Zwift Goes Big On Fitness With Major Garmin-Inspired Redesign

Zwift has announced its latest raft of updates for the next chunk of the virtual cycling season, and they include a change of direction for the Zwift Companion app.

From April 8, the Zwift Companion App will give “fitness metrics” the spotlight.

Up until now, the app has mostly been useful for checking out how many people are on Zwift, what your friends have been up to and details of upcoming events and races. In the next update it will become a bit more like a fitness tracker app.

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Today, you can set a goal for the amount of time you spend riding, or distance, per week. But you’ll soon be able to also set goals for calories/kilojoules or “Stress Points.” This is also known as TSS within Zwift, and is an indicator of how hard you’ve worked — a higher intensity effort is going to earn you more of them more quickly.

Zwift is also introducing new Training Score and Training Status metrics.

Training Score is based on the volume of your training, providing an easy way to track your amount work done over time — in a slightly more nuanced way than just looking at pure distance figures.

Training Status is just like that seen in Garmin’s platform. It tells you how ready you likely are to train, and signals if you might be losing progress or be at risk of overtraining.

Such a metric will be better judged by a wearable — some call this a “readiness” stat — which can factor in elements like stress and sleep quality/duration. But it should be handy to have if you don’t already use a wearable in your day-to-day life.

While these stats will be introduced in days, it’s only later in the year they’ll be fully explored.

“Rolling out later this summer, Zwift Companion will receive a second update that will enable Zwifters to track their fitness trends,” says Zwift. This will include charts that look at those stats’ scores over time — again, in fitness tracker platform style.

Zwift’s New Features

The other key element to this is these new training stats won’t just use Zwift data. Zwift Companion can also pull in data from Garmin and Wahoo, and Hammerhead integration is “expected later in the Summer,” according to Zwift.

This makes the Zwift app more of a direct competitor with Strava, at least for folks who do most — or a significant proportion — of their training indoors.

And it all feeds into the sense of value for what is not a cheap subscription. Zwift currently costs $199.99 a year or $19.99 a month, while Strava’s premium subscription is $79.99 a year or $11.99 a month, but of course does not bring an entire training platform to the table in the way Zwift does.

Zwift has also announced the release of eight new roads in the Paris game world, which will be available from April 7.