Thursday, January 6, 2011

Training Peaks


Looking for a one stop solution to training for any sport is a difficult task at best. In the past the usual solution would be to pay an overpriced coach to develop a yearly plan for you, or you just did what you felt you should do based from what you read in a book.

Over the last few years I have been using Training Peaks. The people there have finally created the solution for the budget conscious athlete. Now you can monitor almost everything you need to do to excel at the sport you are wanting to participate in. You can:

  • Track exercise, nutrition, weight, stress, and more.
  • Upload heart rate, power meter, and GPS workouts.
  • Plan and schedule your own exercise and meals.
  • Monitor your fitness and health over time.
You can create your training plan with a few simple clicks. Then it's just a matter of creating and scheduling your workouts. If you don't know what workouts you should do, the Virtual Coach feature will generate suggested workouts for you. You can save workouts you like or create your own and save them in your own library for future use, or you can purchase plans from various coaches and they will be placed into your library for use. You will never be short of different options for working out and the workouts will get emailed to you each day so you know what you need to do that day.

If you record your workouts when you perform them, then you can upload that information to your account. Training Peaks works with almost every recording device out there. (Timex, Garmin, Cycleops, Polar, iPhone, Nike, etc...)

Monitoring your own nutrition never became easier either. You can plan and record what you eat on a daily basis, or purchase a plan based on your goals from different nutritionists.

There is a wealth of information that gets logged with minimal input from the user. If you like charts and graphs, you can examine many things on a daily, weekly, monthly, even yearly basis to pinpoint problems or see improvements.

The costs for the personal edition are extremely reasonable and affordable for any person. You can get the free account, which is pretty limited or you can purchase a 1 month ($19.95), 3 month ($49), 6 month ($79), or 1 year ($119) subscription. 

Go check them out. You won't be disappointed.




No comments: