Final Surge – CIQ Plans and *NEW* Structured Workouts

Final Surge (FS) is an online platform for triathletes, runners and cyclists to plan, record and analyze their efforts. It has some cool coach-specific functionality as well as being suitable for individual athletes who want to organise their own training or purchase and follow one of FS’s hosted online plans – for example Mark Allen’s 70.3 triathlon plan starts at $149/month.

That’s all ‘very nice’ and I hadn’t been tempted to look much more beyond that until recently.

But now comes some cool stuff…

FS have just announced a Garmin CIQ app for structured workouts and I have been chatting to Tim (@FS) around that and was impressed with some of the things they are just about to implement and which you can use now in beta.

There’s probably nothing that new with the ability to use their platform to buy online plans and then use their calendar to plan your season and/or lead up to a key race. It’s nice you even get sent an email reminder of the workouts you are next scheduled to perform.

The cool, new thing is their Garmin CIQ app that supports their complex, structured workouts. FS’s structured workouts essentially replicate the Garmin Workout engine AND ADD IN a few new bits. Thus you can create something like this which the FS CIQ app will then sync to your Garmin watch and then you can follow the workout as normal on your watch.

If you’ve been using Garmin Connect functionality then you might be having a ‘So what?’ moment however..

1. If you’ve been using Training Peaks you might like how FS implement the ability to have specific power values as the high/lows for your workout stages
2. If you use Wahoo then you may have been syncing workouts down from TP. That’s fine if you have a premium TP account but if you just want to create a structured workout on TP for your Wahoo Element then you can only do that for ‘today’.
   • Tim@FS is working on auto syncing between FS and Wahoo’s Elemnt. There is no link at present.
   • It looks like FS will be a free way to create and schedule your season’s BIKE workouts for WAHOO ELEMNT
3. FS structured workout functionality is ‘free’. You can schedule your season and sync for free. FS make their money from athletes if you buy a plan…fair enough
4. There’s some other stuff I’m going to cover in a separate post in a bit more detail 😉

The FS platform is fairly extensive and I haven’t got the time to go into it in detail today. Here are a few screenshots to give you a flavour of SOME of the new functionality that has been created around the CIQ app. There is also a video and some links below.

Note:

1. The CIQ app for structured workouts works NOW. However you will need to use the BETA platform as of 29/12/2018
2. It’s in beta so don’t expect everything to be 100%. Having said that once you get the workout to the watch it seems OK to me from the limited testing I’ve done so far.
3. I added the FS CIQ app via Garmin Express. However all the sync’ing of workouts is undertaken via your link to Garmin Connect MOBILE. You WILL need your device sync’d to your smartphone. Although FS will, instead, allow you to export a FIT file workout which you can then import into your Garmin (or other) device.
4. The FS platform can be linked to STRAVA and GARMIN CONNECT to get your completed workout data.

Links:

1. CIQ app on Garmin.com

2. Final Surge BETA Platform