Garmin announced today that its acquired TrainingPeaks & TrainHeroic (TrainHeroic was part of TrainingPeaks). Garmin hasn’t announced how much it spent, or really much else except that it did. As you can see below, the press release is pretty thin on details. Still, I’ve got some thoughts about what this means for consumers and the industry alike.
Obviously, TrainingPeaks has been around a long time, as somewhat the defacto platform for coaches and athletes over the past decades. I started using it way back in 2008 while training for my first Ironman with a coach. I still use it today, albeit with less focus than I did in the past. My wife also uses it with her coach as well, for all of her training. Point being, I’m pretty familiar with the platform and target audiences over quite a long time period.
The Core Details:
First though, let’s just briefly throw the press release into this post, for historical purposes. Here it is:
SCHAFFHAUSEN, Switzerland/July 22, 2026 — Garmin Ltd. (NYSE: GRMN) today announced it has acquired the TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic training platforms for athletes and coaches. The acquisition strengthens Garmin’s fitness ecosystem with customizable coaching experiences for endurance, strength and performance-focused athletes across every stage of their fitness journey.
“TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic share Garmin’s passion for empowering athletes and coaches around the world with world-class training tools, performance metrics and actionable insights. The addition of these highly successful platforms to the Garmin ecosystem will expand access to more authentic coaching experiences—connecting athletes with professional coaches who guide, motivate and inspire them to reach their goals.” –Brad Trenkle, Garmin Co-Chief Operating Officer
“We’re thrilled to join forces with Garmin to advance our shared mission of empowering coaches and athletes with science-based training. For over a decade, we’ve worked together to democratize coaching and performance insights, helping millions of athletes reach their peak through data-driven, structured training.” –Andy Stephens, CEO of Peaksware Holdings, parent company of TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic
TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic are digital services specializing in connecting coaches and athletes of all abilities who are looking to improve. Headquartered in Louisville, Colo., 120 combined associates from TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic will join Garmin’s global workforce. Financial terms of the acquisition will not be disclosed.
Got all that? Good. Like I said, there’s basically nothing in terms of actual details. The only detail is that seemingly all employees are being retained, assuming 120 employees was the total count (I asked for clarity there, but just got the press release numbers back). Of course, keeping the employees makes sense on multiple levels. First, to maintain and expand the TrainingPeaks/TrainHeroic platform, and second, because Garmin needs all the fitness-deep engineers it can find. It’s an easy decision.
Note that the musical platforms that TrainingPeaks umbrella company (Peaksware Holdings) has, aren’t included in the acquisition, and remain with them.
However, this acquisition does include TrainingPeaks Virtual, formerly Indievelo, which TrainingPeaks acquired a bit back in 2024. That’s the Zwift-like competitor platform that now integrates more tightly with the larger TrainingPeaks platform.
Now, when you look at the broader TrainingPeaks platform, you’ve got basically a few core things:
1) The TrainingPeaks website/app where athletes log their workouts, synced in from all manner of devices
2) The coaching side to that equation, where athletes see those workouts, and manage full businesses using TrainingPeaks as platform for that
3) Training plans that are sold to athletes for all sorts of sports
4) Coaching directory, which ties into the coaching business above
5) TrainingPeaks Virtual, which is included with TP subscriptions, for indoor cycling
6) Licensing of TrainingPeaks metrics like TSS/NP/IF to companies, including Garmin, Wahoo, etc… for various metrics.
Most of these haven’t really changed over the years. TrainingPeaks as a company has done various smaller spin-off athletic projects here and there, but few of them have ever really caught on. There’s also the WKO desktop software, but best I can tell from the release notes, it hasn’t seen updates in 2 years, and even before that it was slim pickings.
Meanwhile, for TrainHeroic, they are/were mostly focused on the strength side of the question. They boasted some 500,000 users and 10,000 coaches, and have been around well over a decade.
What’s Valuable?
Anyway, looking at those pieces there, there’s a lot that Garmin could be going after, but I’ll be honest, I’m a bit puzzled on this one. If I look at the general trend here, it’s that AI coaching is eating into real coaching (substantially). Now, don’t get me wrong, I think AI coaching mostly sucks, especially compared to real (good) coaches. But that’s neither here nor there, a lot of people are just using one-off AI coaching plans and calling it done, especially at the more basic level.
Which is another way of saying that I question how TrainingPeaks was doing in terms of growth, faced with the headwinds of AI apps. They are obviously super well known and respected, but also not really pushing the boundaries of technology (nor have they for many years). Instead, they were/are really good at being consistent and stable, something that (notoriously finicky) coaches tend to appreciate. And in many ways, athletes too. The system ‘just worked’ day in and ay out, even if it was rarely on the leading edge of technology.
If I look at what Garmin might want here, there’s a few things, and my thoughts:
1) The structured training plans from TrainingPeaks: This is logical, though, Gamin already has many of these and can mostly cover the same sports that TrainingPeaks has.
2) The structured training plans from TrainHeroic: This is an area that has more potential for Garmin, especially as they try and expand into this area.
3) TrainingPeaks Virtual: This has value, potentially substantial value, but only if Garmin invests heavily in it, and wants to make a go at competing with Zwift. Ultimately, if they just leave like it is, I’m not sure what the value is by itself, however, with Garmin Connect+…more on that in a moment. This however, is a piece that Garmin could more easily ‘Garminify’, since it was just recently done when Indievelo came TrainingPeaks.
4) The TrainingPeaks platform for athletes: Hot take here, I think this is overrated for Garmin to try and integrate. In fact, as one who worked in IT integrations of acquisitions for a decade+, I think there’s virtually zero chance they could integrate TrainingPeaks into Garmin Connect at a native/structural level. They are just too vastly different and massive platforms that don’t really allow for a marriage. Instead, they’d be operated separately.
5) The TrainingPeaks platform for coaches: This is just a layer atop the athlete platform, so are treated as one and the same. Again, there’s zero chance Garmin can integrate this natively into other Garmin things, instead, everything will be partnership type integrations (from a technical layer).
6) The data within TrainingPeaks: I don’t think this actually has much value to Garmin. Again, hot take, but Garmin has *far* more data already in every possible way than TrainingPeaks does. Sure, there’s some competitive device data in there from Wahoo and the like, but again, that’s a drop in the olympic sized pool compared to what Garmin has. In fact, I’d even bet that Garmin generates more data within its user base every day than TP does in a year (if not far more). We’re likely talking 50-100 million users generating daily data, and the vast majority of TP data is likely from Garmin devices anyway. Finally, Garmin has hardly been on the leading edge of using big data for training models, so going out and getting a slightly different bucket of data doesn’t seem to hold much water.
So what’s Garmin’s thinking here? I suspect finding a way to eventually make Garmin Connect+ a thing people want to pay for. As I outlined in my Garmin Cirqa piece yesterday, Garmin has a very legit problem where Connect+ simply doesn’t offer a compelling reason for people to pay for it. I don’t. I let my subscription lapse this past April, it just doesn’t add anything to my life.
Yet, if they add in TrainingPeaks in some sort of tier? Now we’re talking. Same goes for TrainingPeaks Virtual as an indoor platform.
In fact, while the pricing for TrainingPeaks as a user platform exceeds that of Garmin Connect+, I think they could split out access, and offer TrainingPeaks Virtual within the Garmin Connect+ membership as a really interesting way to immediately increase the appeal to at least cyclists. Keeping in mind we’re talking a platform (TPV) that was free before the TrainingPeaks acquisition. We know that the software development team is super lean there (and super talented).
Which to me almost sets the stage for two different Garmin Connect+ tiers, one including access to the full TrainingPeaks analytics suite as an athlete, and one including other TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic features at a more normal price point. While Garmin might try and make the argument that adding too many features to Connect+ would ‘cheapen’ the platform, I’d argue the opposite: It strengthens it. Because right now, there’s no compelling reason for most people to subscribe.
The Concerns:
Still, I have some very real concerns here. Let’s get right into them.
First, will Garmin block access to 3rd party companies like Wahoo and others from uploading to TrainingPeaks? If so, coaches will quickly migrate to other coaching platforms out there, despite how much coaches (rightfully) dislike moving platforms. The key aspect of TrainingPeaks that made it successful is being data-neutral. I asked Garmin for an answer to this, but didn’t receive any reply back on that question yet.
Second, will Garmin still allow licensing of the TrainingPeaks metrics to various device makers/platforms that leverage it today? Back when Garmin acquired FirstBeat, they said they would allow such licensing. But over time that slowly disappeared, and today FirstBeat doesn’t do any licensing to 3rd parties for their metrics to new customers as far as I know. In the grand scheme of things, most TrainingPeaks metrics can be emulated (near identically) without the TrainingPeaks name, so this isn’t quite as critical as the others. Still, it’s notable.
Third, will Garmin actually maintain and improve, the platform? Garmin doesn’t have any viable pathway to consolidating the TrainingPeaks platform into Garmin Connect. From a technical standpoint, even the most talented tech acquisition integration teams would struggle heavily to consolidate to these very different platforms. Structurally, they are so fundamentally old and different. Further, Garmin themselves have a long history of being unable to integrate 3rd party platforms. We can look at the original MotionBased platform (which became Garmin Connect), or things like the DeLorme platform (which became inReach). Both well over a decade. In the case of inReach, we’ve only recently seen some tech changes there to light-up various new features. I suspect behind the scenes it’s still totally separate. All of which ignores Tacx basically running as-is (with improvements, to be fair), ever since. Point being, Garmin is going to have to effectively maintain TrainingPeaks forever, hopefully with new features. At some point, someone might see that budget line item and question it.
Fourth, what does this mean to coaches? At this point, there’s been no real communication to TrainingPeaks coaches as far as I know, on what this means to them (in any way). So that’s a big ticket item.
All of these are fuzzy, and when asked for more detail, there’s no promises or detail to be had. Usually acquisitions have slightly more information, though, Garmin does tend to provide virtually no information on acquisitions.
Wrap-Up:
Garmin has made many fitness acquisitions over the years, some really compelling (like Backtracker, which then launched and became Garmin Varia radar, well loved by many), others that fired a blank (like Alphamantis aero sensors), and some in between, like Tacx (which cost Garmin a boatload, but hasn’t really produced many new products since). But the vast majority are hugely successful (like DeLorme). For ones like the FirstBeat acquisition, there’s been pretty clear benefits to Garmin users, even if at the expense of (many) competitors. In that case, such is business. Those companies had to go out and develop their own algorithms. And then there’s more recent ones like MyLapse for timing, which it’s a bit too soon to see that one play out.
On the scale of user bases, the TrainingPeaks one is likely up there as one of the biggest, alongside Tacx. Sure, there’s more people crossing a finish line with MyLapse hardware at that time, but that hardly counts as an end-user in this context.
One of the things that I think separates this acquisition from those, is I feel like in most other Garmin acquisitions, the company being acquired either has some unique new technology Garmin wants, or Garmin is buying it so someone else doesn’t. In this case though, I’m struggling to classify TrainingPeaks as either of those two things – especially in the face of a rise of AI training apps. I don’t see someone like Strava seriously fishing to buy TrainingPeaks. They already bought others, and adding more to their balance sheet ahead of an IPO doesn’t make a ton of sense.
Instead, it seems logical that Garmin is looking to see if it can increase its subscription revenue, possibly via putting coaching aspects (plans or otherwise) into some sort of Connect+ bucket, or perhaps just keeping it standalone. Ultimately, if there’s one truism of Garmin acquisitions, is that they are very rarely wrong (from a Garmin business standpoint). Sorta like Garmin’s legal team. We just don’t necessarily see what the full picture is immediately, or even in the medium term.
Only time will tell, both in terms of the impact on Garmin, but also to consumers.
With that, thanks for reading!
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