INVITE ONLY · A HUNDRED FOUNDING PLACES
The AI cycling coach that knows your week as well as your watts.
Forma remembers every ride and every conversation, from the dodgy knee to the wedding in June, and builds your season backwards from the ride you’re aiming at. When life gets in the way, it rewrites the next fortnight with you. It coaches your head too, and I learned why that matters in a decade inside Team Sky and British Cycling.
A hundred founding UK riders pay £14.99 a month instead of £19.99, locked for as long as they stay subscribed.
THE PLATEAU
Your plan doesn’t know you slept four hours.
You ride eight hours a week when life allows it. You own the power meter, the good tyres, possibly the aero socks. And your FTP, the power you can hold for about an hour, hasn’t moved in two seasons.
Until now you’ve had two options, and both are guesswork. You can invent the week yourself, with sessions picked on feel, fuelling roughly right and recovery fitted around work. Or you can download a twelve-week plan written for ten thousand riders at once. It sets the same Tuesday session whether you slept eight hours or four, and it falls apart the first time your life doesn’t follow the PDF.
Riders who keep improving for years have someone who knows their life as well as their numbers, and plans each week around both. That’s the job Forma does.
01
It remembers what you tell it.
It keeps every ride you’ve done and every conversation you’ve had with it, so it knows about the dodgy knee, the night shifts and the crosswind that broke you last September. Each week it asks how you’re sleeping and whether work is getting on top of you, and when life gets in the way, it rewrites the next fortnight with you.
I asked it for a Sa Calobra plan three days after a crash. I didn’t mention the crash in that message. It brought it up before it wrote a single session.
02
Marginal gains, without the wind tunnel.
Most of the marginal gains I watched work for a decade cost very little: reading the wind before you roll out, waxing the chain instead of oiling it, eating before you feel you need to. Each day, Forma briefs you on where the wind will help and where it will be against you, and what to wear and carry. On the morning of your goal event, if you’ve given it the course GPX, it draws your route coloured by headwind and tailwind, and tells you where to spend your effort and where to save it.
03
And it coaches your head too.
Your legs rarely give up before your head does, so Forma coaches both. Before you clip in, it tells you what today’s session is for and where your head needs to be. On the turbo, it talks you through the intervals. Afterwards, it reads your ride against the conditions, so a headwind doesn’t get logged as a bad day. On race-day morning, it helps you settle before the start.
When you talk a goal through with it, it asks why the goal matters to you and what you’d know about yourself at the finish. It keeps your answer and shows it to you again on race-day morning.
Strava tells you what you did. Forma remembers what you’ve told it, tells you what to do next, and talks you through it on the turbo.
THE FOUNDING HUNDRED
That’s the whole club.
A hundred founding riders get the coach that remembers what they tell it and coaches their head as well as their legs, the daily briefings, and a plan it rewrites with them when life gets in the way. I also read every founding rider’s first month and write back.
A human coach costs £150 to £250 a month at typical UK rates, before the bike fit and the testing. Forma is £19.99 a month. The founding hundred pay £14.99, locked for as long as they stay subscribed.
Why only a hundred? Because reading every first month myself is the promise, and a hundred is as many riders as I can honestly keep it for. When the hundred places are gone, so is the £14.99.
THE WAITLIST
Hold your place.
Invites go out in queue order, and the founding hundred pay £14.99 a month, locked for as long as they stay subscribed. Until yours arrives I’ll send you one letter a week with the fuelling maths, the cheap marginal gains and the numbers from my own testing. The letters are free.
ONE QUESTION
What ride are you aiming at?
Optional, and answering just means I turn up prepared.
One letter a week until your invite arrives. Reply “stop” to any of them and you’re off the list.
WHY FORMA EXISTS
My grandfather and my dad never had a coach.
My grandfather raced time trials in post-war Britain, training by feel between RAF shifts and riding 88 miles each way at weekends to see my grandmother. My dad built wheels and led the Surrey League as a young rider, then three boys arrived and the racing stopped. I grew up riding to school on the back of his tandem.
Then I spent a decade inside Team Sky and British Cycling, and saw what my grandfather and my dad never had: the coaches, the performance analysts and the psychologists.
My grandfather fitted his training around RAF shifts, my dad fitted his around a job and three boys, and neither had anyone planning it for them. I built Forma so riders with a job and a family, me included, can have a coach who plans around all of it.
Gareth Winter
PALMARÈS
2011 to 2019
Inside Team Sky and British Cycling, watching marginal gains done day to day
Veloforte
Creative director at the UK’s fastest-growing sports nutrition company
Mindvalley
Creative director and head of content, working with teachers of mindset and performance
The people
Twenty years working with experts in performance, coaching, longevity and mindset. Forma puts what I learned from them into one coach for one rider
THE JOURNAL
I’ve tested everything I write about here.
Long reads on cheap marginal gains, the mental side of riding, and training when you have a full-time job. There are no sponsored roundups or listicles.
FAIR QUESTIONS
- Is the coach a person?
- No. Forma is an AI coach. Anthropic’s Claude models write its replies, working from what I’ve learned in cycling. Nobody checks a reply before you read it, so it can be wrong, and it isn’t medical advice. I read every founding rider’s first month afterwards, and I answer the emails.
- I already have TrainerRoad.
- Keep it if it’s working. Forma writes your plan and runs your indoor sessions too, so you’d use it in place of TrainerRoad. What it adds is the memory of your knee and your wedding, a daily read of the wind, and someone to talk to on race-day morning.
- I don’t have ten hours a week.
- Neither do I. Forma plans inside the hours you tell it you have.
- I always fall off the plan by week three.
- Most people do, usually when work or family takes over. Tell Forma what happened and it rewrites the coming fortnight with you, once you say yes. It never asks you to make the missed sessions up.
- Is the mindset stuff woo?
- No. I sat in the room when Professor Steve Peters taught it at Sky, and it’s practical: what to think about on the start line, what to do when a climb starts going badly, and how to stop one bad session spoiling the week.
- I ride Garmin. Or Wahoo. Or something older.
- All of it works. Wahoo links directly, so rides turn up on their own once your ELEMNT syncs. Everyone else uploads FIT, GPX or TCX files, points Forma at a Dropbox folder, or imports their whole history from the archive Strava or Garmin lets you download, ten years in about fifteen minutes.
- Is there an app to download?
- No, and you don’t need one. Forma runs in your browser, on your phone or your laptop. Indoor sessions run in Chrome on a laptop or desktop, paired to a Bluetooth smart trainer, and Forma sets the resistance for you.
- I’m not in the UK.
- For now Forma is open to riders in the UK only. Hold your place anyway and reply to my first letter with where you live, and I’ll tell you the day it opens there.
- What happens to my data?
- It’s yours. Export it or delete it whenever you like, and it’s never sold. Your GPS traces stay on our own server, down to working out place names offline. A ride’s start point and time go to a weather service so I can tell you what the wind did to you. When the app shows a map, your browser fetches the map images for that area from CARTO, and if you use voice, the text of each reply goes to ElevenLabs to be spoken. Your conversations and ride summaries go to Anthropic to be answered, and Anthropic doesn’t use them to train its models.