Back to home
Free tool

Cycling training zones calculator

Enter your FTP and the table below gives you every zone in watts. The percentages are the widely used seven-zone model — conventions, not measurements. They differ slightly between systems, and what does not differ is the logic: every band is defined in relation to your threshold, which is why an inaccurate FTP misplaces all of them at once.

Method and figures last reviewed on 27 August 2026. The calculation is shown in full below, along with its error margin — we would rather you check it than trust it.

Zone
What it is for
Watts
1 · Active recovery
Moves blood without adding stress. Not training, and not meant to be.
0–138 W
2 · Endurance
The aerobic base. Conversational, and the zone most of your week should sit in.
140–188 W
3 · Tempo
Useful in the right dose — and the zone amateurs drift into by accident.
190–225 W
4 · Threshold
Trains the line itself. Hard, focused, expensive to recover from.
228–263 W
5 · VO2max
Raises the ceiling FTP sits under. Short intervals, full attention.
265–300 W
6 · Anaerobic
Repeatability of very hard efforts. Matters for racing, rarely the limiter otherwise.
303–375 W
7 · Neuromuscular
Sprints. Seconds, not minutes — limited by force and coordination, not by aerobic fitness.
> 378 W

Sweet spot sits at 88–94% of FTP — here 220–235 W. It is a name for the top of tempo and the bottom of threshold, not an eighth zone. Values are rounded to whole watts; the FTP they come from carries a typical error of around 5.6%.

What these percentages are, and what they are not

They are a convention that works, not a measurement of you. Different systems draw the lines in slightly different places, and none of them is reading your physiology directly.

What does not differ between models is the logic: every band is defined in relation to your threshold. That is the practical consequence worth keeping — an FTP that is 20 W too high does not make one zone slightly wrong, it shifts all seven at once, and the effect is largest exactly where you spend most of your time.

So the boundaries are worth treating as soft. A ride at 76% and a ride at 74% are the same ride. What matters is which side of the big divides you are on: genuinely easy, genuinely at threshold, or genuinely above it.

The one that decides your season

Zone 2 is where most of the week belongs, and it is the hardest zone to actually ride, because nothing stops you going faster.

The failure mode is specific and common: easy rides creep into zone 3. That middle intensity is expensive — it costs real fatigue — and it buys comparatively little adaptation. Ride it habitually and you arrive at every hard session slightly too tired to hit the numbers that would have moved your threshold. The session gets completed; it just does not do what it was for.

If the table above tells you your zone 2 ceiling is lower than the pace you usually ride "easy", that is the most useful thing this calculator will tell you today.

Why there is no heart-rate table here

Because it would be more precise than the underlying idea deserves. Heart rate lags behind effort at the start of a ride and drifts upward over the course of a long one, so the same effort shows two different numbers ninety minutes apart. It also moves with heat, sleep, caffeine and stress.

Qualitative guidance survives that, and precise bands do not. Zone 2 should feel almost annoyingly easy and let you hold a conversation. Zone 4 is hard, focused, and you can speak only in short phrases. Above that, you are not speaking.

If you train by heart rate rather than power, zone 2 heart rate cycling goes through the field tests properly — including why age-based formulas are rough estimates rather than measurements.

How to distribute them — and how much the model matters

Less than the internet suggests. A 2024 systematic review with meta-analysis pooled seventeen studies and 437 participants comparing polarized training against other distributions. Polarized came out ahead for peak oxygen uptake, but only slightly (SMD 0.24) and only in interventions under twelve weeks and in already highly trained athletes. For the outcomes closer to what you care about, the distributions were indistinguishable: time-trial performance SMD −0.01, and power or speed at the second threshold SMD 0.04, 95% CI −0.21 to 0.29 (Sports Med, 2024).

The interval question lands the same way. Twenty-two well-trained cyclists completed both a one-week block of moderate-intensity intervals and a one-week block of high-intensity intervals. Both improved 15-minute maximal power — 4.9% and 2.8% — with no significant difference (p = 0.44); the moderate block was better for power at 4 mmol lactate, 4.5% against 2.1% (p = 0.03) (Eur J Sport Sci, 2025).

🔴 And the spread on that: the 4.9% carried a standard deviation of 8.7 percentage points, nearly twice the average gain. A group mean promises an individual nothing.

The practical reading: consistency, recovery and whether your easy days are actually easy will decide far more than which distribution you picked.

Keeping the zones honest

Zones drift because FTP drifts. Heat, altitude, sleep, where you are in a block, your trainer's calibration — all of it moves the anchor, and a 3–5% swing between two honest tests is normal.

Retest every six to eight weeks, or after a block that clearly changed something. React to a trend across several tests, never to a single one. And if you set your FTP from an outdoor test, remember that indoor sessions at those targets will feel harder than they should — the same effort measures differently in the two places.

Need the anchor first? That is the FTP calculator.

A table is a snapshot. The part it cannot do is notice, five weeks from now, that your threshold has moved and these ranges have quietly become wrong.

Peakfy computes your zones from the riding you already do and keeps them moving with your FTP estimate, then explains what today's target means and why — with no counters on the conversation. Peakfy is pre-launch and not yet in any app store; data comes in through Intervals.icu and .fit import.

Good questions

Frequently asked

Take your FTP and apply the percentage bands: under 55% is active recovery, 56–75% endurance, 76–90% tempo, 91–105% threshold, 106–120% VO2max, 121–150% anaerobic and above that neuromuscular. Enter your FTP above and the table does the arithmetic. The percentages are conventions rather than measurements, and they differ slightly between models.
Sweet spot is usually given as 88–94% of FTP — at an FTP of 250 W that is roughly 220–235 W. It is not an eighth zone; it is a name for the overlap between the top of tempo and the bottom of threshold, chosen because it is hard enough to force adaptation and gentle enough to repeat two or three times a week.
Because they are conventions, and different systems drew the lines in slightly different places. The logic is the same everywhere: every band is a percentage of your threshold. That is also why the exact boundary matters far less than whether your FTP is roughly right — an inaccurate FTP shifts every zone at once.
Power if you have it, because it does not move with heat, stress or caffeine and makes weeks comparable. Heart rate is still useful as a cost signal — how expensive a given effort was today — but it lags behind effort and drifts on long rides, so precise heart-rate bands promise more than the measurement supports.
Most of it easy, some of it genuinely hard, and very little in between. Beyond that the evidence is less prescriptive than the debate suggests: a 2024 meta-analysis found polarized and other distributions indistinguishable for time-trial performance and for power at the second threshold. Consistency and recovery decide more than the split.

Sources, all read on 27 August 2026: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11329428/ · https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12575440/ · https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7862708/

Train like the pros — whatever your level.

Peakfy is launching soon on iOS and Android, free to try at launch.

See how Peakfy works