TL;DR: On 22 July 2026, Garmin announced it had acquired TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic from Peaksware Holdings. Around 120 staff in Louisville, Colorado move to Garmin. The price was not disclosed. Nothing about device support, pricing, or coach accounts changed on day one, and TrainingPeaks emailed customers to promise the platform stays cross-platform. Garmin itself has said little beyond the press release. The honest summary is that a platform whose main commercial asset was neutrality is now owned by a hardware company. Based on how Garmin has handled past acquisitions, the most likely outcome is not disaster but stagnation: TrainingPeaks keeps running, largely unchanged, for years. What did change permanently is that endurance coaching no longer has an independent default platform. That is worth understanding before your next renewal, even if you do nothing about it today.
What Garmin Actually Bought
The deal covers more than the TrainingPeaks calendar most coaches picture:
- TrainingPeaks, the coach and athlete platform, including the training plan marketplace and the coach directory
- TrainHeroic, the strength and conditioning platform, founded in 2012 and also based in Louisville. It reports roughly 500,000 users and 10,000 coaches. See our TrainHeroic review for what it does
- TrainingPeaks Virtual, the indoor cycling platform bought as indieVelo in October 2024 and bundled into Premium
- WKO, the desktop analysis package, whose release notes showed no meaningful update in roughly the two years before the sale
- The metric trademarks. TSS, Normalized Power and Intensity Factor are registered marks. Wahoo, Hammerhead and TrainerRoad license those names, and they now license them from Garmin
Peaksware sold only its two sports businesses. MakeMusic, Alfred Music and Fons stay behind, so this was a carve-out rather than a sale of the whole company.
Garmin’s own statement came from Co-Chief Operating Officer Brad Trenkle and framed the deal as expanding access to coaching inside the Garmin ecosystem. Peaksware CEO Andy Stephens described it as a continuation of a decade of working together.
One clarification on the trademarks, because it circulated incorrectly in the first day of coverage: the marks cover the names, not the maths. Andrew Coggan published the underlying calculations in Training and Racing with a Power Meter, and anyone can compute the numbers. What you need permission for is calling the result “Normalized Power” or “TSS”. Strava and Today’s Plan sidestepped this years ago by inventing their own equivalents.
What Did Not Change on Day One
This part matters, because the first wave of reaction ran well ahead of the facts:
- Device support is unchanged, and TrainingPeaks committed in writing to customers that the platform “will continue to operate as a cross-platform ecosystem”. Wahoo, Polar, COROS, Suunto and everything else still sync
- Pricing is unchanged. Coach Edition, athlete Premium and the per-athlete upgrade all continue as before. Our TrainingPeaks pricing breakdown covers what that actually costs a coach
- Coach accounts are unchanged. Rosters, the plan marketplace and the coach directory keep operating
- No Connect+ merge has been announced. The speculation about TrainingPeaks disappearing into a Garmin subscription tier is speculation
If you coach on TrainingPeaks, nothing is asking you to act this week.
Why Garmin Did This, According to People Who Disagree
The two most-read independent voices in endurance tech published within hours of each other and reached opposite conclusions. That disagreement is more useful than either take alone.
The5krunner argues the value is the coaching archive. TrainingPeaks holds something Garmin cannot generate: a record of what a qualified human coach prescribed, whether the athlete completed it, and what happened next, accumulated since 1999 across every brand of hardware. A model trained on Garmin Connect learns what people did. A model trained on the TrainingPeaks archive learns what a coach decided and whether it worked.
DC Rainmaker calls that overrated. Ray Maker points out that Garmin already has vastly more data, that most TrainingPeaks data comes from Garmin devices anyway, and that Garmin has never been at the leading edge of using large datasets for training models. His read is that this is about giving Garmin Connect+ a reason to exist, since the subscription currently struggles to justify itself. He also floats a simpler explanation: 120 engineers, most of them deep in fitness software, in a city where Garmin already has an office.
They land on the same practical outcome by different routes. DC Rainmaker, who spent over a decade working on IT integration of acquisitions, says Garmin simply cannot merge TrainingPeaks into Garmin Connect natively: the platforms are too old and too structurally different, and Garmin’s own history with MotionBased, DeLorme and Tacx shows how long these things stay separate. The5krunner reaches the same endpoint by arguing Garmin has no need to try, since it can bundle TrainingPeaks into a Connect+ tier while both platforms keep running exactly as they do now.
Either way, TrainingPeaks most likely stays TrainingPeaks. That settles this season and raises a harder question about the ones after it, because it means Garmin has to fund a large platform indefinitely without being able to fold it into anything. As Maker puts it, at some point somebody looks at that budget line.
What Garmin’s Past Acquisitions Tell Us
Nobody can answer the coach questions from the press release, because the press release contains nothing. What we can do is look at how Garmin has handled the companies it already bought. That record is long enough to be useful.
- DeLorme (2016) became inReach. Garmin told existing customers at the time that they would see no change to their services or subscriptions, and that held. inReach is still sold and supported a decade later, and ran as a separate system for most of that decade
- Tacx (2019) still runs. It has improved slowly rather than dramatically, and it never became Garmin-only. Tacx trainers still work with everything
- Firstbeat (2020) is the cautionary one. Garmin said third-party licensing would continue and confirmed it publicly. It did continue, for a while. Over the following years it wound down, and Firstbeat no longer licenses to new customers
- MotionBased became Garmin Connect, and took well over a decade to absorb
- Backtracker became Varia radar, which is widely liked. Alphamantis aero sensors went nowhere
- MYLAPS (2025), the race timing company, came too recently before this deal to draw conclusions from
Three patterns come out of that, and they are the basis for the assessments below.
Acquired platforms rarely die, but they rarely accelerate either. Garmin’s habit is to keep things running separately for years. Expect stability rather than progress.
Commitments about third parties describe intent, not a guarantee. Nobody at Garmin lied about Firstbeat. The commitment was real, and then business logic ground it down over several years.
Garmin says almost nothing, about anything. It does not disclose terms and it does not narrate its plans. Silence is characteristic, not a signal.
The Questions Coaches Are Asking
Will prices go up?
The most common reaction, usually paired with the assumption that TrainingPeaks features will end up behind Connect+. No price change has been announced, and with no disclosed purchase price there are no numbers behind the “they have to earn it back” argument.
Our read: a straight price hike on the existing product would be out of character. Garmin has never charged more for Tacx or inReach because it bought them. The likelier shape is a new bundle, where TrainingPeaks or TrainingPeaks Virtual appears inside a Connect+ tier that Garmin badly needs to make attractive. That is an offer, not a hike. Watch what happens to Connect+, not to the TrainingPeaks price list.
What happens to my athletes on Wahoo, COROS or Polar?
The sharpest question for working coaches, and the one TrainingPeaks moved fastest to answer. Some hours after the announcement it emailed customers directly:
As a valued customer we wanted to proactively assure you that TrainingPeaks will continue to operate as a cross-platform ecosystem, enabling athletes and coaches to use the devices, platforms and services that best suit their needs.
That is about as explicit as a commitment gets, and it is the single most reassuring thing said so far. Two details are worth noticing anyway. It came from TrainingPeaks Managing Director Lee Gerakos, not from Garmin, and Garmin itself did not respond when DC Rainmaker asked the same question directly. It also commits to devices and platforms, saying nothing about pricing, roadmap or what happens if this ever conflicts with selling watches.
Our read: take the commitment at face value for the short term. An outright block was always unlikely, because it is visible, it would be reported within hours, and it would trigger exactly the migration that makes the purchase worthless. The written assurance makes that even less likely. The longer-term risk is not a block but a drift, where new capabilities arrive on Garmin hardware first and third-party support becomes the tier that never quite catches up. Worth remembering that Garmin gave a comparable public assurance about Firstbeat licensing in 2020 and meant it at the time. That commitment held for a while and then wound down. A promise describes intent today, which is genuinely worth something, and it is not a contract about 2030.
Is TrainingPeaks still neutral?
Neutrality was not a nice quality of TrainingPeaks, it was the business model. Working with every brand equally is what let a coach run one calendar for thirty athletes on five brands of watch, and it is a large part of why the platform won.
Our read: the technical answer today is yes, and nothing suggests that changes soon. What changed is the nature of the guarantee. Neutrality used to be something TrainingPeaks depended on commercially. It is now a decision Garmin makes each year, weighed against selling hardware. Tacx suggests Garmin can live with that. Firstbeat suggests it does not always want to.
Will Garmin ruin the software?
A common fear, given Garmin Connect’s reputation. The realistic version is not that TrainingPeaks gets absorbed, since the people who do integrations for a living say that will not happen, but that it stops receiving investment.
Our read: this is the most likely outcome of everything on this page. Garmin’s record says TrainingPeaks will still be here in five years, still recognisably itself, and not much further along. Our TrainingPeaks review covers where the platform already stood before the sale. If you were hoping the acquisition brings resources and a faster roadmap, Tacx is the honest preview: bought in 2019, improved since, but never transformed. Note what that means in practice. TrainingPeaks was already criticised for years of slow development and WKO had gone quiet well before the sale, so the realistic forecast is that a platform many coaches already found stagnant now has an owner with no structural reason to change that. Nobody is going to break it. Nobody is going to fix it either.
What about API and data access?
Relevant if you build your own tooling. TrainingPeaks runs a partner API open only to approved commercial developers, so individual coaches never had direct access. Garmin has historically kept Connect closed.
Our read: nothing here is likely to open up. Neither company has ever treated broad data access as a feature, and Garmin views its data as part of the product. If your workflow depends on getting data out programmatically, this acquisition does not improve your position and might eventually narrow it.
What have they actually said to coaches?
Coaches first heard about the deal from a press release, at the same time as everyone else. TrainingPeaks followed some hours later with the customer email quoted above, which announced the change, restated the cross-platform commitment and thanked people for their support. Garmin has added nothing beyond its original statement.
Our read: the email is thin, but it is not nothing, and it addresses the one question that mattered most. What it does not do is explain anything about how coaching businesses on the platform are affected, which is the part coaches actually wanted. Do not read intent into the sparseness. Garmin communicates almost nothing during acquisitions, including ones that turned out well for customers. The DeLorme reassurance in 2016 was unusually specific by Garmin’s standards, and even that was thin.
What Did Change, Permanently
Almost every answer above is some version of “not yet” or “unlikely”, and that is honest. But it makes it easy to conclude that nothing happened, and something did.
Until 22 July 2026, the default coaching platform in endurance sport was independent. If it ever raised prices too far, restricted the wrong thing, or simply stopped improving, coaches had somewhere neutral to go, run by a company whose only business was serving them. That option is now gone from the market, and no announcement from Garmin can bring it back.
This is not a prediction that Garmin will behave badly. It is a description of what your dependency looks like now. Every athlete file from a Wahoo, Polar, COROS or Suunto device flows into a platform owned by a company that sells competing hardware. Whether that is ever used against you is a decision that gets made in someone else’s boardroom, once a year, forever.
Coaches who care about that are not overreacting. They are noticing that a structural protection they had last week has been removed, quietly, at no cost to anyone but them.
What To Do Now
Do not panic-migrate. Changing coaching platforms mid-season is disruptive for you and worse for your athletes, and nothing has actually changed yet.
Do export your data. Not because anything is at risk, but because you should be able to leave any platform you depend on. If you have never done a full export from TrainingPeaks, do one now and find out how painful it is. That number is useful regardless of what Garmin does.
Do audit your roster. Count how many athletes are on non-Garmin hardware. If that number is high, you have more exposure to the neutrality question than a coach whose athletes all wear Garmin watches.
Do watch for two specific signals. First, any change to third-party device sync. Second, any move of TrainingPeaks features into Connect+. Either would be the moment to reassess, and both would be publicly visible.
Keep your renewal short if you can. If your subscription comes up while the questions above are still unanswered, a shorter commitment costs little and keeps your options open. Locking in a long term is a decision worth making deliberately rather than automatically.
If You Do Decide To Look Around
There is no single right answer, and the best choice depends on what you actually need. For the wider field, our TrainingPeaks alternatives guide covers more options than the three below.
Intervals.icu is free, deep on analytics, independent, and built by one person. The trade-off is a steeper interface and no coaching business layer. Our Intervals.icu review goes through it properly.
Final Surge offers a free coach account and solid multi-sport planning at a lower price point than TrainingPeaks. See the Final Surge review.
Coachbox is worth considering if you want testing, communication and planning in one platform rather than three. It is independent and not owned by a hardware manufacturer, prices in euros, works across seven languages, and supports Garmin, Wahoo, Polar, Suunto, COROS and Fitbit equally. Coaches can also connect their Coachbox account to an AI assistant over MCP and ask questions against their own athlete data. What it does not have is TrainingPeaks’ ecosystem: no marketplace revenue today, no virtual cycling platform, and a smaller integration count.
Staying on TrainingPeaks is a legitimate choice, particularly if you depend on marketplace revenue or work with federation-affiliated athletes. The platform today is the one you used last week. Just make it a choice rather than a default, and know what you are accepting: a tool that was already slow to evolve, now owned by a company with no particular reason to speed it up.
One distinction is worth being precise about, because it gets blurred in these conversations. The question raised by this acquisition is about who owns the coaching platform, not about whether Garmin makes good hardware. Garmin devices are excellent and Coachbox integrates with them fully. Plenty of coaches will run Garmin watches on a platform Garmin does not own, and that is a coherent position rather than a contradiction.
FAQ
Did Garmin buy TrainingPeaks?
Yes. Garmin announced on 22 July 2026 that it acquired TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic from Peaksware Holdings. Around 120 staff in Louisville, Colorado join Garmin.
How much did Garmin pay?
Garmin did not disclose the financial terms and no reliable figure has surfaced. Peaksware is privately held, so there is no filing that will reveal it later. Garmin also withheld the price for Firstbeat in 2020 and MYLAPS in 2025.
Does TrainingPeaks still work with Wahoo, Polar, COROS and Suunto?
Yes. Nothing announced on 22 July 2026 changed device compatibility, and TrainingPeaks emailed customers the same day to assure them the platform “will continue to operate as a cross-platform ecosystem, enabling athletes and coaches to use the devices, platforms and services that best suit their needs”. That commitment came from TrainingPeaks rather than Garmin, and covers devices rather than pricing or roadmap.
Will my TrainingPeaks price change?
No pricing change came with the acquisition. Coach Edition, athlete Premium and the per-athlete upgrade continued as before. Garmin has made no commitment about future pricing.
What happens to my coaching business on TrainingPeaks?
The acquisition announced nothing that affects coach accounts, rosters, the plan marketplace or the coach directory. TrainingPeaks emailed customers on the day, but that note confirmed the cross-platform commitment without explaining anything specific about coaching businesses.
Is TrainingPeaks becoming part of Garmin Connect+?
Not part of the acquisition announcement. Several analysts expected some form of bundling, because Connect+ has struggled to justify its price, but Garmin said nothing about it. People who work on acquisition integrations consider a full technical merge into Garmin Connect very unlikely.
Does Garmin now own TSS and Normalized Power?
Yes, the trademarks transfer with the acquisition. The marks cover the names rather than the calculations, which were published openly. Wahoo, Hammerhead and TrainerRoad license the names and now license them from Garmin.
What happens to TrainingPeaks Virtual?
It transfers to Garmin. TrainingPeaks Virtual was acquired as indieVelo in October 2024 and is included with Premium. Garmin has owned Tacx since 2019, so it now has two indoor cycling products.
Did Garmin buy all of Peaksware?
No. Garmin acquired TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic. Peaksware retains MakeMusic, Alfred Music and Fons.
Should I switch coaching platforms?
Not urgently, and not on the strength of a press release. Export your data, check how much of your roster runs non-Garmin hardware, and watch for changes to third-party sync or a Connect+ bundle. The more useful question is not whether to leave today but whether you were already waiting for TrainingPeaks to improve. If you were, this acquisition makes that wait longer, and that is a better reason to look around than anything Garmin might do.
If you are going to try something, try it properly: run one or two athletes on a second platform for a few weeks alongside TrainingPeaks rather than moving your whole roster on a hunch. If what you want is lactate testing, athlete messaging and planning in one place instead of three, Coachbox is the one to put through that test, and our Coachbox vs TrainingPeaks comparison sets the two side by side in detail.