What syncs from Strava
When you connect Strava in Settings, PocketCoach can bring in completed activity summaries: sport type, activity name, duration and moving time, distance, average and max speed or pace, heart rate, cadence, and elevation gain where available. Sync uses Strava's webhooks rather than repeated polling, so new activities can typically appear within minutes of being uploaded. What is explicitly excluded matters just as much: PocketCoach does not collect GPS coordinates, route polylines or maps, photos, kudos, comments, or any other social data from Strava.
What the coach does with it
Completed activity summaries give your AI coach a more accurate picture of the week you actually had, not just the week that was planned. If a Strava activity lines up with a session your coach had scheduled, PocketCoach links the two so the session shows as completed rather than appearing twice in your history. The coaching reasoning itself, deciding what a missed session or a hard effort means for next week's plan, comes from the configured AI provider; PocketCoach does not run its own scoring or recovery calculations on your Strava data in app code.
Your control over the connection
Connecting Strava is optional at every stage, during onboarding and afterward. You can disconnect Strava at any time from Settings, which removes your synced Strava data from PocketCoach according to current app docs, or you can revoke access directly from your own Strava account settings, which triggers the same deletion once PocketCoach receives the notice. Nothing about using PocketCoach's AI coach requires a Strava connection; users without a tracker can mark sessions complete manually and give feedback by typing or voice instead.
What this does not replace
PocketCoach does not replace Strava, and it is not a substitute for Strava's own activity feed, segments, or social features. It reads a narrow set of completed activity summary fields to give your coach useful context; everything else about how you use Strava, kudos, following friends, segment leaderboards, stays exactly where it is, on Strava.
Garmin and Zwift, through Intervals.icu
PocketCoach does not connect directly to Garmin or Zwift. If you want structured workouts your coach creates to reach those ecosystems, that happens through a separate Intervals.icu connection: Intervals.icu handles structured workout delivery into Garmin and Zwift workflows, while Strava remains a separate, completed-activity connection focused on summaries rather than workout delivery.
Reading the fine print
PocketCoach is not formally affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Strava, and this site does not claim that Strava data is used to operate, train, or ground the underlying AI model. For the full breakdown of what is collected, what is excluded, and how withdrawal and deletion work, see the Strava usage page.