Planning Comes to Zwift Companion: Schedule Upcoming Zwift Activities

As promised in the latest “This Season on Zwift“, yesterday Zwift released a new planning feature in the Companion app. You’ll need to be on version 3.82.0+ see the feature (download for Apple or Android).

This replaces My List, since it replicates that feature while adding scheduling and additional supported activity types. Let’s jump in and see how it works!

Activities (Currently) Supported

The following Zwift activity types are supported by the planner today:

• Cycling & Running Events
• Cycling Workouts
• Cycling Routes
• Robopacer Rides
• Challenge Tasks (i.e. Route of the week)

Right out of the gate, we see the new planner is more robust than My List, which only supported routes and workouts.

Scheduling Activities

Future days with scheduled activities are indicated by a dashed line in your Fitness Trends chart, while the planner’s main interface lets you easily add, move, or delete planned activities up to a year in advance.

While the new planner supports more types of Zwift activities, the big new feature here is the ability to schedule your activities.

When you sign up for an event, it’s automatically added to your planner’s schedule. Easy peasy.

For the other activity types – workouts, routes, Robopacers, and Challenge Tasks – you can easily add that activity to the planner by tapping the orange “+” or “Add +” button. (These are the same “+” buttons formerly used to populate My List.)

When you tap that button, a popup will gives you the option of scheduling the activity for a particular date. Toggle the “schedule” option to put it on a particular date, or leave it off and just tap “Add” to add the activity to your planner’s “To Do List” without scheduling it for now. (You can easily drag and drop it onto a desired date later.)

Schedule a workout for a particular date (left), or simply add it to your To Do list without committing to a date (right).

You can schedule activities up to a year in advance, drag and drop to reschedule, and swipe left to delete at any time.

Pro tip: by default, the planner (reached by tapping “Plan” in the app) shows your current week. Tap the right or left arrows in the Fitness Trends graph at the top to move to future or past weeks.

Watch me schedule a ride with Coco in 13 seconds:

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Planning Third-Party Workouts

Zwift continues to expand their list of integrated third-party workout providers whose workouts can be scheduled through the provider and automatically brought into Zwift for you to execute on the proper day. In fact, I’ve lost track of which providers are supported at this point, because there are many, and new ones aren’t always announced! (Zwift maintains a list here.)

If your third-party provider is connected to Zwift, your scheduled workout will show up in your planner. You can’t change the scheduled date for the workout in Companion, though – scheduling changes need to be made via the third-party provider.

It’s also worth noting that workouts scheduled through TrainingPeaks are not currently popping into the planner automatically. My guess is this is because TrainingPeaks uses an old, bespoke integration method to talk to Zwift, and that method doesn’t work with the planner.

Bugs & Niggles

Overall, the new planner seems functional and robust, especially considering this is its initial public launch. But of course, there are a few annoyances and bugs you may encounter. Here’s my running list:

• The Companion app likes to crash when I’m scrolling through the list of workouts, particularly under the “30 minutes to burn” category (but it’s happened under other categories as well).
• What about Zwift’s own Training Plans? When browsing your enrolled Training Plan’s workouts in Companion, you aren’t able to add those workouts to the new planner. Training Plans seem to have been neglected in Zwift’s latest feature releases (including “Next Up” recommendations and now the Planner), but having an interface to help you plan your execution of these workouts seems like it would be quite helpful.
• When adding a Robopacer, they all show as “D” pace on the card, even though they show correctly when added to the planner.
• When I click a past race I completed, I’d like to be taken to the results screen.
• Even though Zwift mentions “Challenge Tasks (i.e. Route of the week)” as a supported activity type for the planner, I don’t have access to Route or Climb of the week in Companion. Would love to see that added.
• The game and Companion homescreens aren’t refreshing quickly enough to reflect changes made in the planner. I’ve had to restart Companion or pop into an actual ride and back out to force a refresh.

What next?

Any time Zwift releases a new feature, I like to ponder how it could be improved further, and how the new feature lets us peek into the company’s strategic plan.

First: making it better. Apart from the bugs/niggles listed above, I think one obvious value add would be the ability to schedule outdoor rides. Let me quickly say how long/hard the ride will be, so it shows in my overall planner.

Then here’s the kicker: have that outdoor ride (and everything else in the planner, of course) factor into the “Next Up” personal recommendations.

As a simple example: if I’m planning on riding a big Levi’s Gran Fondo event this weekend, I could add it to my planner, and “Next Up” would help me taper/train smartly for it.

What does the planner release tell us about Zwift’s strategic plan? When viewed alongside the prospect of personalized recommendations going outdoors (as promised in This Season on Zwift), it seems clear that Zwift is working to create a planning and recommendation ecosystem that helps riders train smart and (crucially) use the platform year-round.

Questions or comments?

Check out the Zwift forum thread for more info and discussion, and you can always ask questions or comment below. Got bugs or niggles for me to add to the list above? Share those, too!