Speaker: TrainingPeaks is a platform that helps you track, analyze, plan,
and log your training. It gives you heaps of tools
if you're building towards a specific goal or maybe you just want to increase your fitness.
Now it's actually a platform that I use throughout the entirety of my racing career,
and together with the folk at TrainingPeaks, we've decided to put together a helpful little guide
to help you understand some of the features on the platform and get the most out of it.
First off, I'm going to talk about the free-to-use basic version of TrainingPeaks. When you first
sign up for an account on the platform, you'll be able to use a heap of tools to help you monitor
your progress. You'll be able to upload workouts, log those workouts, view workout summaries, and
you will be able to use a bespoke training plan with a coach amongst other things.
You can see all this on a training piece calendar page, where you'll be able to see all your past
workouts and also all your upcoming ones. TrainingPeaks is compatible with over 100
third-party apps like Zwift or Wahoo for example. You can set up the platform so that
when you finish a ride, that ride will be sent straight to your calendar page ready to view.
On the right-hand side, you'll see a summary of your weekly hours and distances. You can click
on your completed workouts and this is where things get really interesting.
All your ride metrics are displayed here. Things like elevation gain, calories burned,
power if you are using a meter, and your heart rate. This is also the
place where you can communicate with those looking after your training.
This is what makes the platform so special in my opinion, it's that bridge between the
athlete and the coach. TrainingPeaks makes it so easy to communicate with your coach,
tell them how things are going so they can then adapt your training. You can write in here a
description of how your workout went, how you're feeling, all of which can be seen directly by your
coach. Also, if you're completing your workouts as planned, in the training piece calendar, they will
be color-coded green. Not quite completing your sessions, well then they'll be color-coded amber,
and really not finishing your session as planned at all, then it will be color-coded red.
Actually, remember having quite a few of those myself when I was training. These are all tools
that would really help you get the most out of your training and monitor your progress
to the best of your ability. I remember when I was racing and we turn up at a competition,
it will always be a bit of a topic of debate is how we color-coded our training and the
build-up to that race. Whether we had been on red in that week or our sessions had been on
green and we'd be on top form in the build-up. Now as I said before, you can give perceived
exertion scores on your rides in TrainingPeaks. This is a great tool. I used to use it a lot
when I was racing to keep track of how I was feeling and relay that to my coaches.
At the Giro d'Italia, we had to give a perceived exertion score on every single stage. My coaches
would then look at that, relay that to management, and I would potentially adjust the tactics for
the next day. If I'd had a few days where I was saying I was like a 10 out of 10, super fatigued,
then we'd maybe try and give me a bit of a day off, but well that never seems to happen actually.
You can see here each day score as we scroll through the days on that grand tour. Starting
off on the prologue, that was a 6, then we had 8, 5, 7, 5, 4, 9, 7, 7.5, 3, 5, 7, 10, 10, 6,
7, 10, 10, 7, 11, off the chart at that stage, and finally, a 5 to finish off the grand tour.
TrainingPeaks also has a mobile app which works together with their online site. If you are out
and about on the go, you can look at your day's workout, see what training you have coming up,
what you need to complete, and also give feedback very easily through the mobile platform.
"How did the workout go?" "Yes, super easy day actually,
I felt absolutely amazing. My ride partner, Ollie, well, he was suffering quite a lot."
You can also organize all your goals and events on the calendar. You can scroll ahead
through the calendar and input any of those goals or events, so you know what's coming
up and what you have to work towards. I've made a key goal coming up beating Si
in a team time trial. Seven riders on my team and for obvious reasons, I have made this a key goal.
You simply click on a day and input your goals and events, so they appear in your calendar.
Your coach can also do this for you to plan your training or you could use it as the final
date of a specific training plan available on TrainingPeaks. Training plans are one of the key
features of TrainingPeaks and the platform really connects riders with a whole array of different
training plans specifically made for the beginner to the experienced rider and are literally aims
at whatever you are training for. These training plans are all written by professional coaches and
they are rated by other users, so you get a really good idea of how the training plan works
and how well people respond to it before you buy. Now if you want to find these plans, you can find
them in the TrainingPeaks store. So you go to the left-hand panel, and you click right here to enter
that store. Upon purchase of a training plan, all the day's training will appear automatically
in your calendar on TrainingPeaks. All you have to do is scroll ahead, see what you've got coming up,
see what different intervals you have on each day. If you work with Zwift, for example,
that day's workout will appear automatically on the platform. So all you have to do is
jump on your bike and complete your efforts. If you're looking for a coach to have more
of a personal relationship with your training, well TrainingPeaks offers a coach match service
where you put in your preferences, and TrainingPeaks will match you with an
accredited coach to help you achieve your goals. I personally think that if I didn't use a coach or
monitor my training in such a way, I find it 10 times harder to achieve any progress whatsoever.
If you'd like to use more of TrainingPeaks features, there is a premium version which comes
in at just under US$10 per month. To give you a better idea of what some of those features entail,
I'm going to use one of my old racing files from the 2019 Giro d'Italia to be precise and stage 20,
which was an absolutely brutal day on the bike. 5,500 meters of climbing,
six hours, 45 minutes on the bike and I tell you what, I was crying before, during,
and after that stage. It was absolutely horrific. You can see my ride here and you, of course,
have the map view where you can see my route or shall I say race of pain through the Dolomites.
Then you can see the graph of my power file, elevation, speed, heart rate data,
et cetera. Plus, you have my peak performances for the ride here. For example, I did 393 watts
for an hour at the start of the stage, my second highest power output for the whole of 2019.
No wonder I was crying during the race. Peak performances are another key feature of the
TrainingPeaks premium accounts. Meaning you can keep track of all your personal best, things like
power, heart rates over certain time durations. This was quite a topic of debate when we get
back from a race getting on the team bus, and you compare with your teammates who had a PB
on that day whose power was a bit off who maybe had the best power of all the year or
maybe of all time in that specific race. It will always be quite a bone of contention actually.
You will also be able to track your metrics in more detail using premium using the performance
management chart and tracking such as fatigue, form, and fitness during your different training
phases. Now you'll also be able to drag and drop your workout so maybe you had to rush
into work on one day, you couldn't complete your training. So you can drag that day's training,
move it to the subsequent day. You can also customize your own workouts using the workout
builder. You could design a specific interval session or if you're like me,
you could design a nice, easy ride to the cafe. The dashboard setting on your premium account will
also contain loads of different graphs. So you can really track your performances and your progress
across lots of different parameters. That was a little bit of a guide to TrainingPeaks and a bit
more information on how the platform works. I hope you enjoyed this video and if you did, please give
it a big thumbs up. While you're down there, let me know in the comment section below, do you use a
coach and if you do, how do you best communicate with that coach? How do you let them know how
you're getting on with the training and how do they tell you what training you have coming up?
Please let me know. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. As always,
thanks for watching. See you soon. [00:08:41] [END OF AUDIO]