On July 22, 2026, Garmin announced it's acquiring TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic from Peaksware. About 120 employees join Garmin, the platforms keep running, and the price wasn't disclosed.
It would be easy to file this under routine industry news. I don't think it is. TrainingPeaks spent 27 years as the neutral ground of endurance training, the place where a coach could manage athletes on any watch or trainer and the brand never mattered. Now it belongs to the biggest device maker in the sport. This site tracks the apps that orbit Strava, and TrainingPeaks sits near the center of that world, so here's what the deal actually includes and what to watch for.
What Garmin actually bought
TrainingPeaks was founded in 1999 by coach and author Joe Friel, his son Dirk, and engineer Gear Fisher. It started as a web-based training log for Friel's coaching business and grew into the default platform where coaches plan workouts and athletes upload the results. By 2026 that means several distinct pieces:
- The athlete platform: training calendar, device sync, and the analytics built around metrics whose names TrainingPeaks owns as trademarks: Training Stress Score (TSS, a single number for how hard a workout was), Normalized Power, and Intensity Factor. Those names are licensed to other companies' bike computers and apps. The math itself isn't protected, which is why rivals ship the same concept under different labels.
- The coaching business: coach subscriptions, a marketplace of training plans, and a coach-matching directory.
- TrainingPeaks Virtual, the indoor cycling platform it got by acquiring indieVelo in October 2024, folded into the Premium subscription in 2025.
- WKO, the desktop analysis tool a lot of serious coaches still swear by.
TrainHeroic is the strength side: programming and coaching tools for gym athletes. DC Rainmaker puts it at roughly 500,000 users and 10,000 coaches.
One detail worth noticing: this was a partial sale. Peaksware kept its music education businesses (MakeMusic, Alfred Music) and sold the sports platforms. Garmin's co-COO Brad Trenkle gave the expected line about shared passion for “empowering athletes and coaches around the world with world-class training tools.” Fine. The more interesting question is why Garmin wanted this now.
The Firstbeat precedent
Garmin has a long acquisition history, and the recent entries form a pattern: Firstbeat Analytics in 2020, Tacx trainers in 2019, race-timing company MYLAPS in July 2025, and now the dominant coaching platform. Add it up and Garmin owns the watch, the trainer, the physiology algorithms, the race timing, and the coaching layer.
Firstbeat is the precedent that matters here. Before Garmin bought it, Firstbeat's physiology algorithms (VO2 max estimates, training load, recovery time) powered watches from Suunto, Huawei, Amazfit, Casio, and others. The licensing didn't get switched off on day one. It faded. DC Rainmaker's read is that Firstbeat no longer takes on new third-party licensees. Nobody had to announce anything; the neutral supplier quietly became a Garmin feature.
That's the honest frame for reading TrainingPeaks' reassurance this week that it will “continue to operate as a cross-platform ecosystem”. I believe that's true today, and probably next year too. The real question is slower and quieter: whether the TSS licensing deals with Wahoo and others get renewed on the same terms, and whether integrations for rival devices keep getting approved as fast as Garmin's own. Also where the best new features land. TrainingPeaks, or a Garmin subscription tier?
Everyone is buying the middle layer
Zoom out and this deal caps a two-year consolidation run:
- October 2024: TrainingPeaks buys indieVelo and turns it into TrainingPeaks Virtual.
- April 2025: Strava buys Runna, the running training app.
- May 2025: Strava buys The Breakaway, the cycling training app.
- July 2025: Garmin buys MYLAPS.
- April 2026: Zwift buys ROUVY (covered here).
- July 2026: Garmin buys TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic.
Meanwhile the graveyard grows. Today's Plan, long the main rival to TrainingPeaks on the coaching side, announced its closure in December 2023. Fatmap, which Strava bought in 2023, was switched off in October 2024. The Breakaway's standalone app is being wound down this year as its features move into Strava.
The training-app world used to be modular. You bought a device from one company, analyzed the data somewhere else, and posted the ride to Strava. Every layer talked to every other layer because nobody owned two of them. That structure is collapsing into three stacks: Garmin, Strava, and Zwift. When an independent app gets absorbed, it tends to become a feature of the stack that bought it, or it disappears.
Why now? Hardware growth is hard and subscription revenue is where everyone is looking. Garmin launched Connect+ in March 2025, the Connect app's first paid tier at $6.99 a month, and the reception was lukewarm because it didn't include much. TrainingPeaks hands Garmin a real subscription business with decades of coach relationships attached. And there's a defensive read too: Strava filed confidentially for an IPO at the start of this year and has been acquiring steadily. I can't prove Garmin moved to keep TrainingPeaks off the table for a newly public Strava, but the timing is hard to ignore.
Will TrainingPeaks still work with Strava and non-Garmin devices?
Today: nothing. Your syncs work like they did last week, no pricing changes were announced, and both companies say the platforms keep operating. For most athletes the plumbing looks like this: the watch or bike computer uploads to Garmin Connect or Wahoo's cloud, which pushes one copy to TrainingPeaks for the coach and another to Strava for the social feed. That chain is intact. It's also worth noticing that for a lot of athletes the chain already started with Garmin; now more links of it end there too.
What I'd actually watch over the next year or two:
- Bundling. The most likely first move is TrainingPeaks or TrainingPeaks Virtual showing up in some flavor of Connect+ tier. That could genuinely be a good deal for Garmin owners.
- TrainingPeaks Virtual vs Zwift. Virtual now has Garmin's resources behind it, plus Tacx trainers to pair with it. Zwift already had MyWhoosh chasing it; now there's a rival with hardware money too.
- Non-Garmin devices. Uploads from Wahoo, COROS, Polar, Suunto, and Apple are the thing TrainingPeaks' coach business depends on. Any friction there is the early warning sign.
- The metrics licensing. TSS and Normalized Power on rival bike computers now depend on deals with Garmin. Watch what happens at renewal time.
Coaches have the most at stake, and the reaction I've seen from coaches this week has been closer to nervous than celebratory. A coach running one calendar for thirty athletes on mixed hardware is exactly the use case that neutrality made possible. And the Today's Plan shutdown is recent enough that most coaches have already lived through one forced migration.
TrainingPeaks alternatives: the independents left standing
If this week made you want a TrainingPeaks alternative, or at least a plan B, the good news is the independent analytics scene is still healthy. intervals.icu is free, ships improvements constantly, and covers most of what self-coached athletes use TrainingPeaks for (our detailed comparison is suddenly a lot more topical than when we wrote it). Final Surge remains a solid independent option on the coaching side. Xert and Join Cycling take different, adaptive approaches to training load. All of them sync with Strava, and all of them are in our training apps directory.
To be fair, Garmin ownership could mean more investment, not less. TrainingPeaks' core product moved slowly for years, and Virtual needs resources to catch Zwift. Firstbeat's algorithms arguably got better inside Garmin. Owners don't always ruin what they buy.
But something real was lost this week, even if no feature broke. For 27 years the biggest training platform in endurance sports answered to no device maker. That's over, and the apps in the middle, the ones this site exists to track, now operate in a world with three walled gardens and shrinking neutral ground. Nothing about your setup needs to change today. Just know which direction the wind is blowing.