Training with ROUVY: a deep session engine and a deliberately thin plan layer

What ROUVY actually is, and what it does better than riders expect

A filmed-route riding platform with a structured-training stack most riders never open. ROUVY lists 22 workout categories, from VO2 MAX and THRESHOLD through SWEET SPOT/TEMPO, ANAEROBIC, SPRINTING, CLIMBING and RECOVERY to FTP TEST and CADENCE [ROUVY Workout Types]. The scenery gets the attention. The workout engine does the training.

Start with the part everyone knows. ROUVY rides real roads filmed on location, and the app knows the gradient of each route and adjusts the resistance of your trainer to match the terrain [ROUVY Workouts FAQ]. You can also set how much of that gradient your trainer reproduces. Reality Level defaults to 100%, which is the real load; below 100% makes the climb easier and keeps the ride out of leaderboards and challenges, and above 100% makes it harder [ROUVY Vocabulary].

Now the part that is undersold. Every ROUVY workout is expressed as a percentage of your FTP rather than as fixed watts. ROUVY states the consequence plainly: workout intensities are automatically calculated as percentages of your FTP, and when your FTP changes, through a ramp test or a manual update, your entire workout library adjusts so targets always match your current ability [ROUVY Workouts FAQ]. One number moves and several hundred sessions re-scale behind it.

The 22 categories are not padding either. Several of them name a specific training shape rather than a vague mood: STRENGTH is described as targeted low-cadence strength intervals, SWEET SPOT/TEMPO as longer constant intervals just below threshold, and ANAEROBIC as high-intensity work for anaerobic capacity [ROUVY Workout Types]. That vocabulary matches how coaches actually talk. A rider who knows what they need on Tuesday can usually find it.

The gap is not the session library. It is the layer above it. Nothing in that list decides whether Tuesday should be threshold or endurance, how much of it you should do, or what changes when you miss it. That decision is the rest of this guide.

The workout layer: a library you can bend, and a score for how you rode it

Three doors into a session and one grade coming out. Ride a ROUVY workout, build one in the workout creator with custom intervals, power targets, cadences and durations [ROUVY Workouts FAQ], or import a file. Import accepts exactly three formats: .mrc, .erg and .zwo [ROUVY Workouts].

The import list is worth reading twice, because it is a closed list rather than a default. ROUVY's own wording is that you can only import .mrc, .erg, and .zwo files [ROUVY Workouts]. There is no .fit or .tcx workout import. The upload lives at the bottom of the Workouts tab in the app and at the top of the Workouts tab on the Riders Portal, and both accept a drag-and-drop file.

The creator is real and a little hidden. Beyond building from scratch, any workout on the Riders Portal can be copied into the creator with Duplicate and Edit, which means you can take a ROUVY threshold session and change the rep count without rebuilding it [ROUVY Workouts]. ROUVY describes the creator itself as designing your own training sessions with custom intervals, power targets, cadences and durations [ROUVY Workouts FAQ]. There is no walkthrough article, so the quickest way in is to open it.

Execution is now graded. Every workout is scored on how closely you match each segment's power target: a full star if you held the target within the acceptable range, a half star if you were close but off, and no star if you were too far off or skipped the segment [ROUVY Workouts]. Coins are awarded segment by segment in proportion to how well you matched, rather than all-or-nothing on completion. That is a genuinely useful feedback loop, and very few platforms grade the inside of a session at all.

Two limits sit around the grade. In-ride intensity adjustment raises or lowers your FTP for that workout only, and maximum power is limited to 1.5x base power [ROUVY Workouts]. And you can skip up to 20% of a workout's total duration and still have it count, which means you must complete at least 80% for it to register [ROUVY Workouts]. That is a sensible tolerance, and it is worth knowing before you decide a session was close enough.

The library covers the interval shapes the research actually supports. Short work intervals are not a lesser version of long ones: in elite cyclists, three weeks of 30-second-on, 15-second-off series improved 20-minute mean power by 4.7% while effort-matched 5-minute intervals moved it by minus 1.4% [Rønnestad et al. 2020]. ROUVY has sessions of both shapes. What it does not have is an opinion about which one you need in week three of your build.

ERG, gradient, and the 1% almost nobody writes about

ERG can be switched on and off during any structured workout [ROUVY ERG Mode Switch]. The surprise is what happens when it is off. Inside a workout your trainer simulates a steady 1% slope and you manage your effort manually, so the filmed climb on screen stops setting resistance entirely.

ROUVY states it in its own words: with ERG mode off, your trainer simulates a steady 1% slope, and you manage your effort manually, and the trainer no longer holds the target power [ROUVY ERG Mode Switch]. Read that against the free-ride behaviour, where the app knows the gradient of each route and adjusts resistance to match the terrain [ROUVY Workouts FAQ]. Both statements are true. They describe different modes. Inside a structured workout the route is scenery.

This catches people out for an obvious reason. A rider picks an Alpine route for a threshold session, turns ERG off to control their own pacing, and then wonders why an 8% ramp on screen feels like flat road. Nothing is broken. The workout mode never handed the gradient to the trainer in the first place.

Knowing that makes the toggle useful rather than annoying. ERG on is the right default for short, high-intensity intervals, where over- or under-shooting the first 30 seconds costs you most of the stimulus. ERG off is the right choice for long steady efforts and for any session where you want to practise pacing yourself, which is a skill ERG quietly removes.

There is also a physiological argument for not holding a target rigidly. When work intervals were matched for duration and mean power but varied in power output rather than held constant, well-trained cyclists spent 410 seconds above 90% of VO2max against 286 seconds in the constant version, with no increase in blood lactate, perceived exertion or any training-load metric [Bossi et al. 2020]. The harder session did not feel harder and did not score higher. A platform that grades you on target accuracy cannot see that difference.

The plan layer: what ROUVY ships, and the one thing it leaves to you

ROUVY ships real training plans and is building more. They are written by experienced coaches, sports scientists and cycling experts using evidence-based training principles, and most run from 4 to 6 weeks [ROUVY Training Plans]. The narrow gap is what happens after a week goes wrong.

The catalogue is broader than most riders assume. It runs from a Master's plan for riders aged 50 and over through Climber's, Time Trialist's, Puncheur's and Sprinter's plans, a 12-week half-distance triathlon plan, a 4-week Specialized MTB plan, and 6-week Level Up and Push Harder blocks [ROUVY Training Plans]. ROUVY's own guidance is that training at least 3 to 4 times per week is ideal for steady improvement, though two structured sessions plus easy riding still produces gains. That is sound coaching advice, given away on a public page.

ROUVY is also investing here rather than retreating. Its published roadmap for January to April 2027 reads: improve week by week with fresh training plans and workouts [ROUVY Coming Soon]. Anyone telling you ROUVY has no plan story has not read what it ships.

Here is the careful version of the gap, and it is deliberately narrow. No ROUVY support article describes a training plan that changes after a missed or failed session. The one adaptation ROUVY documents anywhere is FTP rescaling, where a new FTP re-scales every target in the library [ROUVY Workouts FAQ]. The nearest thing to a miss rule is a counting threshold rather than a rescheduling rule: skip more than 20% of a workout and it stops counting toward your training plan [ROUVY Workouts]. It is marked incomplete. Next week is unchanged.

The same seam shows in ROUVY's answer about outdoor riding. You can substitute or supplement scheduled sessions with outdoor rides as long as you maintain similar effort and volume [ROUVY Training Plans]. That is correct, and it is an instruction to the rider. Judging whether Saturday's four hours on the road replaced Saturday's prescribed tempo block is work that stays with you.

This matters because load progression is the part of training most likely to hurt you when nobody is watching it. The case for building a high chronic training load gradually rather than spiking it is well argued in the injury and illness literature [Gabbett 2016], though the workload-ratio method behind it has been debated since. A fixed 6-week schedule progresses correctly for the rider it was written for. After two missed weeks and one accidental five-hour Sunday, it is progressing for somebody else.

ROUVY says all of this itself, in the most direct way available: by routing adaptive coaching to partners. Its own help centre describes Humango as an AI-powered training app designed to provide personalized, adaptive coaching, whose virtual coach continuously adjusts your training plan based on your performance, schedule and feedback, and ROUVY's role in that pairing is to import the Workout of the Day and export the completed activity [ROUVY and Humango]. That is a company drawing its own boundary, and it is a reasonable boundary to draw.

What ROUVY measures, and what a ROUVY-only ledger is missing

More than people credit. Training Load is calculated for every activity longer than five minutes, Training Score builds long-term fitness from recent indoor and outdoor rides, and TSS is computed from Normalized Power, Intensity Factor and duration [ROUVY Vocabulary]. ROUVY says an estimated TSS lets you project Chronic Training Load, Acute Training Load and Training Stress Balance.

That is a fuller training ledger than most riding platforms keep, and the vocabulary is the standard one rather than a proprietary invention. If you have used TrainingPeaks or intervals.icu, the numbers mean what you expect them to mean. The workout tile even shows the session's TSS before you start it [ROUVY Workouts], which is the input a plan needs in order to be plannable at all.

One documented limit deserves naming, because it decides how much of your training the ledger can see. The most accurate Training Load comes from power data, and without power ROUVY estimates it from energy expenditure, which it describes as helpful but less precise [ROUVY Vocabulary]. A heart-rate-only rider is not locked out. They are scored on a softer input, and every number downstream inherits that.

The larger gap is not ROUVY's fault at all. A ledger built from your ROUVY rides is a ledger of your indoor training, plus whatever outdoor activity you push into it. The Saturday group ride, the commute, the gravel race are the sessions that most often break an intensity distribution, and they are the ones a platform-shaped ledger sees last.

That matters because intensity distribution is one of the few training variables with a clean evidence base. Pooled across randomised trials in trained endurance athletes, a polarized distribution produced a moderate advantage over a threshold-heavy one on time-trial performance, with an effect size of minus 0.66 [Rosenblat et al. 2019]. You cannot audit your own distribution from a ledger that holds four of your six weekly hours. Any system reading your ROUVY data, ours included, inherits whatever the rest of your week left out.

Where we fit, and what we do not do

We read ROUVY. We do not write to it. When you connect, we pull 180 days of ride history, download each ride's recorded FIT file rather than a summary row, and dedupe it against your other connected sources. Then we decide what next week should be.

Say the limit first, because it is the one that matters. AdaptCycling does not push workouts into ROUVY. If you want a session of ours on a ROUVY route today, you export it and import the file yourself, within the three formats ROUVY accepts [ROUVY Workouts]. Platforms that do push, including Humango through ROUVY's own integration [ROUVY and Humango], have a real advantage over us on that specific step.

What we do instead is the decision layer. We estimate your threshold from your power curve as it accumulates rather than asking you to schedule a test, build a plan from what you have actually been riding, and rebuild it when the week falls apart. The 180-day backfill is why that works on day one: ROUVY hands over real history rather than a live feed starting from today, which is unusual among the doors we support.

A second limit, stated plainly. We read the recorded file, so the ride's own data is what we judge. We do not yet read ROUVY's own label for the session, so a ROUVY race and a hard endurance ride arrive looking similar until the file tells us otherwise. If you raced, say so in chat and the plan will treat it as a race.

And the honest competitive read. TrainerRoad's Adaptive Training is an excellent product and adjusts a plan from completed sessions. TrainingPeaks has a deep workout builder and pushes structured sessions almost everywhere. Xert models your fitness continuously and is adaptive by design. Humango already reaches ROUVY with an adaptive plan, through ROUVY's own integration [ROUVY and Humango]. None of that is a reason to be vague about what any of them do well.

None of it replaces a good human coach either, and a rider chasing a top-5% result, or working around a complicated injury history, should hire one. What a coach gives you is judgement about things no ledger records. What we give you is a plan that actually changes when your training does, for riders who were never going to hire anybody.

Quick answers

Sources cited in this guide

1. 01
   ROUVY Workouts. Workouts in ROUVY. ROUVY Support.
2. 02
   ROUVY Workout Types. Types of Workouts. ROUVY Support.
3. 03
   ROUVY ERG Mode Switch. ERG Mode Switch for Workouts. ROUVY Support.
4. 04
   ROUVY Vocabulary. ROUVY Vocabulary. ROUVY Support.
5. 05
   ROUVY and Humango. ROUVY and Humango. ROUVY Support.
6. 06
   ROUVY Training Plans. Best Cycling Training Plans. ROUVY.
7. 07
   ROUVY Workouts FAQ. Indoor cycling workouts to get faster and more fit. ROUVY.
8. 08
   ROUVY Coming Soon. New ROUVY Routes and Coming Soon 2026. ROUVY.
9. 09
   Rønnestad et al. 2020. Superior performance improvements in elite cyclists following short-interval vs effort-matched long-interval training. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports.
10. 10
    Bossi et al. 2020. Optimizing interval training through power-output variation within the work intervals. International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance.
11. 11
    Rosenblat et al. 2019. Polarized vs. threshold training intensity distribution on endurance sport performance: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.
12. 12
    Gabbett 2016. The training-injury prevention paradox: should athletes be training smarter and harder?. British Journal of Sports Medicine.

Specific questions inside this topic

Focused reads — each answers one question end-to-end.

1. 01

   Are ROUVY's training plans any good?

   Coach-written, four to six weeks, included in the subscription. What they do well, and the one thing they do not do after a bad week.

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2. 02

   Training on ROUVY without a power meter

   ROUVY scores training load best from power. How to train and progress on heart rate alone, and what the ledger loses when you do.

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3. 03

   How to import a workout into ROUVY

   ROUVY accepts .zwo, .erg and .mrc and nothing else. The three ways a session gets in, and why the file sometimes lands wrong.

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4. 04

   ROUVY ERG mode on routes: what the gradient does

   Inside a structured workout with ERG off, ROUVY simulates a flat 1% and the filmed climb stops setting resistance. Why that surprises riders.

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5. 05

   Zwift acquired ROUVY: what changes for riders

   Zwift bought ROUVY and FulGaz in April 2026. What both companies committed to, what has actually changed since, and what has not.

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6. 06

   Which ROUVY FTP test should you take?

   Ramp or twenty minutes, what each one costs you, how often to repeat it, and what to do when the number comes back lower.

   →

Related guides

• Indoor cycling training: the self-coached rider's winter guide →
• Adaptive cycling training plans that survive real life →
• The self-coached cyclist: training without a coach in 2026 →