Selecting the right training platform can greatly increase your development as a cyclist, as it can help you plan your training, understand your progression, and address risk and potential, while also motivating you. We’ll dive into features you should consider, and go over some of the most popular training platforms.
Features of a good training platform
The first feature is the ability to create a training plan and see your history, so you can learn from the past. You should consider if you just want to create the plan for yourself. If you want a coach, the platform should support assigning a coach access to your information, without using your account. You could also use a tool that use AI to create a plan for you.
Secondly you need to determine what kind of data you need about your rides and development as a rider. Is power, heart rate and FTP progression good enough? Or do you need to look at more advanced stuff like decoupling, time in zone and watts prime?
Next you want a platform that integrates well with your Garmin and home trainer devices. Whether you use a pc, iPad or Apple TV with your home trainer, there should be an app for that device. Being able to easily transfer workouts and send data back once your ride is finished is essential.
Another thing to consider is the future developments the platform will bring. AI has been everywhere since ChatGPT captured everone’s attention. It’s safe to say that AI will play a bigger part in training in the future. From planning your training to analysing your abilities and potential as a rider, I would look for a platform that invests in developing new features. Particularly around AI.
Popular training platforms
Training Peaks
Probably the most used platform for high level and serious cyclists. It has the best integrations when working with a coach. It offers a free plan, but that should be considered more of a trial to see if you like the interface. The free plan doesn’t allow you to schedule workouts, and as such is pretty useless. You could consider signing up just to have your history in there, in case you ever want to get the paid subscription. That one does offer a lot of great features.
As said above, if you are a coach or work with one, Training Peaks is the best platform out there. It also works well if you are self-coached. Planning your training is easy, there’s an extensive workout library, and analyzing your rides and past performance has plenty of tools and metrics to get you almost any info you want. Sending today’s workout to your Garmin or Zwift is straight forward.
The limitations lie in the lack of ability to ride your indoor workouts inside Training Peaks. You need a separate app for that. It also doesn’t offer AI training plans that adapt to how you develop.
TrainerRoad
TrainerRoad seeks to improve you through their adaptive training approach. It’s intelligent software, which creates a training plan for you and adjusts your workouts when you develop better or worse than expected. All you need to do is tell the software what your goal events, and what type of races they are, and how much time you have to train each week. Based on that, it will create a training plan for you, whichs adapts to how you progress.
It also eliminates the need to do FTP tests, because it detects it based on how you complete the workouts. That means it also maps out your abilities in all the zones. So even if you have a massive threshold, your Vo2Max might not be so great compared to that, so your Vo2Max workouts will have a lower difficulty.
All their workouts has a difficulty, and as such, you will not just progress based on your FTP, but you will improve your endurance skill when completing zone 2 rides, and based on how you rate the difficulty of that workout, it will progress you more or less, ad adapt the coming workouts to your level.
TrainerRoad was originally an indoor training app, but today you can also send your workouts to your Garmin computer and ride outside. They invest massively in new features designed around AI. They also have a podcast which is a great library of information.
Intervals.icu
Free tool that offers comprehensive insights into your ride files. It has tons of data points where you can get really nerdy. Also gives a very good summary of your season and weeks in terms of time spent in zones, estimated FTP at given points and a lot more.
Intervals.icu is almost a nobrainer to sign up for since it’s free. But you should also think about the amount of tools you will use. Sometimes having data spread across too many platforms will make you more confused, and unable to hit the nail on the head. Sometimes different platforms don’t even use the same formula for the same metric, normalized power is a good example of that.
If you decide to use intervals.icu, consider donating a bit to the platform now and then to support the creator and keep it alive.
Zwift
If you only ride indoors, you will most likely use Zwift at some point or all the time. It makes indoor riding a lot more fun by riding with other cyclists in many virtual worlds, routes and races. There are so many people and races on Zwift that you won’t struggle to find level competition at a time that suits you. The gamification can greatly increase your motivation for riding.
As a training platform for planning your season, scheduling training blocks and workouts, Zwift is pretty much useless. It does offer pre-build training plans of variable length, but the plans and workouts aren’t very specific, and target people new to cycling mostly. As those are the athletes that will improve with any type of structured training and consistency. You won’t be able to create your own plan in Zwift. But having a plan in another tool and then importing or creating your own workouts in Zwift works just fine.
Wahoo SYSTM
Formerly known as Sufferfest, Wahoo has taken this platform to the next level.
