Yesterday, Garmin announced the acquisition of the two training platforms TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic.TrainingPeaks is one of the most widely used training-planning and analysis software platforms among coaches and athletes in endurance sports, while TrainHeroic focuses on strength and conditioning.
This is not Garmin’s first expansion by acquisition. In the fitness sector, Garmin completed the acquisition of Dutch indoor bike trainer manufacturer Tacx in 2019, entering the fast-growing indoor cycling training market.
In 2020, Garmin acquired Firstbeat Analytics Oy, a provider of algorithms that convert raw heart-rate data into core metrics such as Training Status, Body Battery and VO2 max.
From Tacx to Firstbeat to TrainingPeaks, Garmin’s acquisition logic has been consistent. It’s not simply buying products,but buying technology, teams, ecosystems, and time.。
Many will think Garmin’s acquisition of TrainingPeaks means data integration and a unified user ecosystem. That’s true, but it’s also the least exciting part. The real question is: what did Garmin gain that it couldn’t have built itself? Who will be the early beneficiaries of this deal?
01
Deal scale and strategic intent
Garmin, with over $7 billion in annual revenue, more than 23,000 employees and over 100 offices worldwide, has acquired TrainingPeaks, which has cultivated a coaching ecosystem for 26 years. Since its founding in 1999, TrainingPeaks has served more than 9 million registered users; the platform hosts tens of thousands of certified coaches and covers almost every endurance discipline—running, cycling, triathlon, trail running, and more.
TrainHeroic, meanwhile, is rooted in strength and conditioning, serving over 4,000 teams and thousands of strength coaches. Together, the two give Garmin immediate access to coaching infrastructure across both the endurance and strength-training tracks.
On the surface, this is an integration of user data and the hardware ecosystem; but the real core lies in:Garmin has bought assets it could not have built from scratch in the short term.
Over the past decade, Garmin’s core has been hardware—releasing more than 80 new products a year, from running watches to cycling computers, from outdoor handhelds to marine navigation instruments—its number of hardware SKUs and breadth of categories are unmatched in sports tech. Yet the ceiling for hardware is obvious.
Image source: social media
Users typically replace watches every two to three years, while subscription revenue is ongoing and compound. Garmin has made software moves (in March 2025 it launched the paid subscription Connect+, introducing AI insights), but the trust barrier in the coaching market is extremely hard to cross.
When a coach chooses a platform they look not only at features but also where their peers are, where the athletes are, and whether the platform is neutral and reliable. This network effect can’t be built quickly by throwing money at it. TrainingPeaks’ value is exactly in those “26 years”: a structured training platform validated by coaches and athletes worldwide, a complete workflow ecosystem, and—most importantly—trust.
This is not Garmin’s first software acquisition. The 2020 purchase of Firstbeat Analytics gave Garmin the “engine”—core algorithms for heart-rate variability, Training Status, Body Battery, etc.; now TrainingPeaks provides the “fuel.” Manually evaluated, structured training data can make algorithms more precise and ultimately train models that understand real coach decision-making.
If Firstbeat solved the physiological modeling problem of “how the body responds to training,” then TrainingPeaks addresses the behavioral modeling problem of “how coaches design training.” Combined, Garmin for the first time has a complete data closed-loop capability from training design → execution monitoring → recovery assessment → plan adjustment.
02
Core customers: coaches
Biggest payoff: distribution channels
The long-term paying customers of TrainingPeaks have never been the athletes, but the coaches. Athletes are transient — some switch disciplines, some drop out, some move to free tools — but coaches build careers here, accumulate reputations, and remain.
A coach’s client profiles, training templates, periodization plans, and communication records on TrainingPeaks are digital assets built up over years, and the cost to migrate them is very high. That is TrainingPeaks’ “stickiness.” It locks in not momentary users, but professional relationship networks measured in years.
The biggest benefit of the acquisition is access to Garmin Connect’s potential distribution channel of roughly 40 million users.Currently, Garmin Connect has over 20 million monthly active users and more than 3 million activity syncs per day. A significant portion of these users are serious endurance athletes who may be encountering structured training for the first time or considering whether they need a coach.
Now, the coaches on TrainingPeaks are only “one step away” from those 40 million users — provided Garmin implements effective product-level routing and recommendation mechanisms.
No matter what brand of device an athlete wears, coaches can have access to them. This “device-agnostic” feature is vital for coaches. A coach shouldn’t have to persuade clients to change watches in order to use TrainingPeaks’ services. Coaches who embrace this trend will gain new entry points for business growth, while clients can still freely choose their preferred hardware brands.
True lasting value often resides in high-trust “nodes” and the infrastructure beneath them. Coaches are the highest-trust nodes in endurance sports. Athletes entrust their bodies, goals, time, and money to coaches — a depth of relationship that far exceeds any app–user connection. What Garmin has bought is precisely the platform that carries those relationships.
03
Biggest concerns:
Economic rationality makes a “walled garden” unlikely to succeed
The coaching community’s biggest worry is: TrainingPeaks has historically been compatible with all hardware — from Garmin, Wahoo, Coros, Polar, Suunto to Apple Watch, and with third‑party training platforms like Zwift and TrainerRoad — will it become closed after Garmin’s acquisition?
If Garmin turns it into an “exclusive accessory” for its own devices, will coaches and athletes using Coros watches or Wahoo head units be forced to switch equipment?
Economic logic answers that. For 26 years TrainingPeaks has worked to integrate with almost every mainstream device; its business model is rooted in “device neutrality.” If Garmin restricts it to its own ecosystem, the coach market they just paid heavily for would shrink dramatically, because coaches won’t accept “only my clients who wear Garmin can use TrainingPeaks.”
Such self‑sabotaging behavior makes no commercial sense.Staying open and letting data from more device brands flow into TrainingPeaks would instead maximize the platform’s network effects and data value — that is more profitable than any goodwill promise.
Of course, a subtle point to watch is that Garmin device users may gradually gain exclusive features other platforms don’t offer (similar to a Connect+ paywall model). For example, Garmin watch users might receive deeper TrainingPeaks integration in the future — one‑click training plan syncs, automatic pushes of real‑time adjustments, richer two‑way data interactions — while achieving those features on Coros or Wahoo could require more complex workarounds.
Today’s “consistency” does not guarantee it won’t change in future under the lure of subscription revenue. Coaches and athletes need to observe whether Garmin is “building a wall” or “fixing the pipes.”
04
A split in the coaching community: opportunity and unease coexist
Not all coaches are optimistic. Observers like Troy Meadows are less worried about device compatibility than about the fate of the integrated team: will TrainingPeaks remain independently operated, or be fully absorbed by Garmin?
“Everything stays the same” promises at the bargaining table often look very different a year or two later. Troy Meadows says plainly: “I’ve seen too many of these cases. The promises sound nice, but a year later the team is cut, the product is merged, and the founder’s ‘strategic advisor’ title is meaningless.”
These concerns are not groundless. Post‑acquisition integration failure rates for large companies can reach 70%–90%, and the most common failure mode is “cultural clash + over‑integration.” Garmin is a publicly traded company with a strong hardware DNA — processes, compliance, and reporting pressures are pervasive; TrainingPeaks is a 26‑year‑old software company whose team culture is closer to a startup.The fusion of two different DNAs has never been easy.
Early signals were relatively mild. Garmin announced it will keep president Lee Gerakos and co-founder Dirk Friel in place and promised the platform will operate independently. After acquiring Firstbeat it likewise largely preserved the Finnish team and even built a lab. But the risk of relying on a single large owner always exists: more distribution channels also mean greater dependency. If one day Garmin shifts its strategic focus, what will become of TrainingPeaks? Those uncertainties are a reality coaches must confront.
05
Competitive landscape:
Algorithm-driven route vs. coach-driven route
Garmin is not unique. In 2025 Strava acquired Runna and The Breakaway, adding AI training plans into its 150 million–user app. Runna focuses on delivering personalized training plans for runners, while The Breakaway drills down into cycling training content. Strava’s goal is clear: when users open the app they should get “good enough” training advice without hiring a coach.
The two strategies diverge sharply: Strava is betting that a “good enough” algorithm can replace coaches, using data and AI to serve massive numbers of users—pursuing scale, low barriers and wide coverage. TrainingPeaks, by contrast, believes human coaches are the core product and that software’s role is to empower coaches, not bypass them. Although both sit in the training-guidance category, they have fundamentally different views on where the value lies.
Behind this is the most important battle over types of data. Activity data can only tell you what an athlete “did”—how far they ran, how long they rode, how high their heart rate was—but it can’t tell you what they were “instructed to do” or explain “why” a particular session was prescribed. TrainingPeaks’ 26 years of archives record what coaches instructed, whether athletes actually completed it, and how performance evolved in the following weeks—and those records are compatible with watches and bike computers from all brands.
Pure activity data can teach a model an athlete’s behavioral patterns, whereas TrainingPeaks’ data can teach a model a coach’s decision logic and its effectiveness. The difference is like reading a game score versus seeing a player’s thought process. That latter material is exactly what can fix Garmin users’ longstanding “training status” misclassifications—like inexplicable “Unproductive” judgments. Garmin used to have to buy this kind of analysis from Firstbeat; now it owns the most valuable data source for training those models.
For hardware and software rivals such as Coros and Wahoo, the landscape has changed: they now compete not only on hardware but against a competitor that owns an industry-standard coaching platform. For neutral platforms like TrainerRoad, Intervals.icu and Final Surge, a big-tech acquisition may actually make “neutrality” more valuable.
06
The future of AI coaching:
Expanding the market rather than replacing human coaches
TrainingPeaks’ archive—the training records coaches built by hand—will become the cornerstone for Garmin’s AI coach models. The deepest implication of this deal is that coaches are both TrainingPeaks’ primary customers and the producers of the data Garmin needs to build its own coaching software.
Some form of AI coach is the likely direction of development; it will be trained on the accumulated experience of human coaches. A doomsday outcome in which machines fully replace human coaches is unlikely. The real role of AI coaches will be to segment the market, not to replace coaching wholesale.
Athletes who never intended to hire a human coach—self-coached runners, budget-conscious beginners, or people who want a bit of direction without deep, ongoing support—will for the first time get a genuinely decent option. That will expand the overall population accepting guidance rather than simply redividing the existing coaches’ pie.
More broadly, this could create a pipeline from AI coaching to human coaching, allowing those who try guidance and want more to eventually move to a human coach. Athletes who value accountability, trust, and personal-life factors that data can’t capture will still choose human coaches.
AI models will reach the “underserved” and low-end markets—segments that most established coaches weren’t targeting anyway. A mature coach’s annual fee is typically $2,000–$5,000 or higher; their clients need bespoke planning, deep communication and ongoing support. AI cannot replace the core value of that relationship.
But this isn’t all good news. Entry-level human coaches will be hit hardest. Their services—basic training plans, standardized periodization, simple data feedback—are closest to what a decent algorithm can now provide cheaply. Ironically, the data training that algorithm often relies on comes from these coaches’ own uploaded work.
How Garmin prices and positions the AI tier—whether it is placed below human coaches as an “entry option” or offered as an assistant to boost coaches’ efficiency—will determine whether the deal “grows the whole pie” or “squeezes the survival space at the bottom.”
There’s also an ethical issue of informed consent. These data were generated within coach–athlete relationships, not intended as “feed” for model training. Do the coaches who upload plans and record athlete performances and feedback know their labor will be used to train an AI that might compete with them? Were coaches and athletes asked for consent? In other creative fields—visual art, writing, music—this question has already sparked real controversy and litigation. Endurance sports are unlikely to be immune.
TrainingPeaks’ leadership will frame this more gently. At the announcement, co-founder Dirk Friel called it “a doubling-down on the company’s original mission to empower human coaches.” That may be true, but it’s incomplete—because the same data that helps human coaches can also train an AI tier capable of replacing the cheapest coaches.
So, if you make a living as a coach, the real question isn’t “will machines replace my job,” but “am I doing the part of the work that machines cannot do.” This is about the artistry of coaching: intuition, empathy, split‑second judgment, and subtle reading of an athlete’s psychological state. Those things are not yet the domain of algorithms.
The emotional value a coach provides is also important.
07
Garmin's expanding footprint and long‑term outlook
Take a step back and look at the map Garmin is building. Recently, Garmin launched the screenless band Cirqa, positioned for around‑the‑clock passive monitoring and directly targeting Whoop. It’s a subscription‑centric pure software + low‑power hardware player. Cirqa has no screen, no GPS, and no notifications—it does one thing: capture physiological data 24/7. That signals Garmin is evolving from a “watch you wear during exercise” into an “always‑on body data platform.”
With TrainingPeaks added, Garmin is assembling a complete closed loop that covers hardware (running watches, bike computers, bands), passive monitoring (Cirqa’s around‑the‑clock data), and active training guidance (the TrainingPeaks coach platform + a future AI layer). A user could wake up to Cirqa’s sleep and recovery data, get daytime suggestions on the watch based on training load, and sync tomorrow’s workout from TrainingPeaks in the evening—Garmin is moving from “tool” to “service,” from selling hardware to selling continuous improvements in health and performance.
Image source: social media
This deal is not merely the purchase of an app; it’s the acquisition of a coach network, a data goldmine, and the lead in future endurance‑sports technology. For runners, it could mean smarter, more personalized training experiences—not a cold “inefficient” label but guidance with context, recommendations, and genuine coaching intelligence.
For coaches, this is an unprecedented opportunity. A channel to reach 40 million users is immense, but it’s also a challenge that requires careful thought: your data may be used to train your potential competitors, and whether you can deliver the value AI cannot replicate will determine your place in the new ecosystem.
The ultimate question isn’t “will machines replace me,” but “am I doing the part of the work that machines cannot do.” That is where the artistry of coaching lies.
[End‑of‑article interaction]
Text: PaoYe / Editor: CC
Image sources: PaoYe Big Bang, social media
Visuals: Max
