Stride: Training Partner

This app is exactly what I needed. I race cyclocross at an amateur level, having raced in various cycling disciplines for about 15 years. Over this time I’ve trained consistently. I’ve had various coaches, self coached (using training peaks and books), bought off the shelf plans and more recently used trainer road. About a year ago I started serious weight training (I’m a 45 year old female, so I was acutely aware of the importance of doing so). Consequently my cycling took a bit of a back seat. The start of the cyclocross season was a humbling experience as reality hit about the impact of my reduction in training. I came across stride by accident and gave it a go. It analysed 5 years worth of my power and HR data. Identified my weak areas (I had a good idea what they were anyway, but it confirmed my suspicions). I was able to feed all my races, holiday dates and target (to improve on where I had been in my best cross season ready for 2027). It’s built me a realistic plan. It has also prescribed strength sessions based around my goals for that. It analyses each work out and feeds back. It analyses sleep, HRV status and RHT. It will talk me through how ready I am to train or race. I’m really impressed! The proof will be in my results next season of course. But it is significantly better than my last coach and way better than just using trainer road. I’ve signed up for a years subscription. I hope the app continues to improve. I definitely recommend it for anyone who races - do explore the strength training element too.

It’s rare to find a training app that does it all, but Stride does. I’ve been a long time user of Trainjng Peaks, both with and without a coach, and found that so much time was spent just copying workouts and looking at numbers that weren’t helping me. Stride helps me plan my training, replan based on what my training data and Whoop is telling me and what I feel like, and then analyse it in so such detail. The insights are actually useful and honest. I find myself waiting to get my Stride insight after a ride even before checking for trophies on Strava!

I’ve been using this app since the end of June. I’ve found it excellent. Easy to use and the AI tool is superb. I’m coming back from an injury, put all this into the app, told it what my goal was and the app developed a plan for me. The app changes your workouts week to week so you’re not doing the same set workout repeatedly. I’m a leisure cyclist and using this on Zwift for fitness and a cycling trip next year. Can’t recommend it enough.

I will preface this by saying that I am coming back to cycling after a long absence due to balancing running two full time businesses & family life with the ambitions of racing once again & being able to hold my own with friends around the Yorkshire dales. I have previously used traditional cycling coaches, TrainingPeaks, TrainerRoad in anger & before settling on stride also trialled other AI based coaching apps, but this is the app I wished I had ten years ago. One thing I always struggled with traditional coaches was if I missed a session getting the plan adjusted, whereas with Stride, it’s a two minute conversation with the AI & all sorted, meaning even as an autistic person, it really does help not feeling like I’ve ruined all of the progress made by life getting in the way once or twice. Previously I’d have ended up stopping training entirely until the coach eventually relented and reset the plan, meaning progress wasn’t as linear as it should have been. The app auto-adjusts metrics depending on how you’re doing so potentially you never have to do any metric testing (FTP etc) unless you really want to & the training sessions are built by both ex-pros and really highly regarded coaches so you know you’re getting set sessions that are both beneficial and maximising your availability. On top of all this, their technical support goes above and beyond - I had an issue out of hours where for some reason my account wasn’t working with the integration to Zwift/Wahoo not auto populating training sessions, I dropped them a message not expecting a fix until the next day and knowing I could manually export/import like you had to back in the day, but they got back to me and sorted within the hour!