Riding TodaysPlan Structured Workouts in Fulgaz

Welcome to the InsideRRR guide to riding TodaysPlan structured workouts in Fulgaz. Read on to discover why I do this, and also some of the limitations. I then describe how to fire up your workout in Fulgaz.

There are many virtual training options out there from the artificial worlds of Zwift and RGT, to the geolocated videos of Fulgaz, Kinomap and Rouvy, to applications focussed purely on structure and metrics like TrainerRoad.

I have spent a lot of time riding in the geolocated video apps in 2020, but for a considerable number of hours in the saddle, was disappointed by weight loss and fitness gain through the year. Part of the reason for that I decided, was that I spent too much time doing the same types of rides, at the same power and cadence, to improve – so I decided to do something about it.

I had used the structured workouts feature in Zwift previously, which is really nicely executed, but becomes monotonous after a while. Driving around Watopia forever makes for a pretty boring virtual training website too. Fulgaz too have a number of training plans ready to ride in their repertoire, and while what I have seen of those are really well executed too, you have to ride the video they are programmed to. So I decided to look into riding custom workouts in some of the other applications.

Rouvy has a workouts app which has not been fully integrated into RouvyAR, without an iOS workouts app Rouvy is outwith my workflow. BigRingVR looks excellent, but again without an iOS app does not fit into how we work, and Kinomap does not provide for .zwo files to be uploaded to ride against. So I came back to Fulgaz, but I did not want to be tied to the videos selected in the Fulgaz plan, so started looking at other custom workout options.

While there are a number of different places to download .zwo workout files from, I wanted to follow a structured plan, I didn’t really want to have to decide what to ride on any given day. I noticed that Fulgaz had synchronisation of workouts from both TrainingPeaks and TodaysPlan, and of the two only TodaysPlan incorporated a plan builder into their premium subscription. So I had pretty much settled on the two.

There are two main downsides though.

1. The integration between Fulgaz and TodaysPlan is not currently working – the workouts are not synchronising through.
2. When riding a structured workout, the video is always rendered at 1.0x, which means that the video plays at the speed recorded and does not respond to changes in power.

You do get to explore the world though, and the workouts give you a structure to ride to, rather than riding tempo all the time, for as long as you can hang on!

Here’s our guide to getting TodaysPlan workouts into Fulgaz to ride:

First, go to your TodaysPlan diary and select the activity, and download the Zwift version of the workout (.zwo). You do need to download this from the browser, you do not seem to be able to download the workout directly from the iOS app.

Once you have downloaded the .zwo file, you need to upload it into your Fulgaz workouts folder – which again you need to do in the browser, and cannot do in the Fulgaz Application.

Having uploaded the workout into your zwo library, which only takes a few seconds to do, you are ready to ride your structured workout in Fulgaz. Head into the Fulgaz app and choose the video you want to ride – just make sure it is longer than your structured workout, our is a video that can be looped.

You next need to select which workout file to use. From the next screen, your uploaded workout will appear in the My Uploads tab, though it would appear automatically in the Todays Plan tab without need to upload, if that particular integration was working. The TrainingPeaks integration does work, but training plans are an additional cost there.

At the time of writing the Todays Plan subscription with plan builder costs £130/year, whereas a Training Peaks annual subscription costs around £105/month, with additional uplifts for training plans. From my perspective, Today’s Plan’s plan builder offered much more flexibility, at a much more sensible price point. Hopefully FulGaz will fix the Todays Plan integration before too long!