This morning, Garmin announced it has acquired TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic. These platforms are major players in the endurance and strength-training world, primarily for the quality of their training plans. This news is already sparking a lot of speculation—and skepticism—among athletes and coaches who’ve built their training around these tools. Here’s what this acquisition might mean for the way you train.
Why Garmin acquired TrainingPeaks
According to Garmin’s official press release, this acquisition “strengthens Garmin’s fitness ecosystem with customizable coaching experiences for endurance, strength, and performance-focused athletes across every stage of their fitness journey.” The deal covers TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic only, not all of parent company Peaksware Holdings. This is a Garmin-specific focus on its endurance and strength assets, rather than a sale of the entire parent company.
TrainingPeaks is best known for its training plans, logs, and coaching tools, but this deal is drawing attention to other features and perks. For instance, Garmin likely has its eye on TrainingPeaks Virtual, a nifty indoor cycling platform.
It’s also worth noting that TrainingPeaks owns the trademarks behind some popular metrics for serious cyclists, like Training Stress Score, Normalized Power, and Intensity Factor. As of right now, other companies like Wahoo, Hammerhead, and TrainerRoad license those terms for use in their own products—we’ll see if the Garmin deal impacts this. Garmin already dominates the hardware layer with its watches, bike computers, and sensors that generate the data. What it hasn’t dominated is the planning and coaching layer that sits on top of that.
There’s also a strength-training angle with TrainHeroic. Garmin is clearly trying to get firmer footing in the strength and hybrid training worlds, and buying up an established strength-programming platform is a much faster path than building one from scratch.
What happens to TrainingPeaks now?
This is where the community’s nervousness comes in, and it’s not unfounded. As of right now, TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic connects to more than 100 devices and apps, including hardware from Garmin’s direct competitors like Wahoo, Coros, Polar, Suunto, and Apple. Garmin now has incentive to make that platform less accessible. Whether it acts on that incentive is unclear, so there are three broad scenarios people are speculating about:
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Best case: Garmin leaves TrainingPeaks largely alone as a standalone product, keeps it multi-brand, and maybe integrates some select TrainingPeaks features into Connect+.
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Middle case: Garmin treats TrainingPeaks the way Strava has treated Runna since acquiring it, which might look like a sort of combo-deal subscription.
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Worst case: Garmin absorbs TrainingPeaks’ features and utterly paywalls them. Existing users lose years of workout history, race notes, and coaching plans.
Nothing in today’s announcement addresses these fears directly. For now, Garmin’s messaging is all about “enhancing the ecosystem.”
The bottom line
Acquisitions like this typically take months (sometimes longer) before any product changes roll out, and Garmin has given no timeline. Here are some longer-term questions worth watching:
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Will non-Garmin device support go away?
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Will Garmin’s strength training finally get better?
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Will pricing for either platform change?
Garmin is already one of the biggest names in athlete devices and data; today’s acquisition expands the company’s reach more into coaching and structured training plans.
Maybe TrainingPeaks’ best training tools make it into Connect+, Garmin’s strength training gets a long-overdue upgrade, and everybody wins. Or maybe a beloved independent tool gets slowly absorbed and degraded. For now, all we can do is keep an eye on whether TrainingPeaks’ device integrations with Garmin competitors stay intact, and what happens to pricing.
