Training Peaks Basic vs. Premium

thekidduxc

Does anyone have any experience/advice on TP basic vs. premium. Is the juice worth the squeeze for the premium option?

As I begin my journey towards IM South Africa, I am looking at using TP again. Two years ago I used the WKO+ software. I noticed TP finally made their shift away from the software download and towards a subscription based service. Just trying to figure out which one is the better tool and if anyone from team EN is using TP or their competitors. 

I couldn't find a similar thread searching the forums. If this has been covered recently in the forums, sorry for the repeat but would love the link.

Thanks

 

- DW

Dino Sarti

I use the premium. Not sure what the advantages are, but I enjoy it quite a bit. Somewhere in their sales pitch they likely show the gaps in free versus paid.

I also used WKO+ and now the cloud version does everything I ever used.

thekidduxc

Thanks D. Think I am just going to try the premium for a month and see how it goes.

Just curious - do you load future workouts for the week or simply use it to review past weeks? I'm thinking of using it to load future workouts as shuffle workout days a bit.

I am in the middle east and my weekend is on Friday/Saturday so I adjust my schedule to sync the weekend with my hard WKOs.

Stephanie Hartmann

I use the premium as it seems to let me move things around more and download programs into it. I also have a metrics program on my iPad... don't remember what it's called and the TP loads directly into it.

John Henault

David - I use the TP Premium. I like the future calendaring function. I take time when I drop into a new plan to load the duration of the plan into TP (which is a lesson in cut and paste patience). It helps me to see the planned workout next to what I actually did, as well as the daily emails I get telling me my workout for the day.

Dino Sarti

I don't load upcoming workouts, but I have training partners that do. They can then forecast their time and estimate TSS. I use it to analyze workouts that I juts completed as well track hours, distance and TSS. I also track miles on my shoes and bikes.

William Jenks

In short, if you don't have the premium, you don't get any analytics at all besides total TSS for a given workout. What you are licensing with a paid TP account is basically access to their online version of WKO as adapted to full swim/bike/run, plus all the other goodies with respect to diet etc if you want that stuff. I suspect most of us use it for the analytics.

I had a paid account for many years, and I continue to feed it my data automatically so that if I decide to go back there, I still have my accumulated data from the meantime. I quit paying for it after they announced WKO4 (thinking I would buy that instead), which of course has never been released...and I haven't missed it much...but I use Golden Cheetah and Garmin Connect. However, what that does not give me is the overall TSB curve, which TP provides.

Daniel Huhn

Be sure to check the discounts for Premium TP that are associated with your USAT membership. It's listed on the USAT web site once you log in. My renewal is in the fall and I think there's something like a 10% discount.

ezellrh

FYI - There is also a decent discount through the boys over at the IM Talk podcast. The podcast is actually really good too.

Jan Schorpion

I feed all my data to TP, but dont have a paid subscription. Every 5 or 6 weeks or so, I will sign up for the premium trial with different codes you can find online . You then have 7 days of free premium access, during which I analyze data and look where I am at. When a race is approaching , I make sure to enable premium the week prior to the race. In reality, I am not worried where I am on the TSB chart with regards to fatigue because RnP do such a good job that I totally trust the EN training plans. But it is cool to  see and analyze what you have accomplished over the past XX weeks. 

thekidduxc

Thanks for all the responses. I have signed up for the premium package.

@Roy - thanks for the IMTALK gem.

@Dan - I don't live or race in the USA. So I no longer have to pay for the USAT (thankfully).

@John - I like the calendar feature as well. Every week I have to shuffle the workouts to coordinate with the weekends in this region. (I live in the Middle East and our weekends are Friday and Saturday. Work days are Sunday - Thursday).