Crews: How Training With People Works in Movement Rebels

Training alone works until the week nobody notices you skipped Thursday. Movement Rebels has a social layer for that week: crews you join by code, a feed of the athletes you follow, high fives, comments and a public profile, all of it under Socials in the Tools menu, on the web app and in the iOS app. This guide covers what each piece does, who can see what, and where the layer stops.

What it is, and where it stops

Five parts. Crews are private groups of up to 30 people that you enter with an 8-character code, and the feed lists your own recent sessions next to those of the athletes you follow; follows work by request, and every profile has a follower list and a following list. A high five is the one reaction. Comments sit under each session. Tap a name and you land on that athlete's public profile.

Now the part to read before you decide anything. No segments. No course records, and nobody timing your local climb. The network is small, too: Strava reported more than 180 million users across 185 countries in December 2025, and Movement Rebels is nowhere close, so if everyone you train with is on Strava, a session posted there gets more eyes than a session posted here. That is why the Strava integration writes each analyzed session back into the Strava activity description. The two run side by side instead of competing for the same ride.

Crews: a private group you enter by code

A crew is the smallest unit, a named group with one creator and up to 30 members, and you cannot search for one. The only way in is the code. 8 characters of letters and digits with the confusable ones (0, O, 1, I, L) left out, which every member can read off the crew page and pass on as a message or a link; the link opens the Crews tab with the code filled in, and you still confirm with a tap.

The creator can rename the crew, generate a new code (the old one stops working the moment the new one exists) and disband it, while members leave whenever they like; the creator cannot leave, only disband, so no crew is left without an owner. Blocked someone inside, or been blocked by them? The join is refused, and the app never says which.

Inside, a crew page holds three things. The member list. A standings table that ranks members by Local Score, the 0-100 Standing number from the Proving Ground, where a member whose stats you cannot see shows a name and no score. And the crew feed, which is everyone's recent sessions and test results, duels between two members, and the crew's own challenges, though a member's duel against an outsider stays out of it. How a duel or a pooled challenge works is the Proving Ground guide's territory; this guide is about who you run them with.

The feed, high fives and comments

The feed opens with a scope picker: Following, My activities, or one row per crew you belong to. Following is the default. It includes you, so your own Garmin ride sits next to a friend's run.

Each athlete contributes a handful of recent items, the three most recent sessions, the three most recent Proving Ground test results, and any duel settled in the last 14 days, and the list caps at 40 items, newest first, a short digest rather than an endless scroll. Sessions that arrived through Strava never appear in any feed. What appears is what the app holds itself: sessions synced from Garmin, Apple Health or Concept2, and sessions you logged in the app.

A session card shows the title, the sport, and whatever the device recorded: distance, duration, elevation gain, average and max heart rate, average power or pace, calories, the device name, and a route map when there is one. Tap it for the detail sheet. A test-result card shows the test and the mark, flagged as a PR when it beat that athlete's best.

The reaction is a high five. One tap on a session, a test result or a settled duel adds yours, a second tap takes it back, and the card shows the count, "3 high fives", and whether one of them is yours. Nobody is notified.

Comments open from the same card, each up to 500 characters and signed with your display name, and you can delete your own while the athlete who owns the session can delete any comment under it. No notification for a comment either. You see the thread when you open the card. Both follow the viewing rule: you can react or comment only on a session you are allowed to see, never across a block.

Follows and the public profile

A follow is a request by default. You find someone by name in the search on the Profile tab, or in the suggestions below it (people your follows follow, and crew-mates you do not follow yet), tap Follow, and they get a push asking them to approve; switch on Auto-accept followers in Settings and follows land at once. You can unfollow, remove a follower, or block, and a block silently deletes the follow in both directions and hides the two of you from each other. Report sits next to it, for a profile, a photo, a feed item, a duel or a challenge.

Search shows only people who have accepted the social terms and left Show me in search on.

A public profile carries your name, a photo if you turned on Show my profile photo, a city you typed (or one guessed from your time zone), your main goal, and a mark if you pay for the subscription, and under that come total sessions, current and longest streak, member-since date, Local Score, recent efforts, badges, consistency and a shelf of duel wins. Four cards stay off until you switch each one on. Strength grades, engine numbers such as FTP and heart rate, fitness age, and the per-pillar Proving Ground breakdown. Your weakest pillar is shown to nobody but you.

Who can see what

Everything above runs through one setting, Who can see your profile, under Settings: Everyone, Followers (the default) or No one. Read the table by row. Find the thing you are wondering about, then read across to the value you chose, and remember that "Only you" means exactly that, whatever else is set. Switching to No one cuts off accepted followers too, without you having to block anyone.

Does training with people change what you do?

The research is more specific than "friends keep you honest". The best-studied mechanism is the Köhler effect, where the weaker half of a pair works harder when the pair's result depends on them, and in a 2012 trial of 58 women cycling at 65% of heart-rate reserve across six sessions, riders paired with a stronger partner under a shared score (the ride ended when the first person quit) averaged 21.9 minutes against 10.6 minutes riding alone. Riding side by side with no shared score still helped: 19.8 minutes. A 2023 meta-analysis of 19 studies and 1,912 participants found a statistically significant gain, its size shifting with whether persistence or intensity was measured, with participant age, and with whether the partner was a person or software.

It is not universal. A 2016 study of 82 adults on a cycle ergometer found men persisted about 12 minutes longer per session with a software partner, while women showed no reliable gain. Read your own response.

The wider link between support and movement holds as well. A 2026 meta-analysis of 54 studies covering 252,206 older adults found a moderate association between general social support and physical activity, and whether the support came from family or friends made no difference. An association, though. Measured in people over 60.

In the app, the side-by-side version is the feed and the crew, people who see each other's sessions, and the shared-score version is a pooled crew challenge, covered in the Proving Ground guide.

Running it next to Strava

Connect Strava and both layers run at once. Strava activities are read into your own activity history and stop there, never reaching the coach and never appearing in a feed; the write goes the other way. After the coach's post-session analysis of a Garmin or Apple Health session, the app finds the same session on Strava, usually within minutes, and appends a short block to its description: a session title of a few words, a one-line summary, and the line "Coached by movementrebels.com". A session with no analysis gets the one line. Only sessions from the last 48 hours are touched, nothing you wrote is edited, and it is on by default, with a switch in the Strava connection settings to turn it off. The Strava guide covers the connection itself.

So the people who follow you on Strava read the coach's take on the ride, and your crew sees the ride itself: the numbers, the trimmed route, the high fives.

FAQ

Do I have to use the social features?

No. Socials is one tool in the Tools menu, and the coach, the weekly plan, the calendar and the Proving Ground all work without it. Nothing about you is published to name search until you accept the social terms at your first social action, and profile visibility starts at Followers, so nobody sees your stats until you approve them.

How do I join a crew?

Get the code or the link from someone already in it, open Socials, go to Crews, enter the 8-character code and confirm. Crews hold up to 30 members and cannot be searched. Nobody has sent you a code? Start your own and send it to the people you train with.

Can people see where my runs start?

No. Anyone other than you sees a route trimmed by about 200 meters at both ends, the start coordinates are never served, and an activity with only a location pin and no route shows no map at all. You see your own full route on your calendar cards and on your own activity detail.

What does a high five do?

It adds one to the count on that session or test result and marks it as yours, tap again to remove it, and the count sits on the card as "3 high fives". No notification. No message. It only works on sessions you are allowed to see, and that is the whole gesture.

Will my crew see my Strava activities?

No. Sessions that came in through Strava never appear in any feed, yours included, and what your crew sees is what synced from Garmin, Apple Health or Concept2, or what you logged in the app. The Strava connection works in the other direction. The coach's summary of a session is appended to that session's description on Strava.

Is there an age limit?

Yes. Social features are for members aged 16 and up, and a known age under 16 blocks the whole Socials surface while everything else in the app, the coach, the plan and the tools, stays available. The gate follows the EU rule on the age of consent for online services, on both platforms.

How Movement Rebels fits

The session your crew high-fives is the same session the coach reads: Garmin or Apple Health delivers it, and the coach folds it into next week's plan next to your logged lifts and PRs and your morning check-ins. A duel works the other way round. It wraps a mark that already sits on your own Proving Ground board, saved there before anyone challenged you for it, and the coach sees that underlying test result but never the duel; your crew sees the effort and the head-to-head. The two never cross. The social layer cannot touch your plan, and the coach never reads your feed, your follows, your crews or a duel.

Make one crew, send the code to the three people you already train with, and leave visibility on Followers.