Garmin Acquires TrainingPeaks: What Coaches and Athletes Need to Know

• By Bruno F -
• July 23, 2026

Five days after Garmin announced it was buying TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic, the internet is full of predictions. Most of them are guesses. Before deciding what — if anything — you should do about it, it helps to separate what is actually known from what is speculation. That’s what this article does, and then it gives you a practical way to think about your own situation, because the right answer is not the same for every coach.

The short version

• Garmin bought TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic on July 22, 2026 — and with them the metrics, the marketplace, and the virtual cycling platform.
• Nothing in the product has changed yet: pricing, accounts, and non-Garmin device sync all work as before.
• The cross-platform reassurance so far comes from TrainingPeaks, not from Garmin itself.
• Past acquisitions in this space suggest watching actions, not announcements.
• What you should do depends on your roster and your business — three profiles below.

What we actually know

• On July 22, 2026, Garmin announced the acquisition of TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic from Peaksware Holdings. The price was not disclosed.
• About 120 employees join Garmin and stay based in Louisville, Colorado.
• Garmin co-COO Brad Trenkle said the platforms “share Garmin’s passion for empowering athletes and coaches around the world.” Peaksware CEO Andy Stephens called it a “shared mission.”
• In its note to coaches, TrainingPeaks said it “will continue to operate as a cross-platform ecosystem, enabling athletes and coaches to use the devices, platforms and services that best suit their needs.”

Just as telling is what has not been said. When industry journalists asked Garmin directly whether uploads from competitors’ devices are guaranteed long-term, they got no answer. The reassurance on cross-platform support has come from TrainingPeaks — not from its new owner.

What Garmin actually bought

The headline names two apps, but the deal reaches further:

• TrainingPeaks — the endurance coaching platform itself, along with its training-plan marketplace and coach directory.
• TrainHeroic — the strength-and-conditioning platform for gym-based coaching.
• TrainingPeaks Virtual — the virtual cycling world formerly known as indieVelo.
• WKO — the desktop analytics tool used by data-driven coaches.
• The metrics language — trademarks such as Training Stress Score (TSS), Normalized Power, and Intensity Factor. Rival products that display these numbers license them from their owner, and that owner is now Garmin.

Peaksware kept its music-education businesses, which reads as a deliberate, planned exit from sports software rather than a distressed sale.

Why Garmin did it

Garmin hasn’t explained its strategy beyond the press release, so analysts have filled the gap with two main readings — and they can both be true at once. The first is about data: decades of records showing what real human coaches prescribed and how athletes responded, across every device brand — exactly the raw material you’d want for building AI-assisted coaching, and something Garmin cannot produce from its own ecosystem alone. The second is about subscriptions: Garmin’s Connect+ has struggled to justify its price, and TrainingPeaks features plus a virtual cycling platform are an obvious way to change that. There’s a defensive layer too — the largest independent training platform is no longer available to anyone else.

Why coaches are uneasy anyway

The unease is not about Garmin’s stated intentions. It’s about memory. One coach summed it up in a comment that made the rounds this week: they were “a bit shook,” still carrying “lingering pain from the Today’s Plan acquisition, and lots of lost data.”

That memory is doing a lot of work, because the coaching software world has been through this before. Today’s Plan, an independent coaching platform, was acquired by Zwift and shut down in 2024. Wahoo closed RGT after acquiring it. And when Garmin bought Firstbeat in 2020, the physiology metrics kept working — but over the following years, new third-party licensing quietly dried up. None of these platforms died on announcement day. The change came later, gradually, and mostly without press releases.

The honest conclusion from those precedents is not “Garmin will ruin TrainingPeaks.” It’s narrower: public reassurances at acquisition time tell you about intentions, not outcomes.

The real question is not Garmin’s intent — it’s your dependency

Here is the structural shift that matters. For twenty years, supporting every watch brand wasn’t a favor TrainingPeaks did the market — it was how TrainingPeaks made money. Neutrality was the business model, so you didn’t have to trust anyone’s goodwill; the incentives did the work.

As of last week, cross-platform support is no longer the business model. It’s a policy inside a hardware company whose revenue comes from selling watches — a policy that can be reviewed in any annual planning meeting. It probably won’t change this year. But “probably” is a different foundation than “structurally guaranteed,” and every coach now has to decide how much of their business to build on it.

Three coaches, three different answers

What you should actually do depends almost entirely on what your coaching business looks like.

If your athletes are nearly all on Garmin devices

You have the least exposure and no reason to rush anywhere. Treat this as a hygiene reminder: export a full backup of your training history and plans — something worth doing on any platform, in any year — and carry on.

If your roster is mixed — Polar, Suunto, COROS, Wahoo, Apple Watch

You are the coach this acquisition actually affects, because your workflow depends on exactly the compatibility that is now discretionary. You don’t need to panic, and mid-season is a bad time to migrate. But hedging is cheap:

• Export everything now — workouts, historical activities, and coach notes — while exports are complete and easy. Check what format the export actually gives you; not everything survives as a FIT file.
• Run a genuine trial of one alternative with two or three athletes. A month of real use tells you more than any feature table.
• Switch to monthly billing if you’re on annual. Flexibility is worth a few euros right now.

If you sell training plans through the TrainingPeaks marketplace

This group is discussed the least and affected the most. Your storefront, your customer relationships, and your commission terms are now owned by a hardware manufacturer with its own strategic priorities. Nobody has announced any changes — but distribution you don’t control is a risk you should never leave unmanaged. Diversify: sell through at least one other channel, and own your customer contact list somewhere outside the platform.

The three signals worth watching

Ignore the noise and watch for these specific events. Any one of them is your cue to act rather than wait:

1. A change to third-party device sync — new limits, new fees, or “premium” gating of non-Garmin uploads.
2. Flagship TrainingPeaks features appearing inside Garmin’s Connect+ subscription instead of the standalone product.
3. Changed terms for marketplace sellers — commissions, payouts, or content exclusivity.

If you decide to look around

The independent ecosystem is bigger than most coaches realize — industry roundups published since the acquisition count more than a dozen platforms still unaffiliated with any hardware maker. Which one fits depends on what you need:

• For free analytics — Intervals.icu (a remarkable single-developer project) and the open-source Golden Cheetah are excellent, though neither is built around running a coaching business.
• For coaching workflows — Final Surge is a solid multi-sport option with a free coach tier.
• For a full coaching business — that’s the category TrainerPlan competes in, covered honestly in the next section.

And staying on TrainingPeaks is a legitimate choice too — just make it with your data backed up and a plan B identified, rather than by default.

Where TrainerPlan stands in this

We build TrainerPlan, so read this section knowing that. We’re not going to promise you independence — promises are exactly what the precedents above said to discount. What we can point to is our incentive structure, the same test we applied to TrainingPeaks: TrainerPlan sells software to coaches. We don’t make watches. Two-way sync with Garmin, Polar, Suunto, COROS, Strava, Wahoo and Apple Watch isn’t a policy we maintain — it’s the product. The day we degrade it is the day we have no business.

In one platform you get strength and endurance planning, athlete management, performance charts, payments, your own branding, and a marketplace to sell your plans. And if you decide to move, our team migrates your athletes, history, and plans for you at no cost.

Compare the platforms side by side: TrainerPlan vs TrainingPeaks · TrainerPlan vs TrainHeroic — or start free.