Strava, a leading social platform for athletes, has acquired Recover Athletics, a startup providing evidence-based prehab workouts to runners. The move gives Strava subscribers access to Recover Athletics’ app, which includes personalised injury prevention plans and exercises.

“Recover Athletics addresses a fundamental problem for athletes and provides an avenue to avoid painful periods of injury in order to help people keep doing the sports they love," said Michael Horvath, CEO of Strava. "We're thrilled to have Recover Athletics join Strava. Their solution adds tremendous value to our subscription and supports athletes in every phase of their journey through sport.”

Recover Athletics was founded in 2018 by Yale graduate Nick Stewart, CEO, and former Education First exec Nick Kafker, COO. Kafker admits he used to be a “chronically injured runner” so the two founders joined forces with physicians and physical therapists to build a solution that could help runners stay injury free.

They gathered content and advice from an array of medical institutions, including Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, Harvard Medical School, the Sports Medicine clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital and Mass General Brigham. This was combined with injury prevention algorithms and training data from Strava, by connecting through the API (application programming interface) – which records 40 million activities each week – to create customised active recovery plans for users.

Now Strava’s base of athletes, of which there are 99 million in 195 countries, will be able to access the Recover Athletics app as part of Strava’s service. The cost is €59 (or US$50) per year with a 30-day trial offered. Users that join through Strava will need to download the Recover Athletics app separately and then give Strava access permission.

On registration users enter their personal information relating to “soreness” in various areas of the body, from legs to lower back and IT band, and on completion users are given access to more than 250 recovery exercises with videos. New routines are added every month.

“Joining Strava is an exciting milestone for our product, our community of runners, and our internal team,” said Nick Stewart, CEO of Recover Athletics. “Strava provides the community that keeps athletes active and we provide the tools to keep them healthy so that they can keep doing what they love. This is the dream partnership that my co-founder, Nick Kafker, and I have always envisioned, and we're looking forward to our future together with Strava.”