Zwift has just announced (most of) their slate of spring/summer 2026 announcements, which they dub ‘This Season on Zwift’. This will essentially cover most of the announcements until their annual fall episode by the same name, usually in September.
Like last year, these announcements also coincide with the Zwift Community Live event held for its second year here in Mallorca (Spain). This event is designed to be a Zwift community get-together for outdoor riding, with various product updates about Zwift, and having Zwift users being able to interact with the product teams and other well-known cycling people.
In any case, here’s what’s new coming up over the next 5 months. Some things have launched recently (now with more details), some are coming in the weeks ahead, and some are still a few months away.
New Paris Roads Coming:
On June 26th, Zwift will be releasing new pavement on the Paris map, which adds in the famed Sacré-Cœur route that was featured as part of the 2025 Tour de France, as well as portions in the 2024 Paris Olympics. As part of the Olympics, this route immediately became a massive fan favorite, and now you’ll be able to ride it within Zwift.
This will include 13KM of new tarmac and cobblestones, including a KOM finish at the Basilica, and three new sprint segments with 10+ new routes.
While Zwift hasn’t released the full map yet, I have seen the rough route, and it’s essentially blending the previous route to/from Sacré-Cœur, along with the upcoming 2026 Tour de France route that takes a different approach back to the Arc.
I’ve mocked up on the Tour de France 2025 route the pieces that are totally new, previously new, and forever existing. I’ve greyed out the non-relevant parts.
The existing Zwift map is the lower half, the usual TdF finishing loop. The entire upper right portion is the Olympics & 2025 TdF route. And then the 2026 piece will be that little segment going from the Arc, up to the 17th. Zwift says they’re gonna create a crapton of routes out of these roads.
Either way, this will finally take the Paris map and give it some life beyond the well-worn circuit. I’d love to see them continue to expand this towards other areas as well; there’s just so much potential there.
Gravel Mountain:
Launching on April 6th, there will be a new event-only gravel circuit, in a “red-rock environment” as seen above/below. Zwift says this route will include ultra-wide roads, corner berms, and more, and is designed specifically for gravel bikes (in terms of selecting to ride those bikes within the game). This is a short-format circuit, designed for multiple loops.
The first opportunity to ride this will be from April 6th to May 3rd, as part of the Pas Normal Studios Racing Series (Pas Race Series). Note that this is specifically a new route, but not a new road.
There will be two new routes within Gravel Mountain, which is within the Makuri Islands. There are also new gravel bikes coming, as part of 13 total new bikes covering gravel/road/TT (and 13 new wheels).
Personalized Recommendation Engine Details:
This ‘Next Up’ feature has been slowly rolling out over the last many months, and is now available in English to all riders. This has been providing specific workout recommendations based on a slate of things, and as part of this, they’ve outlined what’s included in powering those recommendations. The inputs as of spring include:
– CTL
– Fitness Score
– Activities from 3rd party devices imported in (specifically any outdoor bike/run workouts, but not currently other cardio types)
– What types of rides you tend to do on certain days (e.g., longer rides on weekends)
– Your longer-term 30-day and 90-day averages
– The goals you’ve specified in Zwift
– Your FTP profile, and how that relates to everything listed above
At this juncture, they are not looking at 3rd party plans connected to Zwift (e.g., TrainerRoad), as they are instead deferring to that plan (meaning, if you have a day off from that plan, there’s probably a good reason for it). For example, you can see below within my own account, I have a TrainerRoad workout coming in for today. I can override that by choosing ‘Tune’, but otherwise that’s what Zwift is saying I should do.
The key message out of this is actually that they are seeing this as laying the foundation for things in the future.
In addition, starting in late April, they’ll be giving simple recommendations on outdoor rides. Zwift says they will continue to incorporate your outdoor rides into the platform, now just with the existing importing of outdoor rides, but looking forward to encouraging you to ride outside sometimes (and still get credit for that in Zwift).
The details of this are still a bit fuzzy, but they said they’re going to start pretty basic, and scale-up over time. They are keenly aware of Strava’s recent failboat around this, gone wrong.
Week Ahead Planning:
As part of this forward-looking planning, starting from late April you’ll be able to add routes, workouts, and rides to your schedule for the next week ahead using the Zwit Companion App. You can see a short animated example of this below, showing moving around these components.
At launch, the following types are supported:
– Cycling & Running Events
– Cycling Workouts
– Cycling Routes
– Robopacer Rides
– Challenge Tasks (TdZ, Route of the Week, etc…)
In addition, any scheduled workout coming from a 3rd-party platform will automatically appear as well, such as those from TrainerRoad or Xert.
Beyond Level 100:
Starting in April, you’ll be able to go beyond level 100 for cycling, and from 30 to 50 levels for running. In terms of the cycling side, there’s no specific ‘top’ anymore, but rather, it’ll just sorta continue forever. Zwift says right now they’ve envisioned into the “multiple hundreds” of levels.
For context, when they look at all the existing Level 100 riders today, they anticipate it’s plausible someone gets to level 200 within a year, based on looking at the top-riding people, but it sounds like that’s in the single-digit number of people total.
Once someone reaches Level 100, they’ll get a little orange slash/mark/stripe on their profile and ‘Zwifters Nearby’ name tag in-game.
They noted that everything in-game is unlocked from level 100, there aren’t any further unlocks (e.g., at level 125). In talking to Zwift, it sounds like there was a lot of internal conversation on how to handle not only the transition beyond level 100, but how levels exist beyond that. For the most part, they’re seeing the arrival at Level 100 as *the* key milestone, with stripes beyond that. As they didn’t want to create a scenario for people below level 100 (most Zwifters) that would make it pointless to achieve Level 100.
Expanded HUD Customization:
Zwift will be expanding its configurable HUD for workouts specifically (separate from the standard HUD) in May, with a total of 13 biometrics to choose from in four customizable slots.
The configurable metrics will be:
– Cadence (RPM)
– Average Power
– Heart Rate (BPM)
– Energy Burned (CAL)
– Power to Weight (W/KG)
– Kilojoules (KJ)
– Stress Points (SP)
– Core Temperature (DEG)
– Heat Strain Index (HSI)
– Weighted Power (WP)
– Power Balance (L/R)
– Average W/KG
Keep in mind, this is all separate from your other always-on fields, including current power, target power, heart rate, time, distance, etc… And again, this is specific to be applied to workout mode.
Garmin Scale Weight Sync:
This is a quickie, and technically not likely to be finished by summer, but Zwift did at least commit to it now. Zwift confirmed that weight sync from Garmin weight scales will likely be coming this fall (at the latest). This means you’ll be able to step on your Garmin Index Scale, and then have it update your Zwift weight. (Side note: That scale is currently on sale).
Further, Zwift has also announced that they’ve unfudged the existing Withings WiFi scale weight sync (which was having a rough go of life), and that by the end of next week, it should be finished backfilling data for everyone and be functional again going forward.
While one can debate all day long on weight cheating and such with Zwift racing, the basis here is actually more interesting than focused on race weight cheating. It ensures that aspects like the inputs to fitness trend tracking are fully aligned. Meaning that someone could be having theoretical flat-lines in power (watts), but equally be losing weight at the same time. Thus, in reality, their watts/KG is increasing, but unless they were manually updating Zwift, Zwift might incorrectly think they’ve stagnated.
So, while yes, there are aspects here that can help with Zwift racing fairness, I get the feeling from Zwift that they are far more interested in other scenarios long-term.
Overall, this is a huge list of new things coming for the spring/summer, plus there’s a slate of other events/camps/etc that I don’t tend to cover as much (I usually focus on the software and hardware sides).
With that – thanks for reading!
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Interesting post. Will you cover Whoosh too? Works great, cost 0$. covers running, biking and… rowing!
I cover it from time to time, though frankly, there’s been virtually no requests/interest to cover it over the last year or two. There’s far more requests around Rouvy, which is also why you see more posts on that when things are interesting.
Reception of MyWhooshes Rowing feature has been awfull in the rowing community. It looked and felt it was slapoed together by an intern on a friday morning. Aside from weird graphics, the metrics were all wrong (never seen a skiff go 40 km/hour). They choose Bled to launch with, but made a single lap 10K, which is unrealistic as walking around it is about 5K. The exact same track in EXR is about 1.3K. Thus the scenery moves horribly slow, even for rowing standards. And they added a huge set of lanes to keep rowers apart. Aside spoiling the view with having bouys everywhere, you never meet other rowers (as people are put in different lanes). They have a lot of work to do to beat EXR on anything….
My 2 cents about levels over 100: they need to review the increment curve between one level and the next one.
I think this curve should be quite steep. For example, going from level 60 to 61 requires now 11000 xp, 80 to 81 requires 12,000 XP, and going from 90 to 91 only requires 13,000 XP.
If you want to avoid having to constantly add levels, you need to revisit all of this for the next wave of additional levels
I also think that too many levels don’t make much sense, so I’d rather see another 100 difficult levels than another 400/500 ‘flat’ levels.
I’m a little surprised it’s that linear. If we’re gamifying everything else…
Historically, 1st edition of AD&D (1978), lv2 Cleric took 1500 xp. lv3 took 3000, 4 6000, etc, basically doubling every level. So if 60 to 61 took 11,000xp, 61 to 62 should take 22,000 xp!
But modern game design has gone to linear, so maybe that’s it.
Modern gaming doesn’t work like that… too long between dopamine hits. It’s about profitability and I’m sure this hits some sort of sweet spot for Zwift.
Every time I see one of these Zwift updates I get really excited there might be an announcement for a 0 setback seatpost for the Zwift Ride.
Alas… Sad
bro. i thought you were going to talk about zwift integration with an UPCOMING garmin index weight scale, not the same damned S2 which is almost a decade old at this point
It’s actually all Garmin scales, S1, S2, doesn’t really matter. :) All the same API from Garmin’s standpoint.
The original Index is the one that is a decade old (but still actively supported by Garmin). I have one and it is still plugging along, much to my surprise given Garmin’s track record. The S2 came out much later, in 2020, IIRC.
Can I assume that your reference to Gravel MTN being in Maker Island is a typo and it exists within Makuri Islands? If so, where on the islands does it appear?
Yes, Makrui. Being an event-only circuit, it’s not available to enter otherwise.
Apparently they are only doing events on Maker Island, so in a way that typo really has come full circle!
I knew Ray is popular, but rebranding Mallorca as Maker Island… bold move :-D
Thanks for the post. Interesting updates coming.
I’m excited for Withings to work, it will be great to have that update my weight automatically
Any intel on why Whoop logo is in some of the announcement visuals?
Whoop was a sponsor for the Zwift Community Live event in some capacity (I’m not entirely sure, I missed that presentation night).
Beyond that, I have other guesses as to why that’s there, but won’t say much more for now…
sacrec court = Sacré-Cœur (para 3 of that section)
That’s, what’s a wild auto-correction!
I would love to pin the elevation profile to always be visible on the center HUD.
Any mention of any development or updates to Clubs fucntionality?
Like a complete workout-library for Clubs?
Do you know if the configurable metrics on the HUD for workouts will be specific to the workout interval, or for the whole activity? Showing average power for workout interval is a long standing feature request.
Was hoping for alpha 1 dfa as a metric to show in the HUD. The devices that run zwift are powerful enough the calculation should be easy. Plus would get a large enough segment of people using the metric to make it more useful
I miss the average cadence at HUD
I miss the climb rate. For some reason that’s what I’m looking at when outside, not the watts. Perhaps because it allows easy (and usually quite accurate!) prediction of arrival time when you know the elevation of the pass. But that’s the why, the “why is it not in Zwift” lacks an answer.
For average cadence, it’s easy enough to set up on a head unit, assuming you have and use one. Also having it on the Zwift screen would be preferable if you happen to be interested in the number, no doubt about that, but that’s more like a nice to have. Climb however does not exist on the indoored head unit, Zwift does not share elevation data as some kind of virtual barometer sensor. Only Zwift could show that.
(same for elevation itself, i goes Zwift would rather not kill suspension of disbelief by putting an explicit number next to the line where Watopia starts getting snowy?)