This study's aim was to analyse the decisions higher education students make about learning strategies. We focus on research questions related to the strategies that students report, their strategy adaptability to different learning situations, and the association of learning strategies with students' self-regulated learning and academic performance. We carried out qualitative semi-structured interviews with 17 higher education students of Psychology and Sports Sciences with different self-regulatory profiles and levels of academic performance. The results indicate that students reported mainly basic learning strategies, but the level of elaboration of their cognitive and metacognitive operations was different although they use the same terms to identify their strategies. In addition, we found that students change their learning strategies depending on different factors, with a noticeable influence of assessment activities, and that students with low academic performance showed organization problems and limited knowledge of learning strategies. We present some implications for the promotion of critical use of learning strategies.