Garmin announced yesterday that it has acquired TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic. Two platforms at once: the one most endurance coaches deliver their plans through, and one of the bigger strength-coaching platforms.
If you train with a coach, if you have ever looked at a CTL/ATL/TSB chart, or if you just export your rides somewhere, this touches you. So it is worth thinking through calmly rather than reflexively.
I should say up front where I stand: I build IntervalCoach, which is an alternative to parts of what TrainingPeaks does. I am not a neutral observer. But the questions below are the ones I would be asking regardless of what I worked on, and I have tried to write them the way I would want to read them.
Why this acquisition is different
Plenty of endurance software gets bought. This one stands out for a simple reason: TrainingPeaks built its position on being device-agnostic. Its own pitch was to train for any sport, with any device, indoors or out. It became the neutral ground where a Wahoo rider, a Polar runner and a Garmin triathlete could all work with the same coach in the same place.
That neutral ground is now owned by the largest endurance device manufacturer.
There is a second layer. TrainingPeaks did not just build software, it built a vocabulary. Chronic Training Load, Acute Training Load, Training Stress Balance, the Performance Management Chart: that language came out of TrainingPeaks and is now how the whole sport talks about fitness and fatigue. Owning the platform means owning a lot of the standard, plus the coach relationships that run through it.
The three questions that actually matter
1. Does device neutrality survive?
Not "will Garmin break support for Wahoo tomorrow", because they almost certainly will not. The realistic version is softer and slower: where does the best experience live? Garmin has been building out Connect+ as a paid tier. If the tightest integrations, the newest features and the smoothest data flow land on the Garmin side first, non-Garmin athletes do not get locked out, they just quietly get the second-best version. That is how platform gravity usually works.
2. What happens to pricing and packaging?
Acquisitions tend to end with the acquired product folded into the parent's subscription. That can genuinely be good news: bundled into Connect+ could mean more value for Garmin users. For everyone else it is the open question, especially for coaches whose businesses run on TrainingPeaks seats.
3. Can you still get your data out?
This is the one that is actually in your control, and it is the reason I am not writing this as a panic post. Platform ownership changes. What protects you is not picking the "safe" platform, because there is no such thing. It is keeping your training history somewhere you can export from, and not letting any single vendor be the only place your data exists.
What I would do, whatever you use
Nothing about your training breaks this week. TrainingPeaks is a good product with a deep feature set, and if you work with a coach who delivers through it, that relationship is worth more than any platform politics. Do not churn out of reflex.
But this is a reasonable moment to ask yourself two things:
- Where does my training history actually live, and can I take it with me? If the answer is "only inside one subscription", that is worth fixing regardless of who owns what.
- Is my coaching layer tied to my device brand? The device you wear should be an input, not the thing that decides which coaching software you are allowed to get the best version of.
My own answer is to keep the hub independent and the coaching layer independent of both. Intervals.icu is the open hub: it ingests from Garmin, Wahoo, Polar, Zwift and the rest, it is not owned by a device maker, and your data stays exportable. IntervalCoach sits on top of that as the coaching layer, reading your recovery and deciding today's session, and it does not care which brand is on your wrist.
To be fair about where TrainingPeaks still has the edge: it is where most coaches already are. That network effect is real, and it usually outweighs any feature list. If your coach delivers through TrainingPeaks, that relationship is the thing that matters, and TrainingPeaks also has the deeper coach-business layer around client management and finding a coach in the first place.
What is not true, and I want to be precise because it gets repeated a lot, is that you have to go to TrainingPeaks for coaching or for depth. IntervalCoach has a coach mode: a human coach can switch the app into Coach view, see all their athletes, compare fitness across them, open any athlete's dashboard, calendar and plan, edit workouts and settings, and use Coach+ to talk through that athlete's training. Coach access is free; the athlete needs Max. And the analytics run deep on their own terms: power profile and curve, eFTP history, best efforts, progressive overload, HRV and HRV-CV, zone distribution, cohort benchmarks, and a personal recovery curve fitted to your own history. On recovery modelling specifically, we go further than the standard PMC view.
We wrote an honest side-by-side comparison here.
The short version
A device company now owns the device-neutral platform, and the vocabulary the sport thinks in. That is not a catastrophe, and it may even be good for Garmin users. It is a good reason to make sure your training data lives somewhere you control, and that the software deciding your training is not chosen for you by the brand of your watch.