If you’ve just signed up for a TrainingPeaks account, the next – really important – step is to get your watch and other training apps to communicate with your training calendar. Set up correctly, your device/s can receive your structured workouts and send your completed workouts back to your calendar, where they will get magically matched up with your planned workouts.

1. Which Devices Should You Connect ?

You’re going to want to connect all your primary data sources to TrainingPeaks: your watch, your bike computer, your trainer software, anything that you use to start-stop-save your workouts.

Because there are too many products and manufacturers to go through the steps to connect each device individually, I’m going to send you to the TrainingPeaks Help Center article on compatible devices, which will send you to precise instructions for connecting each of your devices.

If you use an indoor trainer app such as Zwift or TrainerRoad, you can easily sync those workouts by connecting your two accounts. In Zwift, you’ll go to my.zwift.com/settings/connections to do this, and for TrainerRoad you’ll go to Account Profile -> Ride Sync. In both cases you’ll need to enter your TrainingPeaks username and password to allow the app to upload your workouts.

2. When Should You Connect?

Devices that operate on your wrist or on your bike without constant Internet connection will need to be manually synced (via Cellular, WiFi, or USB cable) upon completion of the workout – typically this is not much more than the push of a button. Apps that operate from your phone, tablet, laptop, etc typically will auto-sync once the workout has saved.

3. Pushing Structured Workouts to Your Devices

If your coach or training plan provides structured workouts (workouts with blue graphs showing varying effort levels), you can export the workout steps to most Garmins, the Wahoo ELEMNT or BOLT, and most indoor training apps. Garmin will find today’s structure workout via Garmin Connect Sync. Wahoo syncs structure workouts using the Wahoo ELEMNT Companion app. Further information about importing structured workouts into Zwift and TrainerRoad can be found in our Zwift Primer and TrainerRoad Primer.

4. Anything Else?

Just because your workouts will automatically upload to TrainingPeaks doesn’t absolve you from looking at the data! You should always review your workouts after completion, to confirm that you did the prescribed workout and to see how your execution lines up with the workout description. Also, you should always add a post-workout comment for your coach!