it hasn’t reached yet.

The broader strategy connects to something happening across the fitness app market. AI coaching apps are getting more specialized. Wearable hardware is getting more capable. The apps that survive long-term are the ones that either go deep on a specific sport or become the connective layer across all of them. Strava is choosing to be the connective layer.

That’s a defensible position if they can execute it. Nobody else has the social graph that Strava has. Garmin Connect is device-locked. Apple Fitness is ecosystem-locked. Nike Run Club is running-locked. Strava’s advantage is that it’s the open platform where your padel-playing friend and your marathon-training colleague both show up in the same feed.

Who These New Sports Are Actually For

If you play padel, basketball, volleyball, cricket, or dance AND you already use Strava: Upgrade. Log your sessions as proper activity types instead of “Other.” Your training log becomes more accurate, your weekly volume tracking improves, and your activity feed actually reflects what you do.

If you play one of these sports but don’t use Strava: There’s limited reason to start using Strava just for court-sport tracking. The sport-specific analytics are too basic to compete with dedicated apps. The value is in the social layer and the cross-sport training log. If your friends are on Strava, maybe. If they’re not, you’re logging data nobody will see.

If you’re a Strava subscriber who only runs and cycles: This doesn’t affect your experience at all. Your feed might show more diverse activities from friends. Your subscription price doesn’t change. The development resources Strava spent on these sports didn’t come at the expense of the strength training features or running tools you actually use. Those got their own updates in February.

What’s Still Missing

Five new sports is a big number. But the execution on all five is basically identical: time, HR, calories, optional GPS. There’s no sport-specific intelligence.

What would make these sport modes genuinely useful instead of just categorized session logs:

• Padel: Match scoring, rally detection via accelerometer data, session segmentation
• Basketball: Shot detection (HomeCourt does this with a phone camera), game vs. warmup segmentation
• Volleyball: Set tracking, jump count via accelerometer
• Cricket: Over counting, basic match structure, innings separation
• Dance: Move counting, intensity zones optimized for intermittent high-effort activity

None of this exists yet. Whether Strava builds sport-specific features or keeps these as categorized generic activities will determine if the expansion is real or superficial.

The Bottom Line

Strava past 50 sport types is a milestone that looks better in a press release than in practice. The five new sports (padel, basketball, volleyball, cricket, and dance) are category labels with basic tracking, not deep sport-specific tools.

But that’s okay for what Strava is. The platform’s value has always been the social layer and the unified training log, not the depth of any single sport’s analytics. If you play padel on Tuesday, run on Wednesday, and dance on Friday, having all three show up in one feed with consistent HR and calorie data is useful. That’s the pitch, and for multi-sport athletes who live across different activities, it works.

The strategic signal matters more than the current feature set. Strava is telling the market, and likely pre-IPO investors, that it’s not just an endurance app anymore. Whether that plays out as genuine platform expansion or a growth-metric exercise depends on what the next 12 months of development look like.

For now: log your padel sessions. Tell your basketball friends Strava finally sees them. And watch whether Strava builds real sport-specific features or moves on to the next sport count milestone.

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Tested across all five new sport types over two weeks using Strava on iOS with Apple Watch Series 10 for heart rate data. Pricing reflects Strava’s current plans as of March 2026.