Giving coach access to my account or coaching account

I currently am coached and my coach uses training peaks to schedule and review my training.
I would like to give them access to my trainer road account… so she can drag and drop my workouts. Most of which are custom designed and I use workout creater to make the trainer road compatable.

Also at the moment I am spending Sunday afternoons copy my plan across to the cool new trainer road calendar. And then copying and rebuilding the indoor workouts in workout creator (MRC files make this easy)

Myself I prefer the trainer road analytics and calendar. I also much prefer trainer road controlling my trainer to some other apps.
I have discussed this and she is open to the idea of trialling this.

Should I just giver her my login details? Or is there another way?

Also are there any plans going forward for a “coaches” account. I know you can sort of do this with the “teams” feature.

Regardless… data can still be analysed both ways and on both platforms… but the way the calendar and performance analytics are shaping up I think you are into a winner.

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Hoping someone can help-- or is it just as simple as give them my login details?

Yup, sharing your login info is the approved solution right now, direct from Nate.

Make sure to use something uniquely different from your other account passwords, for security.

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Thank you Chad.
I will do that.

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Is there a better solution than sharing account info or is something on the road-map to make this secure because sharing account info is a no-go for me.

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Things may have changed, but it seemed like a very low priority consideration based on my reading of the TR comments.

Unfortunately this is still not on the Development Roadmap. We have some major projects that will be taking a lot of our Development Resources for the near future, so we will not have the bandwidth to take on extra projects like this right away.

May I ask why sharing account information is a no go for you, even if you changed your password to something generic? We are always looking to better understand our user’s use-cases so that we can better prioritize our improvements to the app, so we appreciate any feedback :slight_smile:

I’m not the OP, but it does concern me that it’s not only encouraged, but seems to be the official policy, that users should share their usernames and passwords with others. While it doesn’t seem like a large security risk in TR’s case, encouraging generally unsafe security practices should be frowned upon. Whether warranted or not, it does call into question TR’s internal security guidelines as well.

I understand there are technical limitations around implementing secure account delegation and there are higher priority features on the roadmap. I would rather see credential sharing officially discouraged and users taking it upon themselves to find ways to give coaches access to their accounts.

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I’ve never used the option so I am not sure if it works like this but this might be an easier route:

Could the team option of TR be of help?

Trainer gets their own account and creates a team and the trainee joins that team?

A calendar in the team option that allows the trainee to start up the workout that needs to be done.

If that’s not an option and you can only load a workout that has already been done by a teammate, the trainer could just start a workout and bail after 2 minute but still post it so that the trainee could select it.

As said, I’ve never used the team option so I don’t know what is in there or not but it just popped in my head

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Possibly more like a work around at your own risk

I am kinda in the security business and one of the first things I learn my clients is to never share account information. You know lots of people keep passwords in there email, excel or word docs on their desktops etc and that is not secure.

Anyway don’t wanne be picky, you guys do a good job. Security by design is easier said than done and probably when you started developing the platform functionality like giving access to a coach to certain accounts was not a priority or not even thought about.

I do think it would be a nice feature for the growth of TR.

Hey All,

I understand your concerns regarding security here, and I’m hoping I could clear things up a bit.

Sharing password information is not quite an official stance, but rather a workaround. As an athlete, you should only use that option if you feel comfortable doing so. We aren’t saying this is the way it should be done, we’re saying it’s the way it could be done if you’re comfortable with it.

At the end of the day our platform wasn’t designed for coaches to manage an athlete’s training within TrainerRoad. That’s not to say it is something that can’t be done, but it will require some workarounds since coach-athlete relationships have not been a development priority for us.

With TrainerRoad as it is now, there are two ways to have your coach more active within TrainerRoad. One way is through the use of TrainerRoad Teams. The downside of this approach is that it requires your coach to have a TrainerRoad account of his/her own, and they can’t directly apply changes to your calendar. The other option is by sharing your TrainerRoad login credentials, but this should be done IF AND ONLY IF you feel comfortable with that. Otherwise, your option is to continue using a service like TrainingPeaks that is more accommodative to the coach-athlete relationship and continue porting things over using our Ride-Sync feature. At this time, developing better coach-athlete relationships within TrainerRoad is not on our Development Roadmap.

If users want their coaches to access their accounts at the moment, their best bet is to share a password with their coach that isn’t tied to any other account they use or plan to use.

I hope this clears things up!

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My take, as I have a coach but use the TR platform to do my workouts:

The workouts your coach creates for you can be exported by you and loaded into the TR platform using the workout creator. Sure, it takes 20 minutes (maybe) to do a week’s worth of workouts, but my view is that the coach gives you the workouts and you figure out how to get them done.
I get my workouts sent to me via Today’s Plan, and I export and addthem to Trainer road using the workout creator, then plan my week using the TR calendar.

:+1:

JoeX
CISSP, CRISC

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This is disappointing. As a coach I feel it is part of my job to make sure loading workouts is easy. The current export formula to TR is cumbersome at best and it would be nice if there was a better interface such as what Zwift has as an auto-import of workouts and that is the direction I tend to send my athletes since it is easier for both of us and just as effective.
I have no desire to intrude on my athletes TR accounts and don’t feel comfortable asking for passwords. For now I will look into using the Team option, but only until my one athlete that still uses TR is talked into something else.

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Lets warm this thing up again.

Has anything changed withing the last year?
I have exakt the same issues. The Workout creator is very uncomfortable, and now that Adobe Air is deprecated it gets harder to set it up.
The Workout Creator for MAC OS has stopped working and I am not able to log in to it again.

Also it would be nice to get a interface for coaches without giving them the personal account data.

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Step 1: Create a new password dedicated to your TrainerRoad account. Make sure this password isn’t used anywhere else and do NOT use the last nine digits of your social security number.

Step 2: Share password with coach.

thats just not a solution.

its 2021. sharing a personal password can’t be a probable solution.

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You’re worried about what, specifically?

If it’s a random computer-generated password, unique to your TrainerRoad account, the password itself is meaningless.

Do you want your coach to only have limited access to your account? Because that’s a different matter altogether and significantly more complex.

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I’m hoping to bring this topic up again. I can understand that if the marketing direction for TrainerRoad is to attract and enforce the idea of AI as being the largest value (and the market share they are going after is cyclists and now runners), but as a triathlete and coach I would love to be able to promote trainer road for all of my athletes, yet I can’t though because the narrative is disjointed due to the reality of the workarounds. It’s not an easy narrative to sell even though I desperately want it to be. I shouldn’t have to live on multiple platforms, and if I had one solution I’d be willing to pay more as I’d be free to work on my branding and the unique human insights I could bring to supplement the wonderful analytics that only TR can do.

Although I actually would like for an App like TR to be able to take over the bulk work of the personal training/coaching industry, there should (in my opinion) still be a personal-connection option outside of ‘Team’ that would allow for management of a coach to group/individual activities if allowed the override option with the ability to interact (perhaps auto-message coach with summary reports when activity complete or reminders if not completed per scheduled time similar to Microsoft summary notifications). This would allow for trigger from social motivators to help encourage completion pull-through.

I would think this would be on the development roadmap as this social component would help to develop the habit of compliance and ultimately retention for re-upped annual subscriptions and lock-in via word of mouth. If athletes are not posting socially on their own, having an accountability partner (or coach) can drastically increase engagement. Research shows that when someone publicly shares their goals, they have around a 65% chance of success, however, having a specific accountability partner can boost that chance to as much as 95%.

Anyone else wish TR had more coach/accountability partner options?

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