Garmin Acquires TrainingPeaks: Why? Some Thoughts & Answers

Garmin acquired TrainingPeaks (TP) and TrainHeroic on 22 July 2026. Around 120 staff in Louisville, Colorado, move across to Garmin, and the financial terms were not disclosed.

Peaksware Holdings, the parent company, sold only its two sports platforms. So, MakeMusic, Alfred Music and Fons stay where they are. That is a carve-out of the endurance assets rather than a sale of the whole business.

What comes with the deal

TrainingPeaks (TP) arrives as a coach subscription business first and an athlete app second. Coaches pay a base fee plus a charge for every athlete upgraded to Premium, so TP’s revenue rises with the size of a coach’s roster. Around that sits the training plan marketplace, with more than 5,000 plans written by named coaches, and Coach Match, which routes athletes to accredited coaches for a fee.

The platform also carries the highly respected WKO, a desktop analysis package sold as a one-off purchase to power-focused coaches, and TrainingPeaks Virtual, the indoor cycling platform bought as indieVelo in October 2024 and folded into the Premium subscription the following March. Garmin has owned Tacx since 2019 without ever shipping software to ride on. It now has both.

TrainingPeaks owns something less obvious as well. Training Stress Score, Normalized Power and Intensity Factor are registered trademarks of TrainingPeaks LLC. Wahoo, Hammerhead and TrainerRoad license those assets. Strava and Today’s Plan wrote their own metrics to avoid it. Garmin does not use them at all, because its Training Load runs on the EPOC modelling it acquired with Firstbeat in 2020. Garmin has bought the language of cycling training load from a position of not needing it, which sits oddly.

TrainHeroic covers the gym side, with programming tools, client management and a marketplace where strength coaches sell their work. It lands at an interesting time as Garmin is clearly pushing deeper into strength training, HYROX, and hybrid training more generally with new metrics and new sensors.

Most of that could have been built.

Structured training plans are not a hard engineering problem for a company of Garmin’s size. Neither is power-duration modelling. Garmin has had a decade to write adaptive plans and produced Daily Suggested Workouts and Garmin Coach instead. When it wanted physiological modelling, it bought a specialist and kept the team in Finland.

A company that wanted WKO badly enough would have written it. That particular asset list does not explain the acquisition.

Tacx, Firstbeat, MYLAPS, TrainingPeaks

Garmin bought Tacx in 2019 and Firstbeat in 2020. In July 2025, it acquired MYLAPS, the Dutch timing company behind BibTag and ProChip, and by the Q4 2025 earnings call Cliff Pemble was describing an athlete experience that runs from race discovery and registration through to results. Garmin now owns the trainer, the physiology model, the race timing, the coaching platform, and highly advanced analytics.

Those are the actions of a company seeking to dominate all aspects of training data and the products and services around it.

The platform nobody else can buy now. A defensive call.

Strava bought Runna in 2025 and this month put Runna’s race database inside the Strava app, with training plans built around the date you enter. Strava sits above the hardware and treats every brand the same, which is the position from which a complete cross-brand training stack could have been assembled on top of Garmin’s own sensors.

I have no evidence that Strava bid for TrainingPeaks. TrainingPeaks was the last independent coaching platform of any scale. Nobody can buy it now.

The data Garmin could not generate.

Garmin already holds athletes’ activity files at a scale nobody except Strava can match. Neither of them knows what high-end athletes were told to do, or by whom.

TrainingPeaks records what a qualified human coach prescribed, whether the athlete completed the session as written, and what the athlete did in the weeks that followed (i.e. compliance). That has been accumulating since 1999, across every brand of watch and head unit on the market.

An adaptive coaching model trained on Garmin Connect alone learns what people did. A model trained on the TrainingPeaks archive learns what a coach decided and whether the decision worked. Garmin could only have bought that capability once, from one company, and it has.

If Garmin really is concerned about training a future AI model, this is key data.

The seller’s position

Garmin has never disclosed terms for an acquisition of this kind, including MYLAPS and Firstbeat, so the silence on price says nothing either way. The structure says more. Peaksware separated two businesses of four and sold the pair exposed to AI while keeping the music education assets that are not.

I argued in January that third-party training platforms had stalled and that agentic AI would take the ground underneath them, and TrainingPeaks was named in that piece. Since then, LeCoach has been selling periodised, daily-adapting coaching at app prices, and Runalyze has opened its training database to language models over MCP. The training plan marketplace and the coaching workflow are the parts of TrainingPeaks that a competent 3rd party model can already approximate. The list of buyers for a risky business in that position is limited, likely only running to venture capitalists, Strava and Garmin.

What changes for coaches

TrainingPeaks has been commercially valuable because it treats every device equally, and its own About page still describes it as a neutral platform open to any coach’s methodology. A coach with thirty athletes on Polar, Coros, Wahoo and Suunto hardware has been able to run one calendar for all of them. The Firstbeat precedent suggests Garmin will keep third-party access open, because it continued licensing Firstbeat analytics to other manufacturers after 2020 while taking the newest work for itself first.

Every rival watch pushing a file into TrainingPeaks is now pushing that file into Garmin.

This is not a reason for the acquisition either. A very high percentage of these athletes will use Garmin devices, but an open platform is a requirement for the coach side of the platform to continue to prosper.

Why the acquisition

TrainingPeaks at fair value would not have come cheaply. Its staff roster and renowned market position are some of the factors supporting a sizeable valuation, and Garmin is one of only a small number of realistic buyers able to afford and use the full range of the company’s assets.

Against that, TrainingPeaks may have seen the writing on the wall for its training plan and coaching business, and indieVelo may not have performed as expected. When Garmin bought Firstbeat in 2020, I asked whether the seller’s hand had been forced and concluded that it probably had not been. I am less confident of that answer this time.

There may also be an opportunistic element here. What I do not accept is that Garmin has paid top dollar because it wants a high-end analytics platform or access to a slightly larger number of coaches. TrainingPeaks is competent in many areas, and all of that is a very nice to have.

The real reason for the acquisition, I think, is the compliance data for training a future AI model, and a second subscription asset to justify some flavour of Connect+.

What do you think?

Quick answers

Did Garmin buy TrainingPeaks?
Yes. Garmin announced on 22 July 2026 that it had acquired TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic from Peaksware Holdings. Around 120 staff in Louisville, Colorado join Garmin.

How much did Garmin pay for TrainingPeaks?
Garmin did not disclose the financial terms. Peaksware Holdings is privately held, and Garmin also withheld the price for MYLAPS in 2025 and Firstbeat in 2020.

Did Garmin buy all of Peaksware?
No. Garmin acquired TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic. Peaksware retains MakeMusic, Alfred Music and Fons, its music education businesses.

Does TrainingPeaks still work with Wahoo, Polar, Coros and Suunto devices?
Yes. Nothing announced on 22 July 2026 changes device compatibility. When Garmin acquired Firstbeat in 2020, it continued licensing the analytics to rival manufacturers, which is the closest precedent available.

Will my TrainingPeaks subscription price change?
No pricing change was announced. Coach Edition, athlete Premium and the per-athlete upgrade charge all continue as before. Garmin has not said whether TrainingPeaks will be folded into Connect+.

What happens to my coach?
Nothing was announced that affects coach accounts. Rosters, the training plan marketplace and Coach Match continue to operate.

Does Garmin now own WKO?
Yes. WKO is the TrainingPeaks desktop analysis package, sold as a one-off purchase, and it transfers with the business.

Does Garmin now own Training Stress Score and Normalized Power?
TSS, Training Stress Score, NP, Normalized Power, IF and Intensity Factor are registered trademarks of TrainingPeaks LLC and pass to Garmin with the acquisition. Garmin does not use them in its own products, because Garmin Training Load runs on Firstbeat EPOC modelling.

What is TrainHeroic?
TrainHeroic was founded in 2012 and is based in Louisville, Colorado. It supplies strength and conditioning software for programming gym sessions, managing clients in person and remotely, and selling training programmes through a coach marketplace.

What happens to TrainingPeaks Virtual?
TrainingPeaks Virtual is the indoor cycling platform bought as indieVelo in October 2024 and included with any Premium subscription. It runs on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and Apple TV, and works with Bluetooth FTMS, ANT+, Wahoo and Tacx trainers. Garmin has owned Tacx since 2019.

Is TrainingPeaks now a Garmin-only platform?
No. TrainingPeaks has operated as a neutral platform since the late 1990s, and no change to device support has been announced.

When did Garmin buy MYLAPS?
Garmin acquired MYLAPS in July 2025. The Dutch company, headquartered in Haarlem with more than 200 staff, supplies the BibTag and ProChip timing systems used at mass participation races.

Source: Garmin newsroom

Last Updated on 22 July 2026 by the5krunner