What is the best free alternative to TrainingPeaks?

Intervals.icu. It implements CTL, ATL and TSB, ingests from every major device ecosystem, and exposes more of its modelling than TrainingPeaks does — for nothing. What it lacks is the coach-athlete workflow, the plan marketplace and the polish, which is exactly what TrainingPeaks charges for.

Is TrainingPeaks worth the money?

If you work with a coach who uses it, yes, and the question is moot. If you are self-coached and mainly want load charts, Intervals.icu does that better for free. If you are self-coached and want prescription rather than analysis, TrainingPeaks Premium is not really designed for that either.

Does TrainingPeaks track strength training?

Only as a duration with an optional manual TSS estimate you invent yourself. TSS is defined as intensity relative to an endurance threshold, and a set of squats has no threshold and no normalised power. So the load exists in the calendar as a coloured block and enters no model.

What replaces TSS for a hybrid athlete?

Nothing single-valued, and that is the point. Strength and endurance load are different capacities in different units, and a blended score cannot answer either question. The workable approach is tracking each in its own terms — weekly hard sets per muscle group, and endurance minutes with a ramp rate — against the shared recovery and energy budgets.

Can I use Intervals.icu and something else for lifting?

Yes, and it is a good free stack for the endurance half. The seam is the same one every split stack has: no tool holds both, so the deload decision and the calorie target both stay manual.

TrainingPeaks Alternatives, Compared Honestly

What TrainingPeaks is actually for

Two jobs, and it is worth separating them because the alternatives split along exactly this line.

Job one: the coach–athlete workflow. A coach writes structured sessions, they land on your calendar, you execute, the file comes back, compliance and load are visible to both of you. Nothing else in the category does this as well, and if you are coached the decision is already made for you.

Job two: self-coached load analysis. CTL, ATL, TSB, the Performance Management Chart. This is the job with better free alternatives.

The alternatives

Intervals.icu — free, and better at the analysis

Full Performance Management Chart, power and pace curves, HRV tracking, custom fields, and a willingness to show its own arithmetic that TrainingPeaks does not match. It ingests from Garmin, Wahoo, Zwift, Polar and Strava, so it drops into an existing setup without changing anything.

It has no plan marketplace, a functional-not-beautiful interface, and no coaching workflow. For a self-coached athlete who wanted charts, that is a trade heavily in its favour. Where it stops.

Final Surge — the closest like-for-like, cheaper

Coach–athlete workflow, calendar, plan delivery, device ingestion. Less deep on the modelling, notably better for run coaching specifically, and meaningfully cheaper. If you want what TrainingPeaks does at a lower price and you can live with lighter analytics, this is the direct swap.

Garmin Connect — free with the hardware

If your training is straightforward and you own a Garmin, Connect's load and readiness modelling covers most of what a self-coached athlete uses the Performance Management Chart for. The catch is opacity: Training Readiness and Body Battery are proprietary composites with no visible formula, so a number that disagrees with how you feel cannot be interrogated. What Connect models.

Today's Plan / Athletica — algorithmic prescription

Both write the plan rather than just holding it. Athletica in particular generates and adapts sessions from your own data, which is closer to what a self-coached athlete usually wants than a calendar is. Both remain endurance-only.

The structural problem none of them solve

TSS is defined as intensity relative to an endurance threshold. Functional threshold power for cycling, threshold pace for running. Both terms in the equation assume a sustained aerobic effort.

A set of squats at eight reps has no threshold, no normalised power and no intensity factor. So a hybrid athlete's lifting either does not appear in the load model at all, or appears as a TSS figure they made up — which then pollutes CTL with a number nobody measured.

This is not an oversight. It is the definition of the metric, and it means any TSS-based system is blind to half your training by construction. The full argument, with what to use instead.

The practical consequences show up on exactly the weeks that matter:

A heavy lower-body week followed by a threshold run looks like an easy week in TSB terms.
A deload on the bike while lifting volume climbs reads as recovery.
The ramp rate that predicts injury is computed on part of the load.

The comparison

	TrainingPeaks	Intervals.icu	Final Surge	Garmin Connect	Base
CTL / ATL / TSB	Yes	Yes, deeper	Basic	Proprietary equivalent	Ramp rate on endurance minutes
Coach–athlete workflow	Best	No	Yes	No	No
Structured session delivery	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Prescribed from your threshold
Shows its arithmetic	Partly	Yes	Partly	No	Every derived number
Strength load in the model	No	No	No	Minimal	Weekly hard sets per muscle
RIR / autoregulation	No	No	No	No	Yes
Nutrition	No	No	No	Basic	Adaptive, same ledger
Recovery from your own baseline	No	Via HRV	No	Proprietary	Yes
Cost	Premium	Free	Cheaper	With device	Beta

The honest recommendation

Stay if you are coached and your coach uses it. Everything else is noise.

Move to Intervals.icu if you are self-coached, endurance-focused, and mainly want the charts. It is free and it is better at that specific job.

Move to Final Surge if you want the workflow at a lower price.

Stop looking inside endurance tooling if the thing you keep failing to model is your lifting. Every option above will model your running beautifully and score a heavy squat week as rest. What both halves on one ledger looks like.

Two things worth doing regardless of which you pick: check your endurance ramp rate, which is the load metric with the best injury evidence behind it, and count your weekly hard sets per muscle group, which is the strength-side equivalent no TSS model will ever compute for you.