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Strava is one of the most popular social fitness apps in the world, and its annual Year in Sport selection provides an interesting look at the trends of hundreds of millions of athletes around the world. So it's really interesting to see that Apple dethroned as the most popular running watch on the Garmin platform. 

According to the published report, they were Apple Watch Series and Apple Watch With the number one and two equipment for most runners, the third place belongs to the Garmin Forerunner 245 model. Last year, the 8-year-old Garmin Forerunner 235 held the lead. In addition to the equipment of runners, who, by the way, prefer to wear Nike Pegasus shoes, the report also showed other interesting trends. 

  • An increase in shorter training sessions: More than one-fifth of all "workouts" were short (less than 20 minutes) that helped people stick to their routine. 
  • Women led the way: Strength training was the fastest growing type of sport for women with a 25% increase in 2024. The share of female cyclists on Strava also increased, by 11%. On the contrary, the share of men who uploaded a yoga or pilates activity increased by 15%. 
  • Great shoes: This year saw a 14% year-on-year increase in races completed in carbon shoes across all distances, signaling an increase in runners' investment in high-performance footwear. 
  • Style in the "first" place: All ages agreed that coordinated clothing is the most popular training wardrobe item, with blue tipped to be the new black in 2025.

Why Apple beat Garmin? 

Apple sells about 20% of all smart watches in the world (at least according to IDC) and Strava all Apple Watch Series series are thrown into one bag, which also applies to generations Apple Watch SE. But this is not the case with Garmin, and individual models are distinguished here. But the share of the previously most popular model is falling because customers upgrade it to a newer solution, which simply does not yet have such a share. This is also because over the years Garmin has released many models from which customers can choose.

On the other hand, it is true that Apple is working hard to improve running activity tracking. It started with watchOS 9 in 2022, allowing runners to see heart rate zones, running power, cadence, or altitude during training. Most recently with watchOS 11 added Apple a weekly and 28-day overview of your training load in the form of a graph that shows whether you are overtraining or simply slacking off compared to your previous effort. Thus, the differences between Apple Watch and they also wipe Garmin watches.

Although "serious runners" still tend to use Garmin watches primarily for their better battery life, Apple he took great aim at five-kilometer runners. Strava itself v press release stated that “5k runners are more likely to opt for Apple Watch"while the Garmin Forerunner series was more popular for those running longer distances." 

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