After switching from recording my cycling on the Apple Watch to a Wahoo Element Bolt my activity levels seemed to suck. After previously smashing my move goals I was left short on some days even after a reasonable ride. Simply because Strava wasn’t calculating my calories and it took me ages to find out why.

After a few days of Googling around and finding all sorts of weird information I eventually discovered a fix. I tracked the issue down to a really simple one, but something that isn’t immediately obvious — you need to make sure that Strava has your weight and your bikes weight recorded.

You can only do all of this on the website and not the mobile app, so make sure you can log in on the web. Your weight is changeable in the app to your profile, but you can’t add or customise your gear for some reason. You will need to log in online, create your bike, and make sure you also give it a weight. A rough guess is fine but you can usually track down the correct weight with a quick search of the manufactures website.

Once this is competed your new runs and bike rides will contain calorie information that will be passed to Apple Health. If you want to get this for older rides, just tap edit activity and then save it again. This will pass the last few days worth of activity back to Apple Health but not all of it, and it’s temperamental at best with syncing.

This should mean you are getting all of the credit for your rides going forward. It’s surprising how addictive filling your rings on your Apple Watch is, and Apple Health makes it easy to share your activity data if a medical issue requires it. Strava is great for keeping all your rides logged, but keep it in other places too just in case you want to switch at a later date.