Strava has an official MCP now. What about your Garmin data?

Strava shipped its own connector for Claude this week. Useful, and worth knowing what it can't see: anything your watch records about sleep and recovery.

What Strava shipped

On June 1, Strava launched an official MCP connector for subscribers. Connect it to Claude and you can ask about your activities in plain language: per-second heart rate and pace, GPS, power, club data. It's read-only, and you can revoke it from your Strava settings whenever you want.

The same week, Strava tightened its developer API: a monthly fee for developers and a 90-day countdown on some endpoints, aimed at AI companies scraping the platform. The message is clear. If you want your Strava data in an AI chat, the official connector is the supported road.

If you're a Strava subscriber and you use Claude, try it. It's a good product, and it confirms something we've been saying since we built one: talking to your training data beats clicking through it.

What it can't see

Strava only holds what gets uploaded to Strava, and that's activities. The numbers that explain how those activities went never leave your Garmin account:

• Sleep. Stages, score, restless moments, overnight respiration.
• HRV status. The morning trend that flags fatigue days before your legs do.
• Body Battery and daily stress. What the day took out of you between workouts.
• Training readiness and training status. Whether today should be hard or easy.
• VO₂ max and race predictions. The fitness picture behind the paces.

Ask Strava's connector why last week felt terrible and it can show you the runs. It can't show you the three nights of bad sleep and the falling HRV that made them feel that way. Recovery is half the conversation, and that half lives in Garmin.

The Garmin side, today

Garmin hasn't shipped an equivalent. Connect+ has AI-generated insights inside the Garmin app, but there's no official connector you can hand to Claude or ChatGPT and start asking questions.

That's the gap stats.training covers. It's a hosted Garmin MCP: log in with your Garmin account, paste your personal link into Claude or ChatGPT, and your AI can read all of it. Sleep, HRV, readiness, training load, plus the activities themselves. Nothing to install, nothing to keep running. It connects Strava too, if you want both sides in one place.

Why the recovery side matters

The questions that change what you do tomorrow need both halves:

The takeaway

Strava building an official MCP is the strongest signal yet that this is how athletes will read their data from now on. If your training lives on Strava, you now have a supported way in.

If you wear a Garmin, the numbers that matter most for deciding what to do tomorrow never make it to Strava. Until Garmin ships its own connector, the hosted route is here.