When I picked the name “TrainerRoad,” I liked the idea that the name has two meanings. There’s the physical “trainer” that you do your workouts on, then there’s the meaning that a “trainer” is someone who trains you.
Today, we’re expanding from the indoor “trainer” world, and we’re going to start training you on the road (hence the name, TrainerRoad…we think ahead!).
You’ll now be able to follow a TrainerRoad training plan and have a choice of doing each workout inside or outside.
This allows you to get faster year round by following a structured TrainerRoad plan and bring your training outside! 
How to Switch a Planned Indoor Workout to an Outside Workout
Outside workouts are built around our Calendar. Here’s a picture of my calendar.
The weather is getting better, and I want to do my Saturday workout, Richardson +3, outside.
When I click on it, I now get a new choice to do this workout outside (enable outside workouts here).
You get power or RPE based workout with warm up, main set and cool down complete with TSS Target and power targets or ranges depending on the workout. Outside workouts are always scaled to your FTP.
If you don’t have a power meter on a bike that you want to do an outside workout with you can choose the “RPE Based” option and still get a great workout.
Workouts Designed to be Done Outside
You can see that Richardson +3’s outside workout (Mount Carru) is not the same. We did this on purpose. Richardson+3 would be very hard to do outside.
Coach Chad has written hundreds of outside workouts. Each workout targets a specific energy system (anaerobic, threshold, aerobic, etc.) and is designed to be executed outside.
We’ve then built a system that links our inside workouts with our outside workouts. If you have a 90 minute VO2 max workout scheduled, you can get an outside 90 minute VO2 max workout at roughly the same intensity/difficulty, although the specific workout structure will most likely be different.
Completing Outside Workouts
Once you finish your outside workout, we’ll automatically associate your ride with your planned outside workout if you have Strava or Garmin Connect synced.
You can also manually mark a ride as complete.
Outside workouts are synced to your mobile TR app, that makes it easy to check the workout description while on the road.
Adding Plans with Outside Workouts
When you add a TrainerRoad training plan, you can now choose to have a particular day of the week always be an outside workout.
In the picture below, you can see that I’ve chosen to have Saturday and Sunday workouts always be outside.
After you add your plan, you can manually change any workout to be an inside or outside workout.
Enabling Outside Workouts and TrainerRoad Early Access
We’ve got a new “Early Access” program built into our system where you can enable and disable new features before they are widely released.
Outside workouts is the first feature that uses TrainerRoad Early Access.
To enable outside workouts go here: Log In to TrainerRoad
FAQs
What about Head Unit Integration?
I know this is your first question and here’s our official message right now. “We have nothing to announce about outside workouts on head units at this time.”
Update: 4/11/2019 - Garmin has announced their Training API which let’s us push TrainerRoad outside workouts directly to Garmin Head Units. We’ve been working on this for a few weeks and it’s still a few weeks out from initial launch. We’re also working towards pushing outside workouts to Wahoo head units.
Why are outside aerobic workouts longer than inside aerobic workouts?
Outside aerobic workouts are less efficient than inside workouts. Downhills, stoplights, etc. allow you to coast more than you would inside. We’ve taken this into account and made outside aerobic rides 15-60 minutes longer than their inside equivalent.
Can I view a library of outside workouts?
Not yet. We need to do some more substantial backend changes for this to make sense.
Can I schedule an outside workout directly on my calendar without scheduling an indoor workout first?
Not yet, but we will let you do this. This will most likely launch when we let you see a library of outside workouts.
Does every TR indoor workout have an outside workout alternative?
Not every indoor workout has an outside workout associated with it yet. The good news is that every workout in a TrainerRoad plan has an outdoor workout alternative, along with hundreds of other workouts. We’ll strive to get almost complete coverage in our library.
How should I give feedback on outside workouts?
We’re doing this smaller release (announcing it only in the forum at first) so that we can get targeted feedback before we released to everyone. To give us feedback, you can comment on this thread or give us feedback directly in the early access page.
Like all things we do, we’ll constantly improve outside workouts. We’ve got big plans and this is just the beginning.
. That’s what it will say; go race Flanders.