I don’t find an outdoor package compelling, and in my opinion this approaches the problem from the wrong end. Plus, I personally don’t like anything that restricts the features I have. But I’d pay for expanded features.
Rather than people subscribing/unsubscribing, you should focus on features that are useful to athletes who also or primarily ride outdoors as well as on general health. They should stay, because TR offers them something useful, not because they got a good deal in their off/on season.
Here are a few ideas:
Add proper ride and race analysis tools — in app. I subscribed to Training Peaks for 2–3 years just to have those. I canceled my Training Peaks subscription, because I raced once in two years (due to Covid).
Integrate strength training and yoga. The last deep dive on strength training finally pushed me over the cliff and I started. It feels really good. Plus, I have been doing yoga with my wife (who has been doing yoga for several years). But it isn’t easy. I have a Notes document with lists of workouts and I had to add links to time stamps of Youtube videos … And in two weeks I won’t remember the number of reps I did for a given exercise. It is a mess. Please help people like me, and help me do it inside of TR.
Allow flexible logging of other sports. You need not become like Strava that captures everything from golfing to chess, but things like gym sessions, running, etc. should be plannable and captured. Even a basic import of I ran x km in y minutes, my average pace was 5 min/km, my average heart rate was z. You initially need not think about the physiological impact this will have on your bike training. (Think about it, even if you wanted to, with what data would you train your ML models?)
Think about how to make TR’s plans more enticing for people who want to ride outdoors. To give you two examples: rather than prescribing watts, prescribe people e. g. pacing, a mountain biking skills session, an (on road) cornering session or bunch riding skills. For example, when I ride with others, I cannot stick to some prescribed wattage. But I can train bunch riding or cornering. That kind of work is not captured by TR. Pacing is another huge one. Thanks to Covid my group riding skills have seriously atrophied even though I am physically more capable than ever. Training them should be part of a balanced training plan.
Use tools like FTP prediction to show them how their fitness will likely develop if they “just ride” outdoors. E. g. TR could extrapolate the athlete’s likely FTP (as a band/range) in the TSS/FTP chart on top of the calendar page). Don’t hit them over the head, just allow them to make informed decisions.
I could come up with a few other ideas, in fact, I already have. I know that most of these are going to be hard to implement. That’s fine. But IMHO that’s the direction I would take if I were in your shoes. Just add to the list of things that would make TR more useful to someone who rides primarily outdoors.
Lastly, if you can’t do something yourself, partner up with someone who can. There are plenty of services that try to make people do exercises. Addidas has an app for body strength exercises. It isn’t aimed at cyclists, yes, but with the right training plans, you could use the workout player they have.
At first I liked the idea but then I thought about those rainy weekends, sometimes it’s really nice to be able to do a workout indoors when the weather is shit or you don’t have that much time
I keep the subscription year round. I tend to be a creature of habit: in winter I switch to indoors and ride 99% on the trainer. When the weather heats up I venture outdoors and swiftly switch to 90+% outdoors rides (majority structured).
Still, I keep my subscription year round. Grandfathered prices, the 10% indoor workouts and just plainly habit keep me here I couldn’t be happier with the value I get out of this!
So I’m on the fence about suspending my account over the summer right now. Historically I always have (with other apps, first year on TR) but have a second bike this year so was going to keep the old bike on the trainer year around for those rainy days. At the same time, I treat most rainy days as rest days so…
I also wouldn’t take advantage of the outside training as I typically just “enjoy” riding outside. Plus it’s way too hilly around here to make the power numbers hold steady easily. So all my rides would be unstructured.
If I could get all of the other features, while doing unstructured rides, I’d be likely to go with that plan other than suspending all together…unless I decide to keep the full plan for those occasional rainy day Train Now rides.
Just for clarity…can you highlight what features would work with only unstructured rides?
OK. That sounds like a reasonable option. But I think you’re better off making the current offering more of a holistic “anywhere rides” solution rather than bias the price or people’s thinking on indoor vs. outdoor rides. TR, Zwift, SYSTM, etc. come in with an “indoor rides” vs. “outdoor rides” mindset that you need to break free of. You need to think from the mindset of a coach, one who helps riders with their cycling training whenever and wherever. As a cyclist, I think about training for events and the physical/mental benefits of training year-round – not inside training and outside training - and need a plan and service to support me every day of the week. It just so happens that some times of the year or days of the week it has to be inside and some times/days outside. Most days it’s structured, some days it’s unstructured. If your offering can give me all of that, then you’ll meet my needs.
What’s missing now is integrating unstructured workouts, not a separate tier that only provides outdoor structured workouts. If you can get that out before spring, you’ll keep me and other customers as year-round ones not ones that go for the lower tier outside only workouts offering or drop off altogether. Hope to see it soon.
I’d love a bit more ‘love’ to the TR outside-only-12-months-a-year community.
I just don’t have the space or mental capacity for indoor cycling and found myself much more productive doing intervals outside, thankfully I have a nice large park that suits outdoor riding quite well!
I suspect quite a lot of us are in the same position.
It would be nice to see more development to outdoor workouts - particularly a simpler/more classic format to intervals in the outdoor plans!
Although I think workout alternatives is great so far
If anything I look forward to the update where you can adjust duration based on days - I believe you teased this on the podcast 3 episodes ago -
This will be very suitable to those that cycle outdoors as I suspect we look for longer duration intervals rather than intense 60-90 minute sessions - such as making Saturday SS workouts 120 - 180 minutes etc and 4 hour z2 rides on Sundays etc.
I’m not sure I agree that there are a large number of people following a plan religiously who ONLY ride outdoors, but I agree with this part. I personally hate outdoor workouts because it feels really unproductive (and I feel silly) doing 6 minutes @105%/2 minutes@60% or 10 minutes on/6 minutes off stuff on the road, not to mention something like 30/30s.
@Nate_Pearson, I 100% agree this should be the direction as described by @OreoCookie . I suspect you lose subscribers because when primarily riding/training/racing outside, TR offers very little benefit at the moment. So unless you’re legacy and afraid to lose that, there’s very little incentive to stay with TR. Give me a reason to stay, not a watered down version of TR. So what would solve that? In no particular order:
Including outdoor unstructured rides that affect PLs and AT
Race/Event/ride analysis
Fatigue/readiness score (Green/Red Light, possibly yellow as well)
Predictive FTP (maybe even a “warning” prompt that your fitness is trending down and recommend/suggest what to change, like adding structure/a LV plan)
I can’t think of any service I’ve ever used in my life, and let go, that a lesser/cheaper version would’ve solved. I let said service go because it no longer had value, so make it valuable.
I’ve gone through this line of thinking when deciding between monthly subscription interrupted in the summer, or full- year. I went full-year, because a) I still do indoor rides when the weather does not cooperate, and b) I started doing outside TR workouts. The compromise presented here - lower cost against no indoor rides - does not fit my usage. But I can see the idea - it’s net new users (riders who exclusively train outside) or summer-interrupters. Low dev cost, net new revenue.
You sound like Nate the product marketer talking – what other segments can I sell my product to? – or Nate the CEO talking – how can I plug the seasonal dips in my of my subscription revenue to increase my valuation? – rather than Nate the value-creating entrepreneur talking – what problem or unsatisfied user need can I solve? Solve that user problem/need and you’ll sell more product and take care of your seasonal revenue issue. Does the cycling world need yet another outdoor ride plan product, even with all the benefits of AT, etc.? Maybe. Do we all want to ride faster? Absolutely, yes! Do we get there by having better training tools for the months we ride outside? Somewhat. Do we get there by having better training tools year-round agnostic to inside or outside riding? Bingo.
I find it’s hard to stick to proper structured intervals outside as I have 10-15km of suburbs to get through and very few decent routes to do longer intervals (unless I do laps of a few very specific loops, in which case I’d just go on the turbo and save myself the 20-30k of suburbs to get there and back).
However I do often do what I would describe as “purposeful” rides or I guess you could say structured rides that don’t neatly fit a TR workout - that would be e.g., Zone 2 on the flats and a route which incorporates certain climbs of given lengths so I can do longer or shorter SS/Threshold/VO2 intervals on those (basically, whatever I am subbing out of my TR plan). From what I can tell, this seems to be how pros train a lot of the time, they’ll do a big long endurance ride with a couple of longer climbs thrown in at certain targets. Rather than going out and doing TR-type workouts on the road.
So a TR plan which uses AT and gives advice on what types/lengths/approx power targets to hit in line with your goals and past riding would be great…
I want this, but I want it included in my regular TR sub so I could do more of my structured work outdoors in the summer and have it count properly to AT/my plan. I don’t want to “switch” between “summer” and “winter” plans like that, I just want more flexibility with what I currently have. We can have crappy weather any time of the year in the UK and (especially in spring and autumn) you can be riding outdoors in glorious weather one week and sheltering from torrential rain and gale force winds the next.
So it could be basically the same product except you choose to do more or less of the work inside or outside depending on your personal preference, the time of year, and the weather on a given day…
I think the key question you need to get answer is: for the people who drop TR when they are only doing outside rides, what other services (e.g., TrainingPeaks, Strava, etc.) and why are they still paying for? It is these wholes in the TR service that you would need to plug, in my opinion. But I’m not really your target market for this, as given time constraints and that I live in San Francisco, I train indoors during the week all year long.
This will round up TR to perfrction.
As I already kerp subscription. Using AT and look at the calender, to make sure I don"t miss my deload/recovery weeks.
I am one of the targeted people in the survey. I do not like training indoors, and as soon as the roads are clean enough - you won’t ever see me inside until the next winter. I keep the trainer going during the winter with the main goal of fitness maintenance, so anything above that is a nice perk. That said, with all the benefits of structured training indoors, I still prefer doing workouts outside. In the past I worked with the coach who would prescribe the workouts. So I’d keep my TR account active pretty much just during the winter season. This year I am planning on using plan builder during the outdoor season, but some workouts in the plan seem like they’d be more difficult to accomplish outside. That said, I’d be a happy supporter of whatever features there are planned for outdoor riding.
Additionally, please please please make the addition of recorded run/swim activities to the calendar automatic. Don’t even analyze them with AI, just estimate the TSS (most activities have recorded heart rate anyways) and calculate the total TSS of the week.
I couldn’t be happier with the value I get out of this!
agree with this part. I personally hate outdoor workouts because it feels really unproductive (and I feel silly) doing 6 minutes 
