In an era where every free service has a premium tier, is TrainingPeaks premium worth it? The short answer is yes, so read on to learn why I believe it is great value for athletes, and what you need to know to get the most out of it.
What is TrainingPeaks premium?
TrainingPeaks premium is a series of features on the TrainingPeaks platform which are available only to subscribers. The basic TrainingPeaks account functions as little more than a training diary if you are not following a training plan or working with a coach. TrainingPeaks premium features include:
- TrainingPeaks virtual indoor cycling platform
- The ability to plan workouts in the future and move sessions around
- A large collection of charts and graphs to help you track, and plan your fitness
- The ability to create an annual training plan (ATP) to set targets for your season ahead
- Strength workouts can be created with a premium account, allowing access to a vast exercise library
I believe in the TrainingPeaks premium experience so much that I recommend all athletes I work with use it, and I even cover the cost of the platform for those on my top level of coaching. Let’s dove down into all the above in a bit more detail.
TrainingPeaks Virtual
The vast majority of triathletes will ride their bike indoors during the winter months, or whenever they want to hit a structured session, especially if they live in the city. However, riding indoors while staring at the wall or your cycle computer is… one for the purists shall we say.
The vast majority of us need more stimulation. There are plenty of platforms such as Zwift, Rouvy and TrainerRoad out there, but these all cost money. While TrainingPeaks Virtual is not a free platform as such, you need to pay for premium after all, it can save you having to pay a separate subscription.
I don’t think that even TrainingPeaks themselves would pretend that TPV is as large, well polished or as popular as the likes of Zwift. However, they are investing good money in the platform, and the above factors may not be important to many people. Or certainly not worth paying an additional subscription each month for.
TrainingPeaks Virtual has taken TrainingPeaks premium from being a consideration for triathletes to being the best value subscription for triathletes by a country mile.
Plan your training
If you’re not following a plan, you can create a training calendar with TrainingPeaks premium, either using workouts you create yourself, or using the default workout library in TrainingPeaks. This allows you to be true self coached, rather than simply making things up as you go along,.
If you are following a plan, or working with a coach, then TrainingPeaks premium allows you to move workouts around to fit your schedule, as well as add notes in the calendar, edit planned sessions, and leave comments after each session to keep a detailed training log, which can be useful as part of a season review.
This may not seem like a huge deal, but once you get into the depths of training and life gets in the way of following sessions as you would like to, the flexibility will be massive.
Graphs, reports and charts to track your fitness
Most triathletes love their data, but can’t see the woods for the trees. TrainingPeaks premium allows you to zoom out and see data in condensed charts to see long term patterns.
Whether you want to track long term fitness development, see what your longest run in the last 90 days was, monitor changes to your FTP, see how much time you have spent on each discipline or dive down into the details of a workout, you have the ability to create a chart in TrainingPeaks to show you this.
With the release of beta charts in 2025, TrainingPeak can look at all of your cycling data from the last 90 days to estimate your FTP without a formal test. As long as you have enough maximal efforts to show the algorithm what you’re capable of.
Create an annual training plan
An annual training plan (or ATP) is a roadmap of how you want your season to look. You input your races as well as how important they are, and TrainingPeaks will create a plan for you, breaking your year up into training phases, with targets for each phase. You can edit this as the season unfolds, and tweak the plan as you see fit. Alternatively, you can create it manually, as I do for my coached athletes.
You won’t be able to follow it perfectly, but it will help steer your training to ensure you build your training up in a structured, sensible way for long term success.
Strength Training
All endurance athletes know they *should* be doing strength training, but there are a number of barriers. One of which is that they don’t know how to perform the exercises properly.
When you sign up to TrainingPeaks premium, you can access their strength workout builder. This gives you access to their huge workout library along with demonstration videos and text instructions. Unfortunately you still need to know which exercises to do and when, but that’s where a training plan comes in.
Conclusion
TrainingPeaks Premium is a great value addition to any athlete’s training. It takes some time to get your head around, but it’s worth learning as it’s probably the most powerful triathlon training software on the market.
Sign up or upgrade at www.trainingpeaks.com, or check out my article on how to keep your TrainingPeaks data clean here.
