Power-user series: Killer features of TrainingPeaks.com, Part 1

Getting to know the killer features

There is a lot of functionality throughout our web application. With the build-out of our new interface, the web app works much more like a desktop app. Just like most software, our users typically use 10-30% of the functionality that's available, often, just because those features suit their needs just fine.  We think that's great.

But, sometimes, when a friend or co-worker is looking over your shoulder, watching you wrangle an Excel spreadsheet, they offer up a tip that blows you away. Like how to more easily fill a column or calculate values in sequence, maybe even teach you what a pivot table is, then, an "AHA!" moment occurs.  "Man, I wish I would have known about that feature last week! It would have saved me hours!"

We'll be doing a few blog posts over the coming weeks that will dive into some of the "fancier" features of our software. So, for today, lets get started.

Part 1: the calendar

First up, I thought I'd start where almost all users start, the calendar.  Our calendar was designed to function much like Outlook or Gmail calendar, with a twist: scheduling workouts and meals is fundamentally different than scheduling appointments.  So, we had to take a different approach.  We wanted the ability to re-use scheduled workouts over and over again, drag and drop planning and copy/cut/paste functionality that was more like a spreadsheet than anything ever seen on a calendar, and automatic calculation of workout and meal totals too.  Oh, and it had to be customizable, if you simply don't want to track nutrition, you shouldn't have to look at reports and stats that say "zero" all the time, so, we had to make it fit anyone and everyone.

Drag and drop, copy/cut/paste ...and use your ctrl and shift key too!

It's difficult to simply explain features with text descriptions, so, I made a short video demonstrating these points. First up, did you know you can select multiple days, weeks, and copy and paste them just like you copy and paste data within Excel?  Even highlighting all workouts on 3 successive "Tuesdays" and move them to Wednesday.  Watch and learn a few calendar tricks:



I hope you also saw that through simple copy/paste you can share workouts between clients very easily as well. Load up the 2nd Calendar and compare clients side-by-side, or load the same client in calendar 2 to compare last year vs. this year.  Even if you are not a coach, you can use the 2nd calendar and all these copy/paste features in your own personal account as well.

If you made it this far, well, thanks for reading and watching!  I hope you can see what the power of our calendar and the Adobe Flash platform provides, and how we've utilized it to make our application work for you.

Best of luck in your training and racing!

Comments

[Brian Peterson]

Is this shift/cntrl functionality only available for the coaches version? I don't seem to be able to have it work in the my athlete version. Would be very useful!