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Relay Athletic vs. TrainHeroic
TrainHeroic built something coaches love to use. A clean athlete experience, a strong marketplace for selling programs, and a community of over 500,000 athletes. For individual coaches and personal trainers running an online business, it set the standard for how workout delivery should feel.
But TrainHeroic was designed around the personal training model
One coach, a handful of clients, program delivery and tracking. When you start thinking in phases, managing rosters of 20+ athletes, or need readiness data alongside your programming, you hit the edges fast. Relay was built for the coach who's outgrowing that model.
Build workouts at the speed you actually think
Relay lets you speak your entire workout out loud. The AI parses sets, reps, load, tempo, and RPE into a structured session in seconds. Or use the grid like a spreadsheet - tab through cells, type fast, move on. No lag, no debounce, no fighting the interface. What takes 15 minutes in TrainHeroic takes under a minute in Relay.
TrainHeroic's workout builder lets you add exercises, circuits, and plain text blocks. It's functional, and you can save prescriptions for reuse. But users consistently report lag when entering weight - an input debounce that slows number entry, and the inability to rearrange movements or blocks via drag and drop - meaning reordering a 6-exercise session requires deleting and re-adding.
See the whole picture - from this week to the full year
Relay's program view shows every phase, every week, every session on one screen. Color-coded phases sit across the top like a timeline - zoom out to see the full annual plan, zoom in to adjust Tuesday's accessory work. Drag workouts between days. Copy entire blocks with a click. You're designing the architecture - not filling in calendar squares.
TrainHeroic organizes training on a calendar where you navigate day by day or week by week. You can create programs and save them to a library, but there's no visual phase management - no way to see how your off-season accumulation connects to your pre-season intensity block and flows into in-season maintenance without keeping a separate plan.
Manage a real roster, not just a client list
Relay's athlete roster shows fatigue, sleep quality, and soreness trends at a glance. Tags like "returning-injury," "starter," or "high-performer" let you filter and group instantly. When you assign a program, you see the full preview - 48 workouts, 12 weeks, synced to each athlete's phone. Managing 30 athletes with different needs feels like managing 5.
TrainHeroic thinks in terms of "teams" and "clients." You can organize athletes into groups, but individualization means navigating to each athlete separately. The platform only supports team-level and individual modifications - no middle tier for position groups or training tiers. And each additional coach is $9.99/month extra, with phone support locked behind higher pricing tiers.
Readiness data where you make decisions - not in a separate app
Relay builds compliance, wellness, and workload data right where you program - so you have all the context you need when you need it. Design and assign fully custom questionnaires with complete flexibility over questions, timing, and scoring. Integrations with WHOOP, VALD, Hawkin, and Catapult bring readiness, force-plate, and GPS data into the same view. When an athlete's fatigue spikes and sleep drops, you see it before they tell you - and you're already in the right place to act on it.
TrainHeroic offers a single built-in readiness questionnaire. If you want custom wellness tracking, load monitoring, or recovery data, you're either building workarounds or layering in a separate tool. There's no API, so integrations with external systems like WHOOP or force plates aren't native.
An athlete experience that doesn't fight back
Relay's athlete app delivers today's session the moment a coach hits assign. Changes sync instantly - no reloads, no re-downloads. Athletes log results and data flows back in real time. The experience is fast, clean, and doesn't require fighting the interface between sets. When logging a workout feels effortless, compliance goes up - and compliance is where programs actually work.
TrainHeroic's mobile app has strong bones - videos, coaching points, leaderboards, and in-app chat. But user reviews consistently flag the same issues: the app reloads your workout every time you switch apps (even to change a song), input lag makes logging weights frustrating, the app crashes or freezes mid-session, and navigating between days forces you through a calendar flow that auto-pushes to today's date - even when you're working on yesterday's session.
Grow your brand, not someone else's
Relay's marketplace lets you sell programs too - but with full brand customization so athletes see exactly what you want them to see. Your brand, your experience. And Relay takes zero transaction fees - every euro your athletes pay goes to you. On Enterprise, you can go even further: launch your own branded app in the App Store and Google Play. Your athletes download your app, not ours. That's the difference between using a platform and owning a brand.
TrainHeroic's marketplace lets you sell programs - but athletes live inside the TrainHeroic ecosystem, not yours. Custom branding is limited to logos and exercise videos. And TrainHeroic takes $1/month per subscribed athlete plus a 2.9% + $0.30 transaction fee on every sale. As your business scales, those fees compound.
Switch without starting over
Relay lets you import your existing programs directly from PDFs, Excel files, or spreadsheets. Upload what you've already built, and the system structures it for you. No manual re-entry, no lost work. Your onboarding isn't a rebuild - it's a continuation. And we'll cover your current subscription so you never pay double during the transition.
Moving platforms usually means rebuilding everything from scratch - re-entering your exercise library, recreating months of programming, losing athlete history.
Pricing that works for every coach
Relay AthleticAll features included on every plan. Voice AI, program design, athlete app, analytics, and the full exercise library. 7-day free trial, no credit card required.
TrainHeroicTrainHeroic charges around $99/month for its coaching plans with limited athlete slots. The marketplace model also takes $1/month per subscribed athlete plus 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction on program sales. Each additional coach costs $9.99/month extra, and phone support is locked behind higher pricing tiers.
Quick Feature Comparison
Relay AthleticTrainHeroicTrainHeroic excels at marketplace-based program delivery for individual coaches. Relay is built for coaches who need phase-based programming, roster management, and integrated readiness data.
Frequently Asked Questions
The bottom line
TrainHeroic is excellent at what it was built for: delivering training programs to individual clients and selling programming through a marketplace. If you're an independent coach running an online business with a small roster, it's a strong choice - and the marketplace pioneered something real in the space. But if you're a coach thinking in phases and blocks, managing a roster of athletes with different needs, wanting readiness data next to your programming, and ready to build a brand that athletes recognize as yours - not just a profile inside someone else's platform - you've outgrown what TrainHeroic was designed to do. Relay was built for exactly that moment.
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