Fitness app Strava has, just in time for New Year’s resolution time, come out with a shiny new feature for its users. The company might be counting on that tendency to scoop up some extra revenue because the feature, Instant Workouts, is tucked away behind a monthly subscription.

If you’re already a paying user — and many of Strava’s user base are — that’s not much of a problem. But if you’re trying to skate by on the free tier, you’ll have to shell out at least R90/m to access the new automatic workouts.

Strava to be your best

The company’s new Instant Workouts bear a striking resemblance to Spotify’s automatic playlists, as it happens. They’re generated and updated weekly, based on a specific user profile, with new versions turning up in your app every Monday. There’s a far smaller chance of unexpected Mongolian folk music appearing on the list, but there will be new and creative ways to ~~torture~~ push your body past its previous limits.

Instant Workouts takes much of the work out of workout planning, with users only needing to specify one of four categories and let the Strava app do the rest of the work. Those categories are Build, Maintain, Recover, and Explore, and their usage… should be obvious.

Recommendations — you don’t have to follow the Instant Workouts plan, after all — span more than 40 sports, so users can get selective about how they want to smash their personal best on any particular training session. No matter what’s picked, the app’s assessment of previous training data should keep the auto-generated workouts within a user’s capabilities. Or perhaps just outside of them, depending on what was selected. Either way…