Torch: guided indoor training on a gym bike

A phone web app that guides a structured workout on a studio indoor bike and saves the ride as a FIT file.

The indoor bikes in a gym studio do not know your training plan, and what you ride on them does not end up in your training log. I wanted to follow the workouts my coach writes in TrainingPeaks on the gym bike, and get the ride back into TrainingPeaks afterwards.

Approach

Torch is a web app that runs in Chrome on an Android phone, installed like an app:

• It loads a structured workout exported from TrainingPeaks.
• It reads power and cadence from the bike over Bluetooth, the same way a bike computer does.
• During the ride it shows the target next to what you are doing.
• At the end it saves a FIT file that can be uploaded to Garmin Connect, Strava or TrainingPeaks.

There is no native app and no server behind it: it is a web page that uses Web Bluetooth and keeps the screen awake. In testing it guided and recorded a session of 2 hours 14 minutes without losing a single minute of data.

Status

Torch is live and I use it for my own indoor sessions. It works with ICG bikes. It is also the first piece of a larger project, MyD.

You can open it at torch.velodata.ai, although without a compatible bike there is little to do.