FTP and Power Zones Calculator

A power figure as a percentage of functional threshold power, placed in a zone under either of the two published renderings of Coggan’s seven levels — which disagree above 120% — with the watts at every boundary printed so you can apply a scheme this page does not carry.

Formula

The two published renderings of the same author’s scheme

British Cycling names a different set, and its numbers could not be read

A zone scheme is one author’s model, and there is more than one of it

This page is about cycling. Two different kinds of number appear in this category and they are not sourced the same way. A regulation — a minimum bicycle weight, a gear rollout limit for a junior rider — is published by a body for a period, and every one quoted here is printed with that body and that edition, because the Union Cycliste Internationale and the national federations revise them. A definition — a gear ratio, a circumference, a rate of climb — belongs to nobody and is the same everywhere, and where this page relies on one it says whose published wording it took it from.

Be clear about what functional threshold power is and is not. It is not a formula: it is defined by a test, as the highest power a rider can hold in a quasi-steady state without fatigue for about an hour. The familiar shortcut — ride as hard as you can for twenty minutes and take 95% of the average — is a convention from a named source, not a physical constant. The peer-reviewed reliability study at DOI 10.1055/a-1018-1965 credits it to Allen and Coggan’s Training and Racing with a Power Meter, second edition, 2010, and Hunter Allen, who co-wrote that book, gives the arithmetic as “multiply the average power registered during these 20 minutes by 0,95”. In the same piece he says some riders should subtract more than 5% and others about 3%. That is why the factor is an input on this site and not a number baked in.

A power zone is somebody’s model, and the author of the most used one says so himself. Dr Andrew Coggan’s seven levels, published under his own byline on TrainingPeaks on 29 April 2016 and updated 18 July 2026, come with the sentence “determining the appropriate number of zones is somewhat arbitrary, as the physiological response to exercise falls on a continuum”. Other publishers print different numbers of zones: British Cycling’s own power calculator page names six numbered zones plus an unnumbered Sweet Spot between Tempo and Threshold, which is a different count and a different set of names. So no scheme is presented here as the definition — the scheme is a choice you make above, and the watts at every boundary are printed so you can apply a scheme this page does not carry.

The divergence is small, specific and easy to check. Below 120% of FTP the two renderings agree on every boundary. Above it they separate: TrainingPeaks, under the author’s own byline, prints level 6 as “>121%” and “N/A” in level 7’s percentage cell, so on that table no percentage of FTP ever reaches level 7 — it is defined by effort duration instead. Favero Electronics, attributing the same scheme to the same author, closes zone 6 at 150% and opens zone 7 above it. So a rider at 160% of FTP is Level 6, Anaerobic Capacity, on one page and Zone 7, Neuromuscular Power, on the other. At an FTP of 285 W that is 456 W, and you can watch the band change above by switching the first input.

A smaller thing, printed because hiding it would be dishonest. Both published tables give their ranges in whole percentages — “<55%” then “56-75%” — leaving a one-point hole at every boundary, so a figure of 55.5% of FTP is in no published band at all. This page closes each hole at the lower number, so 55.5% reads as the second zone. That is this site’s decision and not something either publisher states.

The number this page cannot look up for you, it asks you for. The calculator engine has no table interpolation of any kind, and a curve fitted to stand in for a published table is worst at its extremes, which is exactly where an answer changes anything. Anyone who needs this calculation already has the figure, printed on the thing this page is about, so that figure is the input and the arithmetic done on it is honest.

What this page will not do: tell you what to ride, how long for, or what any zone is “for”. It computes a percentage, names the publisher of the boundaries it used, and prints the watts at every boundary so a reader with a coach, a federation scheme or a different book can do the comparison themselves. For the Normalised Power an Intensity Factor is properly built from, and why this site computes none, the normalised power and intensity factor explainer sets out the whole position; for the watts-per-kilogram side of the same numbers, the power to weight ratio calculator.

Where the line runs between this page and the health section: health owns the athlete’s body, this category owns the bike and the ride. A heart rate is measured in the rider, so a heart-rate training zone is health’s work, at the target heart-rate zones calculator, and so is aerobic capacity, at the VO2 max calculator. A watt is measured at the cranks by a strain gauge in the bicycle and would read the same if something other than a person were turning them, so power, and everything built on it, is here. Nothing on this page prescribes a wattage, an interval, a heart rate or anything to eat, and nothing here is a physiological measurement or a medical claim.

Frequently asked questions

Related calculators

References

1. TrainingPeaks. “Power Training Levels”, byline “By Dr. Andrew Coggan, Ph.D.”, published 29 April 2016, “Updated July 18, 2026” (READ TWICE on 15 Oct 2026 on two different URL paths, /learn/articles/ and /coaching/article/, with identical results; 18,000 to 30,000 characters each, levels table as readable TEXT both times, while the adaptations chart and the Borg scale are images and were not read). The Average Power column, verbatim: Level 1 Active Recovery “<55%”, 2 Endurance “56-75%”, 3 Tempo “76-90%”, 4 Lactate Threshold “91-105%”, 5 VO2 Max “106-120%”, 6 Anaerobic Capacity “>121%”, 7 Neuromuscular Power “N/A”. The author’s own caveat: “determining the appropriate number of zones is somewhat arbitrary, as the physiological response to exercise falls on a continuum”. Note that the page’s metadata names a different author from its visible byline, and that the column is headed Average Power rather than % of FTP, the zones being described as relative to threshold power.
2. Favero Electronics S.r.l. “Power training zones for cycling”, cycling.favero.com, published 17 November 2025, modified 12 August 2026 (read 15 Oct 2026; about 20,000 characters of which the article is roughly 4,000, both zone tables as readable TEXT, while the zones graph is an image and was not read). A power meter manufacturer, not a governing body, and cited because it prints the SAME author’s scheme with a DIFFERENT top end — which is what the FTP page is built on. Attributing the scheme to Andrew Coggan and Training and racing with a power meter, its seven zones as a percentage of FTP are “< 55%”, “56% – 75%”, “76% – 90%”, “91% – 105%”, “106% – 120%”, “121% – 150%” and “> 150%”, with the boundaries also given as FTP times 0.55, 0.75, 0.90, 1.05, 1.20 and 1.50. So zone 6 is bounded here and unbounded on TrainingPeaks, and zone 7 carries a percentage range here and “N/A” there.
3. British Cycling. “Power Calculator”, britishcycling.org.uk, article path 20120925-Power-Calculator-0 (read 15 Oct 2026; about 9,000 to 10,000 characters). Cited ONLY for the NAMES and the COUNT of its zones, and this entry records why. The power table came through as readable text naming seven rows — Active Recovery, Endurance, Tempo, Sweet Spot, Threshold, VO2 max, Anaerobic capacity, of which six are numbered and Sweet Spot is not — with EVERY Low end and High end cell EMPTY, and the FTP and power-to-weight fields empty too, because the figures are generated by a script in the page. NO PERCENTAGE WAS READABLE and none is attributed to British Cycling anywhere in this batch. The page carries no publication date in its text; the 2012 date in its URL is an inference and is not quoted as a date. Footer “© 2026 British Cycling”.
4. “Reliability of the Functional Threshold Power in Competitive Cyclists”, DOI 10.1055/a-1018-1965, accepted 11 September 2019, published online 17 January 2020; the search result’s own page title gives the citation as Int J Sports Med 2020; 41(03): 175–181 (read 15 Oct 2026; about 40,000 characters, Table 1 as text with the layout flattened, reference list appearing twice). THE AUTHOR LIST DID NOT COME THROUGH in either of two fetches — the Authors section was empty on both — so no author is named here. It defines FTP as the highest power a cyclist can hold in a quasi-steady state without fatigue for about sixty minutes, and states that because that test is so long “it was suggested that the FTP might be determined as 95% of the mean PO in a 20-min TT (FTP20)”, crediting that to Allen and Coggan’s Training and Racing with a Power Meter, 2nd edition, 2010. It describes FTP as an input to training stress score and intensity factor, again crediting Allen and Coggan, and does not mention normalised power at all.
5. Favero Electronics S.r.l. “FTP test: what it is and how to do it”, byline Hunter Allen, cycling.favero.com, published 19 November 2025, modified 12 August 2026 (read 15 Oct 2026; about 25,000 characters of which the article is roughly 4,000; no table came through, and none is needed). The 0.95 convention stated by a co-author of the book it comes from: FTP is “defined as the highest power a rider can maintain in a quasi-steady state without fatiguing”, and the test is to “multiply the average power registered during these 20 minutes by 0,95”. Crucially for this batch, it says the 20-minute average is typically about 5% above one-hour sustainable power but that some riders should subtract MORE than 5% and others about 3% — which is why the factor is an input on the FTP page and not a constant. Its metadata names a different author from its byline. It mentions no zone scheme and none of the three TrainingPeaks metrics.
6. TrainingPeaks. “Normalized Power, Intensity Factor and Training Stress Score”, byline “By Dr. Andrew Coggan, Ph.D.”, published 10 February 2016, “Updated May 11, 2026” (read 15 Oct 2026; about 14,000 characters; the intensity ranges and the TSS scale came through as readable bulleted lists, and NO FORMULA was readable anywhere on the page). The proprietor’s own explanatory article, notably less forthcoming than its blog above: it calls the method “a special algorithm” which “is somewhat complicated” and gives no steps. It does define intensity factor exactly — “IF is simply the ratio of the normalized power as described above to your threshold power” — which is the one quantity here a summary screen’s figures are enough to compute. On training stress score it gives NO formula: only that TSS “takes into account both the intensity (i.e., IF) and the duration of each training session” and that it is modelled after Dr Eric Bannister’s heart-rate TRIMPS. THAT IS WHY NO TSS IS COMPUTED IN THIS BATCH — not a licence, but no formula read from its own proprietor. Its heading prints all three marks with a registered symbol: “Normalized Power® , Intensity Factor® , and Training Stress Score®”.