TrainerRoad & Zwift Integration Finally Arrives: Full Details

The much-awaited Zwift+TrainerRoad integration has finally arrived, allowing you to execute TrainerRoad structured workouts directly within Zwift. And while this isn’t the first Zwift integration we’ve seen over the last 9 months, it’s the first one to include a new feature that allows you to score your workout, which is sent back to TrainerRoad. This was a key feature for TrainerRoad, where athletes always grade their workout performance after they complete (or fail) the workout.

As a long-time user of both TrainerRoad and Zwift individually, I’ve been using the new integration lately on my TrainerRoad workouts within Zwift, so I’ve got a reasonable handle on how it works. Let’s dive into it.

The Key Details:

At its core, this is a pretty straightforward integration. Essentially, you’ll link your TrainerRoad and Zwift accounts together, and TrainerRoad will automatically push scheduled workouts to Zwift (today + tomorrow’s workouts). Further, if you add a workout to your TrainerRoad calendar manually, it’ll instantly update it on Zwift (kinda fun to watch, it takes a few seconds and happens live).

The underpinnings of this integration is the newer Zwift structure workout API that the company announced last spring, and started implementing last summer/fall. That’s since been used by numerous platforms, including Final Surge, Xert, and more. However, the big difference here is that you’ll now get a post-workout survey within Zwift, something that TrainerRoad considered critical to the integration.

So first, let’s backup briefly and look at how it works. First up, to integrate your account, you’ll link them up within the connections area of TrainerRoad:

That whole process takes less than a minute.

Next, you’ll need something on your calendar in TrainerRoad. This can be workouts from a TrainerRoad training plan, or manually assigned workouts to calendar days, such as this:

In the event there isn’t a workout scheduled, then TrainerRoad will stick a 1-hour workout on there automatically, based on the best thing it thinks you should be doing, according to its algorithms.

Once they’re on there, you’ll instantly see them in Zwift in a few spots. First, is on the home screen, like so:

But in addition, you can also tap on the ‘Workouts’, then ‘Custom’ area, to see the ‘TrainerRoad’ folder, which will dynamically update as you add a workout into it (you don’t even have to log out):

Here’s an example of that on a different day:

Once you open that workout, you’ll see the details on it. Note that your FTP is *not* synced from TrainerRoad to Zwift automatically, so changes that TrainerRoad does to your FTP via its AI won’t automatically carry over. That said, this only impacts the colored bar zones. The actual value for each block/chunk, is determined by TrainerRoad ahead of time.

With that, you simply execute the workout just like any other structured workout in Zwift, as seen here. Notably however, the structured workouts are no longer rounded in Zwift to the nearest 5w, but instead, are precisely at the wattage TrainerRoad sends (like this 389w here):

In the event that the workout has written instructions, you’ll see those too.

Then, at the end of the workout, you’ll get a survey, which has you rate the feel of the workout, on a scale from 1-10:

That, along with your completed data, is sent back to TrainerRoad. For example, in this workout here (below), you’ll notice it’ll show that it came from Zwift (little icon at left on Feb 3rd), the Zwift map (Feb 3rd), as well as not only the workout details but also the rating (RPE: Moderate):

From there, TrainerRoad will simply do its thing normally, adjusting your upcoming calendar accordingly depending on the settings you have in TrainerRoad.

Note that only ‘Indoor’ workouts on your calendar will appear on Zwift to complete, thus, ones tagged as ‘Outdoors’ won’t, unless you toggle it from Outdoors to Indoors.

TrainerRoad has a massive compilation of FAQ’s listed here, diving into far more details than you can shake a stick at. Also somewhat notable is they’ll be doing a Zwift group ride on February 15th with both the CEO of Zwift & TrainerRoad together. You can clickity-click on that link to add it to your Zwift schedule.

That said, one minor thing that’s a bummer is that TrainerRoad isn’t sending structured run workouts to Zwift (for those on a triathlon plan). That’s because within TrainerRoad, the workouts aren’t actually properly structured. Instead, it’s more like a notepad list. Thus, these workouts don’t get sent to any platform as properly structured (including Garmin). While the company has long talked about it, that talk has been happening for a few years now.

Wrap-Up:

Now what’s funny is that undoubtedly some will be unclear about why anyone would have both accounts for Zwift and TrainerRoad. And the answer is frankly quite simple: Zwift’s structured training plans as a platform, kinda suck. With ‘kinda’ being the most polite way of putting it. But more than that, platforms like TrainerRoad (and Xert, Final Surge, etc…) are more than just an indoor training app, instead, they’re full coaching solutions for many athletes. The coach is an algorithm, but one that works exceptionally well for a lot of athletes.

Yet concurrently, a lot of those same athletes want the social element of riding on Zwift. And so, over the years, countless athletes basically ride both platforms concurrently. It’s a bit of a technical mess for many, but it works. This entire integration solves that. It makes it so that you only need to open up the Zwift game for the riding part, and then open up TrainerRoad for the planning part (the other part of the day). That’s pretty logical. Of course, that does mean you’re “double paying”, but that’s not really what this is about.

After all, in this context, people see the “cost” of TrainerRoad more akin to that of a coaching service (for which, this cost would be absurdly low), and they see Zwift as simply the thing they ride within for entertainment.

It’ll be interesting to see the relationship grow here over time. Obviously, as we saw today, this wasn’t just another integration like each of the other platforms added over the past 9 months. Instead, it was additive. And likewise, I don’t remember any other dual-CEO launch group rides happening either. So it wouldn’t surprise me to see deeper integrations down the road. And as a long-time paying member of both platforms, I’m looking forward to that.

Thanks for reading!

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