This article was produced in collaboration with Stride and first published in Rouleur Issue 143

The professional peloton is accelerating. Take 2025’s Tour de France, where Tadej Pogačar racked up the fastest average speed in history (42.85km/h) to claim his fourth maillot jaune. Cutting-edge gear, supercharged nutrition and more aggressive racing style are mooted as reasons why. But there’s one factor that’s arguably been overlooked to eclipse them all: the channelling of streams of data into specific and actionable advice. That’s heavily down to highly qualified support teams. But, thanks to new training platform Stride, recreational riders can now optimise their cycling time and miles without WorldTour resources.

Stride is the new training platform co-founded by former professional Alex Dowsett, who rode into the world’s collective consciousness when breaking the hour record in 2015 – a startling 52.937km in just 60 minutes. The British rider also competed for Team Sky and Movistar in a glittering 13-season career where he forged a reputation for eking out every ounce of speed from his technical knowhow. He’s now performance engineer at WorldTour outfit XDS Astana. Stride marries this peak of the pyramid expertise with recreational reality.

“As a bike rider in a professional team, you’re given a boarding pass to everything,” Dowsett tells us from his Essex home. “You turn up to a race, someone drives you to the hotel, someone drives you to the start. Your bike’s waiting. Your performance is analysed and tactics dictated. You have no idea how much work goes on behind the scenes. It’s the same with Stride. It smooths out the complexity of riding and data, simplifying the advice for better results.”

In short, by marrying WorldTour-level performance insights with accessible, everyday-friendly planning tools, Stride bridges the gap between complex software and the needs of time-crunched cyclists and amateur racers.

Guided by intelligence

So, what’s the deal? Well, at its heart, Stride uses AI as a decision-making layer on top of your training data – not just to show numbers, but to interpret, adapt and guide your training like a coach would.

Stride hoovers up data from all of the leading devices and platforms. We’re talking Hammerhead, Garmin, Zwift, Wahoo, Whoop, Polar, Rouvy and Oura rings. By then taking into account not only performance metrics, like power and cadence, but also recovery data like heart rate variability (HRV), Stride paints an accurate and holistic picture of your fitness and form.

When a rider joins Stride and grants access to their existing data, every ride they’ve uploaded elsewhere is analysed, with key metrics like FTP (functional threshold of power), CP (critical power) and W’ (W prime) calculated automatically.

From there, Stride continuously validates and refines those numbers, recalculating when new data suggests a rider’s capacity has changed. As the team explains, while many platforms estimate FTP once and leave it there, Stride repeatedly checks it against real-world efforts. If something doesn’t add up – like an implausibly high training stress from a commuting ride – it revisits the data until the outputs align with reality. All of this is processed in the background. To the rider, all you see is that it’s presented in a fashion that focuses on clarity over complexity.

Stride converts your rides into training impact scores, charting stress (and

hopefully progress) over time. It shows whether you’re building fitness, carrying fatigue or overreaching.

Stride digs deep into patterns across your data – power curves; progression trends; fatigue v performance – that clearly highlights improvements or flags up stagnation. Its beating AI heart then translates metrics into digestible analytics and actionable insights through structured plans, bespoke workouts and adaptive recommendations.

Your new training partner

“We’ve realised just how versatile Stride is, especially with the AI stuff,” says Dowsett. “However, we’re also acutely aware that ‘AI’ is a good or bad thing depending on who you’re talking to. There are cyclists turning to ChatGPT, asking it to design them a 12-week training plan. We’re a lot more refined than that and we’re also able to support the rider during training. It’s mind-blowing what Stride can do.”

Take Stride’s AI training partner that understands amateur riders and rigid scheduling aren’t always happy bedfellows. Old-school training plans fix sessions in your calendar, failing to account for working late, illness or your toddlers not understanding the importance of your next VO2max session. The result of this directive dogma is that the rider abandons their plan and waves goodbye to achieving their season’s goal(s).

With Stride, your training and plan is assessed each week by an AI-powered assistant that adapts your efforts around your weekly schedule, missed sessions and, if needed, changing goals. It learns from physiological feedback, RPE and sleep data to adjust what comes next.

The workout builder

This adaptive training intelligence ensures you stay on track. As does the Stride workout builder. This, says Dowsett, is a game-changer not only for the rider, but the coach, too.

“One of my clients said, ‘Alex, it’s hammering down again, I don’t want to go out in this weather. Can you design me an indoor session?’ I could but he was after a four-hour session on a smart trainer! The thought of designing a session like that from a coach’s perspective isn’t a wonderful one, as you’ll spend at least 30 minutes designing it and it might be used once. But we have a tool in Stride where you type or voice note into the box what session you’d like it to design and it’ll do it in seconds.

“Another example. I’m a big fan of irregular surges in training. That’s because all of the rides undertaken by both pros and amateurs never follow a uniform power profile. They require you to react, to slow down or to accelerate. The other day, I wanted a quick 45-minute workout before the kids came home; I wanted to include blocks of sweetspot that featured surges lasting 20 seconds in and around zone five. Pop that info into Stride and it fed me back the session in seconds.”

It’s easily done, though Dowsett says if you want that specific session, simply drag the ‘Jam Hashtag 2.2’ workout into your Stride calendar. If you’re looking for a longer workout than Dowsett, you can adjust it in the workout builder. Simple.

It’s impressive, cutting-edge and ready to challenge more established training partners. “TrainingPeaks is obviously popular,” says Dowsett, “but I’ve always been of the opinion that there’s room in this training and racing space for others, in the same way that in the world of bike computers, you have Garmin, Hammerhead, Wahoo… We’re just saying we have these tools to make your coaching and training experience more efficient and more interesting.

“A case in point was the Vuelta a España in 2025,” he adds. “It was the team time trial and I had my Astana hat on. I casually mentioned to Alex [Barlow, Stride’s chief technical officer, co-founder and handy cyclist in his own right] that a team time trial is a collective ride but, with traditional software, I can only view each rider’s efforts individually. Within a couple of days, he’d adapted Stride so that I could layer all of the riders’ files on top of each other, so you can more clearly understand the efforts and interplay of each rider.

“We also have some fun stuff coming up from work we’ve undertaken with the Richardsons-Trek road team,” he continues. “We’ll be able to break down and show how races were won or lost. That feature will appear on our channels soon.”

Stride founder Alex Dowsett competed for Team Sky and Movistar over his 13-season career, and now  serves as performance engineer at XDS Astana

Refining your technique

Dowsett spoke to Rouleur’s tech writer Simon Smythe after last November’s Rouleur Live (which returns to the Truman Brewery, London, between 12-14 November in 2026) and told him that one of Stride’s most compelling features evolved out of a thought he’d had during his professional career as a TT specialist. “I always thought it would be fascinating to see myself like in a Play-Station game – following a ghost version of your fastest lap to chase,” he said, “not only against my fastest time around the club time-trial, but also against Filippo Ganna, where is he pulling away from me? Or where am I holding him? So, you would select your circle of who you want to compare yourself against, your circle, clubmates, it might be the entire race, and then you can bring everyone’s rides in line with each other.”

Strava has the capacity to do this but in a rather tricky manner due to creating your own segments. “Stride can break down every single corner in a race,” Dowsett added. “We can’t yet do racing lines, but we can show average speed, power through the corner, minimum speed, and how much time you gained or lost.”

Cornering is an oft-neglected skill of road riding that, added Barlow, can be the difference between victory and defeat, a personal best or self-flagellation. “Some riders aren’t huge watt monsters, but they’re incredibly smooth and make up time in other ways. The question is whether that’s down to aerodynamics, bike handling skills, the course, the weather… our tooling helps you start to narrow that down.”

Dowsett says this has been transformative for him in his guise as performance engineer at WorldTour level but, he adds, Stride is for everyone, whether you’re aiming for Etape du Tour or looking to slash your midweek time-trial PB.

So, does this mean goodbye to coaching? “Not at all,” says Dowsett. “But let’s be honest, some coaching outfits can charge several hundred pounds a month and you don’t even get one-on-one time with them. There are an awful lot of people that can either not afford or justify that expenditure. What I really like is that we’ve created the next best thing to a good coach for just £15 a month. The present and future for Stride is very exciting.”

You can find out more about Stride at stride.is