Hey TR, It’s Not You, it’s Me (Zwift Plus)

TrainerRoad Software
1

Dear TrainerRoad,

We need to talk.

We’ve been together for years. On again. Off again. But through it all, I’ve always kept my subscription active.

Even when I wasn’t riding.

Even when I was ignoring your workouts.

Even when you kept telling me I needed another sweet spot interval.

I never stopped paying for you. That’s commitment.

Sure, I’ve been seeing Zwift on the side. But you knew that. We had an understanding.

Zwift was the fun one. The social one. The one with the pretty scenery and people who actually seemed happy to be riding bicycles.

You were the serious one. The one with a plan. The one who knew my FTP, understood my weaknesses, and told me things I didn’t want to hear.

It worked.

Then Zwift got a coach.

An AI coach.

And suddenly the fun one wants to get serious.

Now Zwift is whispering things like “adaptive training,” “personalized plans,” and “recovery.”

Recovery? You never used to care about recovery, Zwift. You just wanted me to chase strangers up Alpe du Zwift until I questioned my life choices.

And here’s the problem.

I’m curious.

I haven’t canceled TrainerRoad. I haven’t even downloaded the divorce papers.

But I’ve looked.:eyes:

And apparently Zwift Plus is offering the whole package.

The scenery. The racing. The social life. And now someone who claims to understand my training needs.

So here I am, a cyclist caught in a love triangle, wondering whether this is just a shiny new distraction or the beginning of something real.

To my fellow cyclists in open relationships with TrainerRoad and Zwift:

Are you staying faithful to TrainerRoad’s AI?

Are you thinking about switching to Zwift Coach?

Have you already crossed over and just haven’t told TrainerRoad yet?

And most importantly, for those who’ve tried is Zwift’s new coaching actually good enough to replace TrainerRoad, or is this just the honeymoon phase?**

Because I genuinely want to know. I’ve spent enough time with TrainerRoad to respect what it does, and I don’t intend to walk away just because someone new showed up promising to understand me.

Seriously, for those of us paying for both: Is TrainerRoad’s AI coaching still worth a separate subscription now that Zwift Plus is here? Has anyone actually compared the two?

I’m not looking for another honeymoon. I’m looking for a reason to stay married.

But I’m not going to pretend I’m not tempted.

For now, I’m staying.

Although I may have dinner with Zwift Plus.

Just to talk.

Nothing physical.

2

That was pretty great. But in all seriousness, I’m at a similar spot. What trainer road may become has a ton of potential and makes me want to stay. At the same time, I’m frustrated with everytime I end a plan, the next one suggested drops 2 hours and a bunch of TSS as the suggestion, my FTP hasn’t moved in over 6 months, and the podcast I used to look forward to has become a commercial spouting results about beginner gains. For now I’m holding on and making a lot of the modifications myself as well as paying for a consultation with a coach to verify what I’m doing. My last race is this weekend and then a couple week break so I will be taking advantage of the one month free trial of zwift plus and checking it out next week. Time will tell.

3

If I wasnt on a grandfathered price divorce papers would have been served months ago.

It’s too early to say if the Zwift coach is any good, but to be honest I’m pretty sceptical about AI and coaching.

4

I voluntarily gave up my grandfather price so that means I’m a super fan. But I’m also a super fan of Zwift. And since I can’t seem to follow a training plan to save my life, yeah, I’m in the same three way and not entirely sure what I want. I bet there are a ton of us in the same boat.

Joe

5

Very funny :rofl:

I’m not ready to stray just yet.

Although this is making me reconsider things. I don’t think I’m making progress with TR . That’s probably just my personal plateau so I’m not blaming TR for that. But I also don’t think that I’m in a place where I can make loads of gains either. So perhaps I’m better off looking for a bit of fun, rather than getting led down the garden path of predicted gains of FTP which turn into nothing by the end of a plan.

6

I’m sticking with TR in sickness and in health.
I got the TR AI figured out after 9 months. Takes some manual adjustment on my part when building a plan.
Weekly it might advance me too fast or not fast enough. I can change the workout if don’t have the legs or life gets in the way. Usually takes 10 minutes into a workout before I know.
AI has to live with me . I don’t have to live with it.

7

My experience thus far has been that Zwift’s training style is completely different from TR and not remotely as effective. Having said that, TR workouts are routinely funneled through Zwift now for a lot of users so Zwift has the benefit of an awful lot of TR training data available to train its own models on.

I’m currently paying for both but not honestly sure why. I do essentially every single TR ride on Alpe du Zwift so I’m paying essentially for one climb :laughing: :man_shrugging:t2:

If I was going to dump either of them it would be Zwift. But the visual aspect is really valuable to me psychologically when I’m spending hours on an indoor trainer. Maybe the Zwift training will get good enough but I do feel some loyalty to TR. They paved and braved a path with this and have done amazing things for my progress and training success. I’m not willing to throw that away just because some other training platform walks by in a shorter skirt.

8

Yeah. IDK. My understanding is that the plans and coaching are all new with this add-on so it remains to be seen. I haven’t yet gone in and looked at them in any detail but I can imagine there are bugs to be fixed and features to add. It seems to me TR AI is still a mixed bag after a couple of years.

9

TBD. It’s hard to say where Zwift Coach is going to end up.

I think it’s ideas of throwing in pacer rides or group rides or races is cool as that is something a human coach, IMO, throws into plans occasionally.

I think there are a lot of unknowns at this point.

10

My “plan” is to see what sort of training rhythm Zwift suggests and if it looks sensible I’ll use that as a rough guide.

Thus far it’s suggesting a sensible mix of easy rides/workouts, hard workouts and a weekly long ride. It doesn’t seem overly keen to give me an easy week, so it looks like I might need to manage my own deloads, but that’s OK.

In terms of the actual workouts it’s suggesting, some look OK and I’ll probably just do them as they are. For the ones that look terrible, I’ll create a workout in intervals.icu that kinda channels the spirit but skips the Zwifty ridiculousness.

I’ll add my usual caveat that my training goals are to be a vaguely healthy human and to slowly inch towards death in as good a shape as possible. I’m not optimising for performance on the bike.

11

Been using both TR and Z for many years now. Won’t pay for Zwift plus for now, but depends on where Zwift Coach goes from here. Right now no calendar to organize your training (I live in the TR calendar always moving things around to match my training with my work and Dad life schedule), no ability to sync workouts to my Garmin so I can do outside workouts.

12

Yeah, I like the idea of specific routes, too. Like add a route with rolling hills for a bunch of VO2Max work or something like that.

I’m also curious about their data. They have a ton of rides and riders to analyze, but I think the free ride info is probably the most interesting. Zwift and a handful of other apps are the only ones that have exact data on both the rider/workout side and from the stimulus side based on the route ridden. No idea if that’s actually going to be useful for anything, of course.

13

When I did have a coach she would occasionally tell me jump on Zwift and do hill repeats or ride for an hour and anytime somebody passes you hold their wheel for a few minutes, then recover, and jump on another wheel.

It was just a fun loosely structured workout that still kept me on track for my goals.

14

It’s been 4 years since I’ve done any works on Zwift, but I kinda liked the variety in their wacked-out workouts. They seemed to try to mix everything into a single workout. IDK if that was good or bad but it was def less tedious than the staid TR workouts at the time. .

Yep. Totally trying to minimize the decline rather than make big gains.

15

Generally not optimal training.

But I have friends who just do hard peloton rides 2-3 times a week and long rides on the weekend and are fast-ish. Is that optimal training? Probably not. Does it keep them fit and able to push the pace and group rides and have respectable results when they race. Yes.

16

Do people not realize how much AI slop looks like AI slop?

If you have the idea to write this, just write it yourself. This is embarrassing. At least delete the bolding and obvious tells

17

Z training is a little too new for me to just move to it. I like the workouts I’m getting with TR, and my meh results and flat FTP are due to life interruptions and illnesses this year. If there were a consistency score, this season it would be bad.

I tried Rouvy and Zwift, and I ended up keeping Rouvy. The scenery is so much better and varied. I don’t care about my avatar, bike upgrades, or kit, and turn all that off. I like riding in the alps, the unbound or big sugar routes, along the Colorado River, etc etc etc. Rouvy is just scenery when I want it, TR dishes the pain.

18

to be honest, i wouldnt think twice of paying for both TR and Zwift if TR released a basic plan for 9.99 which only included:

Old plans
Sync to zwift and garmin

No AI, no adaptations, just old plans, ramp tests. Just to have something sync to my garmin and zwift everyday according to the plan and have it up to me to follow the plan.

19

100%, add to that the whole point of a forum is talking with other people. If I wanted to know what ChatGPT or whatever other Ai thought I would go ask it… But I would much prefer talking to, agreeing or disagreeing with other actual humans.

20

I’ve seen numerous responses on this forum suggesting that TR doesn’t prescribe higher volume because it’s primarily designed for riders training 5–8 hours per week. For someone just looking to get fit and stay healthy, I suspect Zwift’s AI training will do that just fine.

I think there’s an opportunity for TR to offer something more for athletes training higher volume, chasing podiums, and looking for something that can more authentically compete with a good coach. Jonathan has interviewed plenty of pros who endorse TR, but I’d LOVE to see their actual training calendars. I suspect many still have coaches prescribing most of their workouts rather than relying on TR’s AI.

What if TR offered a TrainerRoad Plus subscription with a 30–60 minute onboarding call to discuss training history and goals, access to coaching advice (potentially through interactive AI), integration with wearable data like sleep, HRV, and recovery, the ability to push planned workouts to TrainingPeaks, more than 2 weeks of future training visibility, approval before AI changes workouts (with explanations), and training load recommendations that account for years of training history.

I’m sure there are other things I’m not thinking of, but I think there’s a market for athletes who want something more sophisticated without necessarily hiring a coach. TR already has a great foundation, and I’d love to see them build on it.