Polar’s TrainingPeaks Structured Workout Integration Goes Live: Here’s How it Works

After announcing their planned TrainingPeaks planned workout integration last fall, Polar has turned it on in public beta this morning, allowing you to receive your planned structured workouts automatically on your watch. These workouts will sync from your TrainingPeaks calendar, to Polar Flow, and then into your Polar watch. Impressively, Polar has enabled this on just about every watch and wearable they’ve made in the last decade or so, with no firmware update required on any of those devices. In other words, all you need to do is reconnect your TrainingPeaks & Polar Flow accounts together, and you’re off and running (or riding, or swimming, or….).

So, let’s dig into it.

Getting Re-Connected:

Now, the first thing you’ll need to do is connect (or reconnect) your TrainingPeaks to Polar Flow accounts. In my case, I initially connected these two nearly a decade ago, back in 2017, but this now requires additional permissions to access and sync the structured workouts, thus the need to reconnect. Shame, I liked my 2017 date (but you can see the reconnection option there). You can access this panel either from the Polar Flow website, or, via the Polar Flow app and then into Settings > Partners > Connect.

You’ll tappity-tap a few times, which takes you through the usual authorization prompts we’ve all become familiar with. Once on the Polar side, and once on the TrainingPeaks side, validating both parts of the hookup are happy:

In the midst of all that, you’ll also get a quick overview of what’s syncing, as well as a link to the Polar Flow Support/FAQ page about the entire scene. This details what watches, target types, and more, are synced.

First, starting with watches, this supports the following watches:

Grit X, Grit X Pro, Grit X2 Pro, Ignite, Ignite 2, Ignite 3, M200, M400, M430, M460, Pacer, Pacer Pro, Unite, Vantage M, Vantage M2, Vantage M3, Vantage V, Vantage V2, Vantage V3

Next, and most notably, Polar stresses that you’ll need/want to sync your zones manually between TrainingPeaks and Polar Flow. This is like all other implementations from other companies, in the workouts are pushed based (usually) on specific zones in your TrainingPeaks account (e.g. heart rate Zone 4), and thus if your TrainingPeaks zones differ from your Polar Flow zones, then you’ll be doing the wrong zones on your watch.

And lastly, you need to ensure things are actually on your calendar. You can’t merely have workouts in your TrainingPeaks library, but they need to be actively on your calendar. Again, this is identical to how the TrainingPeaks integrations work with all the other platforms/companies too.

Doing the Workouts:

Now, with all that setup, let’s walk through how this works. First up, I dragged a few workouts onto my TrainingPeaks calendar. This included a run, and two rides. You a can see these here on TrainingPeaks:

Likewise, if you look at your calendar on Polar Flow, you’ll now see those there too:

Now, when it comes to which workout types Polar syncs, they’ve even made a handy table on all this. Again, I’ll give Polar credit in that when they do finally launch something, they usually do a pretty darn good job of properly documenting it. And this is once again one of those scenarios.

They noted that Polar has more sports profiles than TrainingPeaks does (and specifically more importantly, Polar has more custom HR zones than TrainingPeaks does). Thus, that’s something to keep in mind (whereas most other watches only have a single HR zone for a given sport profile type).

“TrainingPeaks has fewer workout types than Flow and does not, for example, separate indoor cycling from outdoor cycling. If you only do indoor cycling in Flow, we recommend to have also the regular cycling sport profile in your favorites, with custom zones turned on. This way the indoor cycling training target can also have structured training guidance in your Polar watch and Flow.

The same goes for sports like trail running, road cycling and freestyle XC skiing. Have the main sports as favorites for running, cycling and skiing as well, with Custom zone settings turned on.”

Said differently, if you have sport profiles for bike indoor, mountain biking, outdoor biking, etc… double-check that they don’t all have unique/different custom HR zones on the Polar Flow side. Same goes for running/etc…. By default, they’ll be set to ‘default’ zones, but again, you might just want to double-check.

Next, Polar says they’ll sync the next 30 days (site), and 14 days (watch):

“We import all planned trainings from the current day and 30 days forward to Flow and the user can see these on their calendar. Our recent watches allow the user to see training targets that are planned for this and the next week so at most 14 days.”

With all that sorted, I synced my watch – and was good to go (well, actually, I synced my watch with Polar Flowsync on my computer first via USB, and it oddly isn’t syncing these structured workouts, though when I then tried again via the slower phone sync, it did).

In any event, if I crack open my watch and tap ‘Start Training’, the very first thing it’ll show me (before even selecting the sport mode), is today’s planned workout:

I can then see the details of that workout immediately:

When I select ‘start’, it then opens up the sport menu, which lets me select the sport type (running in this case), and shows it listed as planned:

From there, once I start the workout, I see the workout phases/targets listed. Additionally, I can also open up that middle-button menu to skip a portion of the workout (like my very boring 15-minute warm-up), and see any target/workout notes:

At which point I could go through completing the workout, and later it’ll upload it to both Polar Flow, and TrainingPeaks. On the TrainingPeaks side, it’ll link it automatically to the planned workout. I’ll knock that out later today for an indoor cycling workout, but I’ve first gotta get my bike unpacked from my trip last week. All of that linking is pretty straightforward and normal though within TrainingPeaks, and again, has been happening for years.

Finally, if you want to access upcoming workouts (beyond today), you can do so from the dashboard view titled “This week”, and then scroll down from there till you see the upcoming workouts for the week ahead:

And even, the week after that if you want.

Wrap-Up:

Overall, this is a hugely important step for Polar. One that is well beyond long overdue (other companies started adding this back in the 2017ish timeframe), but hey, better later than never! Overall, once you’ve got it setup, it seems to work well enough. Certainly, Polar has a bit more complexity than some of their competitors on the zone side, which up till now has largely been seen as an asset (by those who use it that way).

Still, at its core, this seems to work pretty well, and is pretty much exactly what people have been asking for. I don’t think this is something that’s going to draw a ton of people to Polar, since all the other platforms already have it. But, it will most certainly keep some people from leaving Polar. And depending on one’s perspective, that can be just as important at this point.

Keep in mind that it’s technically a beta at this point. Polar says that all of the pieces of the integration are in-place today, so this is more about ensuring there aren’t any unexpected/unknown issues before considering it a production release.

With that, thanks for reading!

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