Does Strava track weight training?

It records that a weight training session happened, with a duration and an estimated calorie figure. It does not record sets, reps, load or reps in reserve, and nothing in the platform progresses a lift or models resistance-training fatigue. It is an activity record for lifting, not a training log.

Are Strava calorie estimates accurate?

They are reasonable for cycling with a power meter and rough for everything else, because without power the estimate depends on assumptions about your economy and efficiency. They were never designed to drive nutrition decisions and should not be used for them — a several-hundred-calorie error is larger than most bulking surpluses.

Can I use Strava and Base together?

Yes, and it is a sensible stack. Both read from your platform health store, so a run recorded by your watch reaches both. Strava keeps the social record and the segments; Base grades the session against its prescription and folds its cost into your maintenance.

What is a good Strava alternative for lifters?

Depends what you want from it. For the social and route layer nothing replaces Strava, because the value is the network. For training decisions, a lifting logger plus a hybrid tool that reads both loads gets you further than any single Strava replacement.

Does Strava have training zones?

It has heart rate and power zones and reports time in them after the fact. What it does not do is prescribe a session in a band before you go out and grade whether you hit it, which is the loop that actually changes behaviour on easy days.

Base vs Strava for Hybrid Athletes

What Strava is genuinely best at

Worth stating clearly, because the rest of this page is about a gap.

The network. Strava's value compounds with the people on it. Segments, clubs, kudos, local leaderboards, the route discovery that comes from other people's routes. No competitor replicates this, because the thing being replicated is other people.

The record. A permanent, searchable, beautifully presented archive of everything you have done. Fifteen years of running in one place is genuinely valuable, and Strava is the best place to keep it.

Route and segment data. Nothing else has this density of real-world route information.

If those are what you want, nothing here replaces it, and Base does not try to.

What Strava does not do

Sets, reps, load, RIR. A weight training session appears as an activity with a duration. There is no set logging, no load progression, no rep tracking. Nothing in the platform gets you closer to a heavier squat.

Anything that requires your food. No nutrition layer, so nothing computes whether you are in a surplus, what your maintenance actually is, or what today's calorie target should be.

Prescription. It reports the zones you were in after the fact. It does not decide what the session should have been given the rest of your week, and it does not grade whether you hit it.

Cross-discipline fatigue. Its load models look at endurance. A week with four heavy lower-body sessions and three easy runs looks like a light week.

The comparison

	Strava	Base
Endurance activity record	Best in class	Adequate; reads from the health store
Social, segments, routes	The reason to use it	None. Deliberately
Set and rep logging	No	Yes, with RIR
Load progression	No	Autoregulated double progression
Session prescription	No	From your own threshold
Session grading	Time in zone, after the fact	Graded against a prescribed band, per rep or time-in-zone
Nutrition	No	Full macro and micro logging
Measured maintenance calories	No	From your own trend weight and intake
Deload decision	No	Reactive, reads both loads
Recovery scoring	No	Against your own baselines
Shows its formulas	No	Every derived number

The calorie problem, specifically

Strava reports an energy figure for every activity, and for a hybrid athlete that number carries more weight than it should.

It is reasonable for cycling with a power meter, where the physics are tractable. For running and for cycling without power it is an estimate built on assumptions about your economy and efficiency that are not measured and are not yours.

That matters here because of the arithmetic. A trained lifter's usable surplus is roughly 179 kcal a day. A run estimate that is 300 calories off — well inside normal error for a wrist-based figure — does not degrade your plan, it inverts it.

The fix is not a better estimate. It is not needing one: measure maintenance from what your weight actually did against what you actually ate, and every calorie the training cost is already in the number regardless of what any device thought. The method.

When Strava is the better call

Your training is endurance-only. Base is a narrow tool and there is no reason to pay its complexity cost.
The social layer is why you train. That is a real and good reason, and no analytical tool substitutes for it.
You want a permanent public record. Base is private by construction; there is no feed and no sharing.
Segments and route discovery are how you find where to run.

When they work well together

This is the common case and it is worth being explicit about, because it is not a competitive framing.

Both read from your platform's health store, so a run recorded by your watch reaches both without either importing from the other. Strava keeps the record, the segments and the social layer. Base grades the session against its prescription, folds its energy cost into your measured maintenance, and reads it alongside your lifting when deciding whether this week was too much.

They are answering different questions about the same run.

What to do next

If the thing you want is a better record of your endurance training, stay where you are. If the thing you want is to know whether your easy runs are actually easy and whether your surplus survived the week, that is a different question and it needs different inputs.