100%. Couldn’t write it better. 
For me outside workouts are more than just a gimmick, I really like to do them, especially Sweetspot/Over-Under/thresholds. Some ideas in general for outside riding:
- Should be able to push to Garmin from the Android App directly
- Adapt workout to route/profile of route (if you have scheduled 10min intervall, but the hill is only 8min; if the road stretch allows only 18min of sweetspot)
- You put in your desired start/stop location and some AI/Algos will produce a workout and route based on the topography, traffic, your desired duration, your desired workout zones (or the prescribed workout from AT).
- Any AI stuff would be really cool, but I don’t think it will work with Garmin/Wahoo
I am not sure, what would be the best features to get non indoor riders (not on TR) on some version of outdoor TR. In my Strava feed I am the only one using TR, and no one really showed interest in my training progress or program.
I would say you really should push AI training, it is a really good implementation of AI and is easy to market to most riders.
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Your post made me think of quality of life improvements for outdoor workouts. Biggest one for me is probably out of TR’s control: I wish the head units had better support for pausing, re-starting, or skipping workout steps that didn’t involve traversing sub menus. I think Wahoo may do this better, but I find the user experience on Edge 530 to be really lackluster if anything interrupts the nominal interval flow.
I never use Connect IQ apps but could a custom TR app make the user experience better? Or could TR just pay Garmin money for a first party integration that sucks less? Probably not given Garmin likely has their own vested interests but a guy can dream.
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As others who live in the U.K. have said, the weather can be changeable, meaning that just riding outside in the summer months is not really something I want to do. Also, a pre-getting the offspring ready for school / work workout is far easier on the indoor trainer than on the road. Given this, I subscribe year round, so I’m not really the target.
Last summer I was pushing my plan to my Garmin and then doing the rides outside…assuming the weather was ok. I really liked this functionality for rides up an hour, especially for efforts up to 5 minutes or so.
I do agree with the point above that there might be a marketing issue though. I was introduced to TR by a friend who got faster through focused training. I wanted some of that, and frankly cannot be bothered with the Zwift gamification approach, or indeed the racing. However, I have many friends that ride Zwift, week in, week out, winter and summer, especially those that race. TR is a focused tool, and increasingly a tool that can be used in both the garage and on the road. I’m no marketeer, but you need to get that message out.
That said, many outside rides are social in nature. Imagine riding with the bloke that is doing 30 /30s; unless you were doing them too, it would get very annoying, very quickly!
To add to that:
- with intervals.icu you can create/change intervals very easy by dragging a line and
- you can easily put any metric from all available data to show over each interval (for example decoupling…) (TR equivalent could be to select additional columns for the table)
- with TR creating own intervals is cumbersome at best (via „find power above X and Min duration of Y) and I can’t even delete them after creating!? (or did I overlook something?)
And @Nate_Pearson another very very nice feature with direct benefit for outside workouts would be: Comparison of 2 (or more) rides!
(This is nearly impossible now…would need to create a dedicated season for a single ride.)
Examples:
- show me workout X and let me quickly select previous executions of the same workout to compare these (power, HR, power to HR, …)
(In intervals I often have those workouts in different tabs to compare. One sophisticated comparison view would be so nice) - compare ramp tests
- and now using this as bonus for outside: you could use these function to compare the actual outside ride to the prescribed workout (did I over/undershoot, was my compliance better or worse than previous attempts, …)
(Also think of the requests on this forum to show the workout graph behind the outside ride. This could help with that.)
Don’t you think that could be especially useful combined with outside and overall add to the TR platform?
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Thinking back to when I started racing, we would have early morning mid-week team rides that looked like this:
- Tuesday: Short hill work. Probably akin to VO2 max workouts
- Wednesday: long hill climb
- Thursday: Fast tempo / pace line with sprints
- Friday: recovery ride at a truly easy pace
So as you are thinking through Outside Rides option, think through the above scenarios where people are doing “workouts” with some structure, but the ride / workout doesn’t include pre-defined intervals. So your Outside Rides needs someway to auto-detect intervals, and work from that.
I have friends in San Francisco who do similar to the above. For example, fatcakeclub in SF does a weekly mid-week ride that climbs Hawk Hill which is a 6 - 13 minute climb. So having the tools to process / understand how they are progressing on this climb could be of interest.
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This sounds like a great idea. I rent and my ducts were chewed through by squirrels so I get a lot of hot attic air through the vents in the summer and min indoor temp on some days is 78 no matter what I set it to. Right now, I can maintain 68 indoors so I’m enjoying the trainer.
One thing I’d like to see in an outdoor plan is help for those of us who are 90 miles away from rural intersetionless roads. I think I may have read that Wahoo headunits can handle pauses and manual restarts of intervals but I haven’t tested it since switching from Garmin. I know Garmins could not do it.
eg, If you prescribe 3x8, there is no chance at being able to hit the whole workout without having to stop during one (or more) of the intervals. Obviously the best workout is to do it exactly as prescribed. But if I’m in the middle of an interval and get stuck at a light, I want to be able to pause it so I can still get all 8 minutes. The way the Garmin works (and perhaps Wahoo, I don’t know) is not only do you have the unwanted rest, but you also lose the time spent resting from the prescribed duration.
This is better
4:00 on
1:00 redlight
4:00 on
Than
4:00 on
1:00 redlight
3:00 on
Similarly, it would be nice to be able to hit button to start the next interval if you know you have a busy street coming up
eg, if you suggest a 5 minute rest, it’s better to rest for 6 minutes if that means your next on-interval is uninterrupted.
You can do this with your Wahoo headunit pretty easily.
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that’s cool, thanks! I made the switch to Wahoo in May or June of last year and never tried running a workout on it. I just did some efforts but not any official workout. I’m looking forward to trying it when it’s too hot to ride indoors this summer.
That was added many years ago. You can pause and restart intervals on Garmin, and the UI is easier on the touchscreen 830 and 1030. But from time to time I pause/restart on the 530. While I understand TR’s position on repeatability, I’m doing more endurance and fewer intervals and faster than when I was doing more (TR) intervals. Same commentary about intervals before I had ever heard of TR. For me volume for the win, even just 1.5 hours/week more makes a huge difference (6 vs 7.5 hours/week). The minimum effective dose may be less than you think. Everyone is different. YMMV. yada yada.
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You usually have to hit the lap button to start an interval so it is already in place to push the 5 minute rest out to 6 or whatever to get through a stop. I do this all the time. Hitting the ride stop button on the garmin will stop the interval timers so you don’t lose any interval time. The crappy part is that when you restart the ride on the garmin it takes me back to the workout screen and not the custom one for TR so that I have to switch screens. Someone above mentioned this.
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So true. That’s why I don’t like doing intervals outdoors. Plus, in my experience it is better to do things differently outdoors, e. g. use a small hill for VO2max repeats or heart rate for endurance work. This would be one instance where approaching things from an indoor training-first perspective shows.
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Yes @Nate_Pearson! I know at least one person would would be all over this for that exact reason: Rides a ton. Sets audacious goals for himself. Has a Garmin. Would get power meter if needed. Loves data and ride feedback. Is all about riding outside. I’m sure many TR subscribers know one person like that.
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After reading more of this thread I agree that this is more of a marketing problem. TR as an outside only app is amazing. I don’t really need the deeper analytics, it would be tough to justify the cost to build out with good free alternatives.
Maybe pushing outside workout on the podcast or marketing towards that. With estimated and predicted FTP you could even have a custom thing added to the cancellation page saying based on what you did last summer when you cancelled you can expect an FTP from 260watts to 230watts if you ride similar to last summer without using TR outside.
I found my old support email to refresh my memory for things I wanted to make outdoor workouts on Garmin better.
First support request: “I’d like to set the work and rest intervals to require a lap button just like the initial warmup does. The reason being that to pause or start a new step in Garmin is something like Menu, down, down, down, start next step. The lap button would be much easier.”
I listed 2 use cases for the pause/restart (which Garmin had but it was tucked away and inconvenient):
- For example, you roll up to a stop light while your rest period is counting down. The rest expires but you still have 30 seconds before the light turns green. As it is, your work period starts while you’re stationary and you end up losing 30-60 seconds of your work period bc that time keeps counting.
- Another example is when the workout calls for 20 END minutes before a hard effort. Maybe you’re 13 minutes from the start of a steep hill. It would be nice to just do “close enough” END minutes and then start your Z4 effort on the hill.
The response from support was “It’s not possible to edit the laps from automatic to open laps bc Garmin setup that screen and it can’t be changed.”
Second support request: “I’d like to track my 3 second power rather than average. If I sit at a light, the numeric display is useless for the entire interval bc it includes all the zeros from when you were sitting. The goal is to make all your time pedaling hit the prescribed power so total average power is not as useful”
The reply to this was: “Create a custom screen bc Garmin is the one that decides to show ave power on their default interval screen and “it cannot be edited”.”
I disagree with this bc I can create custom workouts in TrainingPeaks and load them on a Garmin and get both of the features I asked for (press to start interval and choice of 3 sec power on the default workout screen).
At this point I don’t care about Garmin functionality and I think Wahoo has it sorted out better so I’ll see for myself soon enough.
LOL If you don’t like doing intervals outdoors, why are you commenting on this thread? Just kidding around… Here is my perspective - we have some of the best roads in the world out my door.
During 2021 there are 219 recorded rides on my calendar, this is the breakdown:
- 2 on Lifetime recumbent at a hotel, just spinning the legs
- 2 on my bike fitter’s Kickr Snap posing for the Retul, just spinning the legs
- 5 on my indoor (garage) Kickr trainer, all with structure
- 210 outside, about 98% of them having structured workouts
That might be a fun topic to debate over Shabu Shabu and beers. In my humble opinion, after having done 2018 and 2019 as indoor focused years, those outside workouts built better fitness because I was doing the work while also reinforcing fundamentals. Maybe I’m too old to want to do intervals until I’m falling over and puking my guts out. At least now I’ve learned what to do indoors (turn off erg), if I had to switch focus from outside to training indoors.
Part of it is getting out of the house, and part is having the good fortune to find myself living in this part of the world.
Yes, and its something like 10-30 seconds to change my coach’s workouts. IMHO the overall pre/during/post outdoor experience is better when driven by TrainingPeaks, I’ve written up info on the forum and supplied the same to TR when dropping my subscription.
And apologies, I misread and thought you switched from Wahoo to Garmin. There are a bunch of things I like better on Garmin while doing outside workouts, but every bike computer has some sort of compromise and its up to the user to decide what matters.
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All due to respect to Mr Powless, I hate the Nor Cal roads near my home. There are 2 roads within 40 miles of my home where you can do efforts over 10 min without hitting a stop light. One is Mt Diablo which is 10 contiguous intersection-free miles but the gradient varies a lot and in some places is too steep to hit the zones I’m supposed to hit. The other is rolling and a long steep downhill is just as problematic for structure as a stoplight is. There is another small handful of long uninterrupted roads btwn 40-90 miles from home. It’s a miserable place to ride IMO.
Boulder is connected to dozens of rides of every gradient and every length and you can easily ride 4 hours without unclipping all while getting exactly the right grade for your workout. The farm roads outside of DFW in TX are also pretty good for getting away from traffic and intersections. Each of these 2 locations has far less aggressive/angry drivers and smoother asphalt as well.
I thought you had it right. I used to ride Garmin. I tried TP workouts with some success. I tried TR workouts and it was a much bigger hassle to pause than I was willing to deal with. I opened a support ticket. Was basically told “just ride indoors or go back and forth on the same road, we don’t want you modifying your intervals” so I stopped doing structure outside. Due to HW reliability issues, I switched from Garmin to Wahoo so that’s my current system now but I never got around to trying a TR workout on the new headunit.
Because not all training outdoors is doing intervals. 
I mostly do endurance rides outdoors, but in the summer I also make a point of practicing pacing, group riding (when the pandemic permits) and cornering technique when I am out and about. These do not fit neatly into any structured workout, but are indispensable for making me a faster cyclist.
Still I think my point is valid: if I were to design outdoor workouts, I would design them differently. If my hill is 4–5 minutes long at VO2max power, then I guess I am doing 4–5 minute long VO2max intervals. The brakes in between are also dictated by geography. (That 4–5 minute hill isn’t hypothetical, it is what I used for VO2max sessions before starting TR.)
I think you are seeing this too much from your own perspective. Whether indoor or outdoor training is better for you is a nice discussion to have for people who have the option. I currently don’t, at least not more than once per week. I have two small children and I need to get my training in while the family sleeps. I get one outdoor ride, an endurance ride with my daughter in tow to give my wife some peace. (Not complaining, I like family life, just stating how I adapt my training to my life circumstance.) In 10 years time when my kids are bigger and perhaps I can spend half a day in the saddle every weekend again, then I might have other options.
So I don’t think it is necessarily a discussion of what brings you better fitness (my answer would be “train regularly and consistently”, everything else is lower order), but to have flexible training tools that adapt to many athletes’ life styles. I expect that eventually I’ll be able to ride much more outdoors than I do now. And for my taste, TR’s outdoor workouts are too much like straight-up translations of indoor workouts. Local limitations (like road conditions and traffic while you train) are also a factor here. To get to really nice roads, it’d take me 20, 30 minutes on my bike and at least one way I’d be stuck in morning traffic.
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My $0.02, which may be overestimating its value for your market research.
Riding outdoors during the week usually isn’t practical for me because life, work, family mean not enough time.
On the weekend or a holiday, weather permitting, I aim to ride an outdoor workout, but that’s easy to adjust myself and won’t be consistently outdoors.
I do hear people on this forum, Reddit, etc., say they hate riding indoors or only like to ride outdoors. 
I don’t own a trainer, I have been using TR outside since 2018.
Used to write down the workouts on a piece of paper.
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