A COACH FOR THE HEAD, NOT JUST THE ENGINE
The plan bends.
The goal holds.
The pros have an entire team finding their gains. Forma is that team, in your jersey pocket: a coach that remembers every ride and every conversation, and builds your season around the life you actually live.
THE PLATEAU
You're not undertrained. You're unsystematic.
You ride eight hours a week when life allows it. You own the power meter, the good tyres, possibly the aero socks. And the number that matters hasn't moved in two seasons.
Not because you lack the engine. Because your options have always been two kinds of guessing. Invent the week yourself: sessions picked on feel, fuelling approximate, recovery whatever's left over after work. Or download the twelve-week plan written for ten thousand riders at once, the one that prescribes the same Tuesday whether you slept eight hours or four, and falls apart the first time your life refuses to follow the PDF.
The riders who broke through didn't find more hours. They got a system built around one rider.
01
A coach who remembers everything.
Every ride you've ever done. Every conversation. The dodgy knee, the night shifts, the crosswind that broke you last September. A sports scientist would stop at the numbers. Forma is also the mindset coach and the confidant: it notices when work is crushing you, asks how you're actually sleeping, and plans around the answer. Most apps read your data. Forma reads your life, and writes next week from all of it.
You mention a wedding in June, once, in passing. Come June, the plan has already made room: the big week arrives early, the taper swallows the weekend, and the goal date never moves.
02
Marginal gains, without the wind tunnel.
The doctrine I watched work for a decade was never about £7,000 wheels. It's the wind read before you roll out, the chain waxed instead of oiled, the carbs eaten before you feel like you need them. Forma briefs you before every ride: where today's wind helps, where it bites, what to wear, how to fuel. On the morning of your goal event it draws your route coloured by headwind and tailwind and tells you where to spend and where to save.
Compound improvements. Invisible in isolation. Significant over time.
03
And it trains the part that quits first.
Your legs rarely fail before your head does. Forma coaches both, wrapped around every session. Before you clip in, a briefing: what today is for, what the weather is doing, where your head needs to be. During, the words in your ear pacing the intervals on the turbo. After, a debrief that reads your ride against the conditions instead of calling a headwind a bad day. And on race-day morning, the talk that settles you before the flag drops.
It even starts before the plan exists. Forma doesn't take a date and a GPX file and call it a goal: it asks why this one matters and who it's turning you into, then holds onto your answer until the morning you need it back.
Target
287w
Interval
3/5
WHY FORMA EXISTS
Talent was never the missing ingredient in my family. The system was.
My grandfather raced time trials in post-war Britain, training by feel between RAF shifts, riding 88 miles each way on weekends to see my grandmother. My dad built wheels, 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 I finally saw what my grandfather and my father never had. Not the legs. They had the legs. The coaches, the numbers people, the psychologists: the system that turns an engine into results.
Forma is that system, finally in reach. I built it for the rider with the engine, the job and the family. Which is to say, I built it for us.
Gareth Winter
PALMARÈS
2011 to 2019
Inside Team Sky and British Cycling, watching marginal gains practised rather than preached
Veloforte
Creative director at the UK's fastest growing sports nutrition company, where fuelling stopped being an afterthought
Mindvalley
Creative director and head of content at the world's leading personal transformation platform
The people
Twenty years building work with the best minds in performance, coaching, longevity, mindset and self mastery. Forma is what happens when all of that gets pointed at one bike
THE JOURNAL
Everything here, I have actually tested.
Long-form writing on the gains worth chasing, the head that quits before the legs do, and training that has to survive a job. No sponsored roundups, no listicles, no gear I have not ridden.
Strava tells you what you did. Forma tells you what to do next, remembers it, and rides with you while you do it.
THE FOUNDING HUNDRED
That's the whole club.
One hundred founding members get the coach, the memory, the pre-ride briefings, the plan that rebuilds itself around your life, and a founder who reads your first month personally and writes back.
A human coach runs £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 ride at £14.99, locked for as long as they stay.
Why only a hundred? Because I read every founding rider's first month myself, and a hundred is the honest limit of that promise. When the places are gone, the doors close.
FAIR QUESTIONS
- I already have TrainerRoad.
- Keep it if it's working. It gives you workouts. It doesn't remember your knee, reroute your season around a wedding, read the wind before your ride, or talk you off the ledge on race-day morning. Different job.
- I don't have ten hours a week.
- Neither do I. Forma plans inside the hours you actually have, and when the week collapses, the plan bends instead of shaming you. That's the whole point of the name on the door.
- I always fall off the plan by week three.
- Everyone does; week three is when life shouts loudest. Forma is built for the return, not the streak: a missed week is data, the plan rebuilds itself, and nobody audits the gap. Design beats discipline.
- Is the mindset stuff woo?
- It's the talk in the team car, not incense. I sat in the room when Professor Steve Peters taught this at Sky. Your head is equipment. It trains.
- I ride Garmin. Or Wahoo. Or something older.
- All of it works. Wahoo links directly. Everyone else drops in ride files or imports their entire history from a Strava archive in one go, ten years in about fifteen minutes.
- What happens to my data?
- It's yours. Export it or delete it whenever you like, and it is never sold. Your GPS traces stay on our own server, right down to working out place names offline. The single exception: the start point of a ride goes to a weather service, because that's the only way I can tell you what the wind actually did to you.
THE WAITLIST
Hold your place.
The doors open on 15 September. Join now and I'll send you one letter a week until they do: the fuelling maths, the free marginal gains, the real numbers from my own testing. You'll be faster by launch day without paying a penny. That's the deal.
ONE QUESTION
What ride are you aiming at?
Optional, and answering just means I turn up prepared.
One letter a week until 15 September, and a note the day the doors open. Unsubscribe in a click. No spam, ever.