TrainingPeaks Virtual is an indoor-cycling and e-racing platform that, as the name suggests, enables you to train and race in a virtual world.
Like other contenders in this increasingly competitive market, you can enjoy an array of cycling options, from group rides through to structured workouts.
But, says TrainingPeaks, it has several standouts that will better serve serious cyclists than its rivals…
What is TrainingPeaks Virtual?
As the name suggests, TrainingPeaks Virtual is a virtual indoor cycling app from the team that arguably made training by power the omnipresent force it is today. More specifically, it’s the app formerly known as ‘indieVelo’, which TrainingPeaks acquired in the autumn of 2024.
(Chapeau to founder of indieVelo and former Zwift freelancer George Gilbert, who founded and ran the app solo, creating an impressive community base soon after launching in June 2023. Part of its appeal was its price: at the time, it was free.)
Similar to the likes of Zwift and MyWhoosh, it simulates virtual worlds and real-world routes. Again, similar to the competition, you can join virtual rides and races, plus follow structured workouts.
You enjoy all of this after choosing your avatar, plus accoutrements (bike, helmet, hair colour, hair type and so on) from a growing list of options.
How does TrainingPeaks Virtual differ from other indoor cycling apps?
Its major selling point is its integration with the TrainingPeaks platform. Yes, you can upload TrainingPeaks workouts to the likes of Zwift, but this seamlessly syncs your TrainingPeaks indoor rides to TrainingPeaks Virtual, and vice versa.
A huge swathe of data is then fed back to your TrainingPeaks account, as it would be for an outdoor ride, including next-level metrics such as torque (Nm) and, specific to TrainingPeaks, TSS. For the unfamiliar, this stands for Training Stress Score, which takes into account the intensity and duration of a workout to arrive at a composite score of workload.
Regular Zwifters will be aware of a similar metric, ZSS, aka Zwift Stress Score. Ostensibly, this achieves the same thing, but is focused solely on indoor riding.
TrainingPeaks is not only for riders. It’s incredibly popular – and presumably lucrative – for coaches, many of whom use it as the platform to offer their training plans and advice. With TrainingPeaks Virtual, coaches can monitor and chat with athletes in real-time to optimise their workouts and races.
TrainingPeaks Virtual also features a custom physics engine, which is claimed to offer better power accuracy, more credible racing and more realistic riding, including drafting, cornering, braking and line choice.
While it simulates real-world riding via a peloton’s worth of avatars, it clearly defines itself as a serious training tool, and intentionally doesn’t include the gamification that’s seen so vividly in Zwift. There are no power-ups and exaggerated descents here.
Instead, the graphics are subtler and more athlete-focused, with features such as wind direction influencing race strategy. As one reviewer commented, this is “like Zwift but for grown-ups”.
What do you need to use TrainingPeaks Virtual?
As ever with modern-day indoor riding, you need a mix of hardware, software and connectivity to tap into TrainingPeaks Virtual. Smart trainers and smart bikes are the ideal, although you can get away with a traditional turbo trainer and a power meter.
You’ll lose many of the features that make contemporary e-riding and e-racing so appealing with the latter, though, such as the trainer changing its resistance automatically to simulate climbs and descents.
TrainingPeaks Virtual supports Bluetooth and ANT+ devices such as heart rate monitors and cadence sensors, although it’s worth noting that Zwift Click and Play controllers aren’t compatible with the platform.
That also rules out virtual shifting as things stand, so you won’t be able to use a trainer with a Zwift Cog on TrainingPeaks Virtual outside of ERG mode.
Of course, you need a suitable smart device to run the app, too, which is a separate download from TrainingPeaks. The minimum OS specs are Windows 10 (64-bit) or Mac OS 11 (Big Sur) for desktop. Apple TV, mobile phones and tablets are supported, although it’s recommended that you have around 3.5GB RAM to optimise the experience.
You’ll need a TrainingPeaks Premium account to use TrainingPeaks Virtual ($11.25 a month when billed annually or $134.99 per year), although this is a boon for riders who already have it.
The two pieces of software sync, so TrainingPeaks Virtual naturally extracts vital riding information from your Premium account. This includes your functional threshold power (FTP), which is vital when setting training zones, plus the usuals of height and weight.
If you haven’t used TrainingPeaks before, you can undertake an FTP test within the virtual software to begin training smartly.
While riding, you’re relayed power information, plus heart rate and cadence details (if you're measuring), while it monitors your progress throughout, such as how many intervals are remaining and how you’re coping relative to the session target.
Hover your mouse over the bottom of the screen and you’ll enjoy additional controls, such as changing the view, taking a screenshot and sending a chat message. For the many thousands who’ve used it, the user interface is similar to Zwift.
Highlighting its appeal to serious roadies, you’re also given esoteric but potentially useful details such as the power balance between your right and left legs, and how smooth and effective your pedal stroke is.
Workouts are defaulted to ERG mode – where the software automatically adjusts your trainer’s resistance to hold a specific target power output, no matter gear or cadence choice – but you can disable this.
What courses are on TrainingPeaks Virtual?
There are plenty but, understandably for software that’s not much more than two years old, nowhere near the level of the likes of Zwift.
The bread-and-butter is a ‘free ride’ upon an imaginary island. You start on the east side and choose where to ride from there. You can also select from the list of routes on said island that cover different distances and altitudes, from ‘A Bit of Everything’ (a 16.9-mile loop featuring 1,544ft of climbing) to ‘Upper Climb’ (a 6.2-mile loop with a vertiginous 2,28ft of climbing).
You can also ride iconic built-in real routes with the GPXplore feature. The sextet available on launch in October 2025 were the Passo dello Stelvio (Italy); Alpe d’Huez (France); Koppenberg (Belgium); Sa Calobra (Mallorca, Spain); Flagstaff Mountain (Colorado, USA); and Parc du Mont-Royal Circuit (Quebec, Canada).
You ride the topography of these climbs – so, identical distance, elevation and gradients – although the scenery in the virtual world isn’t an exact photographic match.
The most recent update (at time of writing, mid-October) is the My Routes feature.
This works by uploading a GPX file of the route you intend to ride virtually from a third-party app, such as Strava or Garmin, to your TrainingPeaks account.
Then, when you launch your TrainingPeaks Virtual account, go to the Events icon and your route will appear in the ‘Route Type’ section. You schedule your ride at least five minutes ahead and then, when the time comes, click in and away you go.
You have the option for the event to be open to other riders, but you can also have bots join to fill out the start pen if no one bothers or you fancy some riding time alone.
The virtual scenery is generic from the software’s library, so lacks the improved immersion of Rouvy’s Route Creator (where you upload video footage of your route to Rouvy, which turns the real footage into augmented reality), but it’s still a notable feature for course reconnaissance of sportive routes, which often feature GPX downloads of their parcours on their respective websites.
TrainingPeaks says it can handle up to 25MB files, which should work for most courses, albeit GPX files can vary quite a bit because the size depends on factors such as recording frequency. TrainingPeaks found a GPX file for the 250km-plus Milan-San Remo classic that is about 1.5MB, though, so you should be good for most rides you’d want to do indoors on a trainer.
Does TrainingPeaks Virtual offer structured training plans and workouts?
Absolutely. This is where TrainingPeaks feels its USP lies – and it certainly has a strong case. As long as you or a coach have a scheduled indoor workout in the calendar of your TrainingPeaks account, it appears automatically inside TrainingPeaks Virtual.
In TrainingPeaks Virtual, you can tap into the full gamut of workouts, including recovery, endurance and tempo rides, whether these are standalone sets or as part of a training plan, of which there are thousands on TrainingPeaks.
You can then take a deep analytical dive into the data. As a top-level example, TrainingPeaks employs a performance-management model based on Banister’s impulse-response model, which was designed in 1991 to predict an athlete’s performance ability from past training. You might know it as TRIMP (short for TRaining IMPulse).
That provides the foundations for TrainingPeaks’ training-stress balance, or TSB.
It does this by subtracting your acute training load (ATL), that assesses short-term fatigue off a seven-day rolling average of TSS, from your chronic training load (CTL), which reflects your overall fitness and is based on a 42-day rolling average of TSS (see above).
A positive TSB, as you would seek after a taper, is a sign of flushing out fatigue for form and freshness, while a negative TSB means you’re tired (hopefully as a result of lots of high-quality training).
Other advanced metrics that data from TrainingPeaks Virtual feeds into TrainingPeaks include decoupling of wattage and heart rate to measure aerobic drift as you develop endurance, and the power duration curve to visualise your peak power output over time.
How much does TrainingPeaks Virtual cost?
TrainingPeaks Virtual is bundled as part of TrainingPeaks Premium, which starts from $134.99 per year (when billed annually).
That makes it one of the more affordable paid-for indoor cycling apps on the market, plus you can tap into the data-rich TrainingPeaks app.
The price rises to $49 per quarter or $19.95 per month
If you want to try it out before committing to a subscription, TrainingPeaks Virtual has its monthly ‘Free 4 All Tuesday’, which makes the app free-to-use on the first Tuesday of every month.
Signing up for a free ‘basic’ TrainingPeaks account also gives you access to a 14-day trial of the full TrainingPeaks Premium service – which includes access to TrainingPeaks Virtual.
Can I join a group ride on TrainingPeaks Virtual?
You can, either by joining Pacebots' scheduled group rides (they’ve just signed former pro Adam Blythe to host rides, for example) or creating your own.
To keep riders as one and working in harmony, TrainingPeaks Virtual employs what it calls a ‘rubber-band effect’. That means those ahead of the main group will endure a force reeling them back towards the group, while those chasing behind will enjoy a force edging them back toward the group.
You can do group rides without it, but that decision is down to the group-ride organiser.
While stronger riders can generate a higher power output than weaker riders, both groups will have their speeds impacted by the rubber-band effect to keep them riding as one. It’s group riding at its most democratic.
That said, your positioning within the group is still important due to the app’s realism-focused physics engine, which means you can’t have two riders in the same place at the same time. So, you can’t just let the game move you around the pack in idle fashion. Instead, you need to think about when to add effort and how much to maintain a good position in the draft.
According to TrainingPeaks Virtual, “The AI algorithms for rider positioning automatically find gaps in the peloton, seek out the draft from other riders, form echelons to protect from the wind, and so on.
"You’ll need to pay careful attention to subtle changes in your power output to maintain or change your positioning within a group, just as you would when riding outdoors.”
An on-screen indicator bar shows how much of a drafting benefit – or otherwise – you’re enjoying, depending on factors such as your speed, the wind direction, distance and angles to the riders ahead, plus the amount of wake that the riders ahead give off based on their size and speed.
We told you it was aimed at the serious roadie.
Can I race on TrainingPeaks Virtual?
Yes. It’s easily achieved via the Events tab, filtering by race and hopping on.
There are several options for e-racing, including scratch races, where the first rider past the line wins; time trials and points races.
There are also omnium events, comprising multiple stages with cumulative scoring; elimination races, where the last rider each lap is eliminated until one remains; and team or club events.
In September 2025, TrainingPeaks announced a four-year partnership with USA Cycling to establish TrainingPeaks Virtual as its official virtual platform.
As part of the collaboration, Echelon Racing Promotions, the organisation behind the Echelon Racing League, will serve as the event promoter to host the league’s sixth season on TrainingPeaks Virtual from 1 November 2025 to 1 February 2026.
USA Cycling was surely tempted by indieVelo founder George Gilbert’s palmares, because Gilbert formerly worked in e-sports governance for Zwift with the aim of spotting cheats in the professional e-racing ranks.
Features Gilbert developed for this purpose are integrated into TrainingPeaks Virtual to keep its racing fair and realistic.
As well as pre-event checks and requirements (which differ depending on the level of event you’re signing up for), TrainingPeaks Virtual also offers real-time performance verification checks during events.
Riders whose data indicates they may be “gaining an unfair advantage” over competitors – knowingly or otherwise – may be removed to prevent them affecting the outcome of races.
Evolution of TrainingPeaks
TrainingPeaks was founded in 1999. It soon grew in popularity thanks to its ability to plan and refine a cyclist’s training, ostensibly by taking the information emanating from power meters and turning that data into actionable advice.
Since then, it has bought a number of start-ups in search of strengthening the offering, including race-predictive software Best Bike Split. So, it comes as no surprise that the Colorado-based company has moved into the popular virtual-riding sector.
It’s perhaps a surprise it took TrainingPeaks so long to slice off a piece of the potentially lucrative pie.
