8 Reasons to Coach With TrainingPeaks
Hi there. Welcome to this week's episode of endurance coaching business. This episode is brought to you by Training Tilt which is an all in one endurance coaching platform where you can run your website, onboard your clients, coach your athletes, analyze their data and sell stuff, membership plans, products, training plans, all from your own branded site. So meanwhile, since the last episode I had this clever idea of creating a blog post called eight reasons to coach with training peaks. Obviously training peaks is a competitor so I don't necessarily think you should be coaching with training peaks.
Speaker 1:I think you'd be better off coaching with training too. But then that's all dependent on what sort of business you have anyway and what you're looking to achieve with your business. Anyway, my clever idea was to write a sarcastic post about and say that it's eight reasons to coach with training peaks. But actually in a clever way it would be the eight reasons why you shouldn't be coaching with training peaks. Anyway I started to record me actually doing that episode, reading out this blog in this sarcastic way and realized that I can't really I can't really do it that way around.
Speaker 1:So I'm gonna leave the post as is. I'm not gonna take the post down now. But I realized that I'm not comfortable speaking that way, so maybe I shouldn't become comfortable writing that way. And it was a bit of a strategy that I was hoping to maybe cause a bit of a stir or whatever to make people think about these things. And anyway, I'm not gonna undo that work.
Speaker 1:I'm just gonna go with it, but I'm not gonna read it out that way because I just don't feel comfortable doing that. But I guess it came from a bit of a moment of frustration that I couldn't convince enough TrainingPeaks coaches that maybe TrainingPeaks isn't as good for their business as they think it is and that at TrainingTool we focus a lot more on the needs of coaches whereas at TrainingPeaks they don't really focus so much on the coaching business because they sell things directly to athletes anyway. They do a bunch of other stuff as well that isn't necessarily in the best interests of coaches, but that's the business model that they've chosen. There's nothing wrong with it. There's nothing illegal about it.
Speaker 1:It's all clear. They're not pretending they're doing something else than doing the other thing. But anyway, of my ideas about whether or not that's a good idea to write that sort of post. But anyway, let's go. So I've got eight reasons here.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna spin these back to the real reason. So they're not reasons why to use training peaks, but they're actually reasons you might want to consider a coaching centric platform like training tilt. So reason number one, you don't want to just be another coach in the system. So the vast majority of coaches, endurance coaches use training peaks. The experience of the coach and the athlete while inside training peaks is all centered around training peaks.
Speaker 1:Sure you can add your own logo in the header but if your colors don't match their colors it all looks out of place. And it's like jammed into somewhere. So it's not really central to the platform. And then other things around branding, like all the emails that you get, like notifications. Unless you looked carefully and knew you would never even know who the coach of that athlete is.
Speaker 1:It's basically all about TrainingPeaks. Number two is that TrainingPeaks runs a marketplace that is in competition to individual coaching businesses on TrainingPeaks. So the TrainingPeaks marketplace, you can find if you're an athlete and you've got a current coach for example, you can find a training plan from another coach and buy that instead of coaching. You can switch to another. You can find another coach inside the coach directory in the marketplace.
Speaker 1:They might be cheaper. They might offer something different and trading makes it very easy to switch to that coach. And in that marketplace as well, trading peaks take a massive cut of anything that gets sold. So a lot of these things are around incentives. It's not because training peaks are trying to hurt coaches.
Speaker 1:It's because the incentives are set up in a way where it makes more sense for training peaks to do one thing than the other. So it makes more sense for training peaks to try and sell training plans in the training plan store than it does to have a coach on board. Because they'll make more money in the long run. So coaches actually don't pay that much for their coaching platform. Sure they pay per athlete but athletes can pay training peaks directly.
Speaker 1:So that's not actually new revenue for them. Whereas if they're selling things in the marketplace then they take a big cut of it. So they earn a lot more money that way. So their incentive is that they will promote that and that's fair enough. The third one is performance really.
Speaker 1:Performance and quality of the service. So like I was saying before most endurance coaches use TrainingPeaks and TrainingPeaks offer a lot of they have a freemium pricing model, which means as an athlete you can go up and sign for free and never pay them a cent and you connect all of your data, all of your data syncs through. So one issue that training peaks have had recently is that Sunday everything slows down a lot. And lots of reports from coaches that it's basically unusable and on Sundays they can't even do any of their programming for their athletes because it's under so much load. And part of the reason is because of their premium business model where Training Beats offers free accounts to any athlete who wants an account.
Speaker 1:That is resource intensive obviously because all of the data that's syncing up all the time. And that causes performance issues and not training big's fault. It's just something that happens as you grow and as you get big and as all of that data builds up over time. And I noticed that a lot of coaches are saying, well criticizing those coaches who are complaining about it and saying, well, you shouldn't do your programming on a Sunday. You should spread it out through the week and you won't have that issue.
Speaker 1:And I guess that's sort of a valid alternative but you shouldn't have to do that for one. It should perform under load every day. They should be able to scale it up high under high load. But then also a lot of coaches like to see the full week's training. Maybe even see what happened on Sunday or see what happened on Saturday.
Speaker 1:And then make their coaching decisions based on that. So then if that's the case, you don't wanna do your programming on a Friday for the Monday if you're not even sure how the Saturday and Sunday workouts went yet. So there's two reasons why coaches shouldn't necessarily have to sort out their own workflows based on whether the platform is gonna be working or not. And again, is more from my perspective this is more about because they are so popular. Not necessarily because they have done anything wrong or they're not doing a good job because if training tool had that many coaches and athletes on there as well, it'd be exactly the same.
Speaker 1:Would be struggling but have lots of issues. I would be spending all of our time trying to figure that out. So the thing about the training tool platform is we don't have that many coaches. So the system never really gets under high load. Every now and then we have issues.
Speaker 1:We don't offer anything for free. So we don't have thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of users on there who aren't paying anything contributing to the ability to spend more on hosting and servers and that sort of thing to keep the performance up. Okay, so the fourth one is that having control of your own business growth. So TrainingPeaks is not in the business of helping your coaching brand grow. They're really in the business of growing their own brand.
Speaker 1:And you can see that in all of their communications. If you're an athlete in TrainingPeaks you can see that they're promoting themselves. They'll push you to the marketplace for other coaches but it's just because they take a cut of the share. And in their ecosystem they're calling all the shots about how everything works in the system. So you don't really get to control how you grow through that ecosystem.
Speaker 1:The fifth one and I hear this a lot from coaches is controlling your own intellectual property. So if you didn't know if you're an athlete and training peaks, they make it really easy to move between coaches. If you move from one coach to another coach, all of your training history including the prescribed workouts stay on your calendar and the new coach can see it all. So basically it's your business, it's your IP, it's your input on the athletes data. Surely some of that data is owned by the athlete but there's a lot of your intellectual property there.
Speaker 1:And then just like that they switch coaches and then the new coaches have accessed all of that history of data that they can review. See your workouts, see how you structure them through a week. Again a lot of coaches will say, Well that's just part of coaching programming but it's also about the communication and that's all true. But that doesn't mean that you want other coaches to be seeing all of your stuff. I mean, it's just not It just doesn't seem right.
Speaker 1:So with training tilt, athlete accounts are owned by the coaching business. And then if an athlete doesn't wanna be coached by that coach anymore, then the athlete account can just be disabled and they can't transfer it to another coach. Everything's within a centralised around the single coaching business, athlete accounts, coach accounts, all the data, nothing is shared between different coaching businesses. The sixth one is letting athletes control how you run your coaching business. So a lot of coaches get pressured by their athletes because they don't wanna move to a different coaching system.
Speaker 1:They love training peaks. They've got their history of data. If they do move change is always hard. We know that regardless of how technical you are, it's always hard to change from one system to another. So a lot of coaches are frustrated with all of these things about training peaks but they stick with it because they don't want to upset their athletes.
Speaker 1:But all I would say about that is who's coaching who? Who should be in control of the coaching experience? And if an athlete isn't willing to make a few changes to be coached by you, what other changes aren't they gonna be willing to make? So is that a good sign that maybe they'll be reluctant to change their training as well? So I don't know what the answer to that is but it's a good thing to think about.
Speaker 1:Seventh one is endurance coaching is really lagging behind other industries. Even other coaching industries. So training peaks is the incumbent here and everything that I've seen so far does not see the coaching industry up to be successful. Whereas across other industries or even other coaching industries, say life coaching or nutrition coaching. There's probably dozens and dozens of different platforms to cater for each of those industries and they always almost always put that coaching business at the center of the universe in that platform.
Speaker 1:They don't half sell to athletes and half sell to coaches and then have some marketplace. It's focused on their coaches. So that focus on that industry and that coach raises standard of the entire industry up. So with endurance coaching we haven't gotten there yet and I'm trying to help with it. But no, I haven't done a good enough job of convincing coaches and even doing a good enough job of making training to look like a no brainer.
Speaker 1:So if I was successful in what I'm talking about here, like in other industries, then it would be a no brainer for coaches to move over to training to that would just do it. So I haven't done a good enough job on that. Training piece is not incentivized to do it for themselves because of all the reasons that I've outlined before. So far it just hasn't happened. So the eighth one.
Speaker 1:Your athletes and training peaks, some of them will be drowning in data that they don't really understand. So some of them will be getting confused and frustrated because they don't understand it. Others think that they understand it and they probably obsess over it too much. Taking too much of the data in consideration, not realizing what is important and not understanding that they don't understand what their data is doing to them. And then of course there is athletes who do understand it and do a good job of analysing their own data.
Speaker 1:But in that case then they might be the athlete to step away from coaching and then just use training peaks as an athlete and do their own analysis in coaching. Data is good but in training peaks the coach has no control over what the athlete sees in terms of data. Whereas in training tool the coach can configure a bunch of features that the athlete can and can't see. They can set defaults around what charts they see and what charts they don't see just to give maybe a simpler, more customizable experience to the athletes based on the way the coach coaches but also in the way that the athletes learn. So a lot more customization around that sort of thing and trying to again putting the focus and the control in the hands of the coaching business to really make the platform their own platform.
Speaker 1:So yeah that comes to the end of that. I think if you really wanna take control of your coaching brand, your coaching business, the growth of your coaching business, the experience that your athletes have in the platform, customizable, more branded, then training tool is probably something that you should at least take a look at. I'm And gonna be doing some free migrations for coaches looking to move from training peaks to training tool. It'll be free but it will take at least the commitment to use the platform maybe for at least one year. Sign up for an annual payment and we'll do all of the data migration for you for free.
Speaker 1:So all of your workouts, all of your training plans, all of your athletes data, anything that you need to get into the platform. So the best way to If that sounds interesting. The best way to get started with it is just to sign up for a free trial. Because you need to make sure first before you commit to a year of using a platform that is a platform that you actually like and you think will work for you. So you can sign up to a free trial at trainingtool.com and then reach out and mention that this offer that I made.
Speaker 1:Yep, so free migration if you sign up for a year's subscription of Training Tool. Pricing is very reasonable so that's a benefit as well. But anyway thanks for listening. Sorry about the sarcasm if you did read the full post. I think it's an interesting way for coaches to think about it.
Speaker 1:Anyway talk to you guys soon.
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