We’ve all been switching to more virtual meet-ups these pandemic days, and TrainerRoad Group Workouts does the same thing for your regular group training rides. With live shared video, voice, and performance stats, you and up to four of your friends can hop on your home trainers for a social distancing complaint virtual training ride together.
TrainerRoad Group Workouts, virtual group training for up to 5 riders
By now, we all know that that maintaining regular exercise is one of the best ways to stay both mentally and physically healthy while in various degrees of lockdown. Gamified
virtual riding goes a long way to limiting the boredom, keeping us more focused on the riding. But these days what many of us social beings are really craving is more real human interaction. And that’s what TrainerRoad group training delivers, along with all of their structured workouts.
How to use Group Workouts?
TrainerRoad actually already rolled out Group Workouts at the start of this month, but to be honest we’re just playing catch up on our own training schedule. But Group Workouts are easy to use for all TrainerRoad members. All you need to do is plan ahead for up to 4 other riding buddies to join you on TrainerRoad.
- One of you will need to create the Group Workout from any of the regular Workouts (or any workout already in your training calendar). Just click the button next to the normal Open button at the last step before you begin.
- That will create a unique code to join the group. Just share that code with up to four other riders (by text or email), then select Continue to wait for them to join.
- For the other riders, from their main Group Workouts tab they can enter the code you sent to join in. That’s it, and you’ll be linked up, training together.
Group Workouts was developed to allow you to share voice and video with up to 4 of your friends while you do the same TrainerRoad workout, all at the same time with resistance levels adjusted to each rider’s individual fitness levels (FTP). You can see each other and keep each other motivated. Plus, see real-time heartrate and power output data for your training buddies, so you can either cheer on, chide, or motivate each other to stay on target. The host of the ride maintains the ability to pause the workout, and each rider can also individually adjust their workout intensity as needed.
Indoor training can be tough. Training indoors it together should make it more bearable!
TrainerRoad’s software development team worked hard to push this new feature out quickly as they saw more riders confined to home training, and wanted to help everyone stay engaged. For now it is limited to the Mac & Windows PC TrainerRoad apps (no mobile yet) and they recommend using the built-in webcam & microphone on your laptop and earbuds for sound for the best performance. They’ve also told us that more interactive training features are expected as they continue to develop & refine Group Workouts (like the ability to ride separate workouts together at the same time, to join in just to cheer on your friend, or for more virtual riders). But for now they say they’re “confident it will get more people training and getting faster together.”
