Garmin coach was introduced almost a year ago relatively quietly. Even at its launch it offered tantalisingly ‘adaptive’ training plans. Potentially it would re-schedule workouts during your ever-changing week at work and maybe even adapt an individual workout on-the-fly should your run start off either too fast or too slow.
I had a look at the time and partly followed one of the plans to check the sanity fo the recommendations and to see that if it really did adapt to what I was doing…or not doing.
The initial plans on offer seemed somewhat limited, only covering 5k training plans for people performing up to 25:00/5k. I wasn’t all that convinced that the plans were truly adapting either. Clearly, Garmin was never only going to only keep that level of plan and I expected to see over time a gradual increase in race distances covered and ability levels catered for, perhaps even including a triathlon plan or two.
Well that has started to happen (29 April) and here are the headline changes showing the scope of all plans covered
- Running – Garmin Coach extended to cover new distances of HM and 10k
- Running – Garmin Coach extended to cover higher ability levels to those running up to 7:00/mi which is approximately 21:00/5k, 42/10k, 1:32:00/HM.
- Running – Standard (non-adaptive) plans added to cover higher abilities, training up to 7 workouts/week and distances up to Marathon (Levels 1, 2 and 3)
- Cycling – Standard (non-adaptive) plans to cover Century, Metric Century, Gran Fondo, TT, MTB and ‘Race’ (Levels 1, 2 and 3)
- Triathlon – Standard (non-adaptive) plans to cover Sprint and Olympic distances. (Level 1 and 2)
- Supported Models: Initially the GARMIN COACH adaptive plans only worked on Vívoactive 3, Forerunner 645 and Forerunner 935. But the list now includes Fenix 5 (and 5 Plus), Chronos, MARQ, 945, 245 and Forerunner 45/45S
You can access them online through your CONNECT account and they appear to be free. Enjoy ! although having said that perhaps only the GARMIN COACH plans might appear on CONENCT MOBILE
One of the great benefits of following these types of plans is that the structured workouts are sent to your watch or bike computer with sufficient instructions to follow the plan through calendar scheduling on your watch and in-workout cues and alerts.
Thanks to: @BrianS, @ColdBeer
More Info: Garmin
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