The Power Meter Handbook: A User’s Guide for Cyclists and Triathletes

them listed at cycleops.com/coaches .
     
    HAVING READ PART I, you now should have a basic understanding of what a power meter is and generally how it can help you become a stronger cyclist. Now it’s time to move on to Part II and how you can start training and racing with your power meter to become fitter and faster.

4
Your Power Zones
    BY NOW YOU SHOULD HAVE a good understanding of how your power meter works and what it can do for you. In this and the following chapters, we will get into how you can use your power meter to produce greater fitness. By the end of this chapter, you will have your power-training zones set up and know the basics of how to use those zones for workouts and races.
POWER ZONES
    Power zones are a simple training tool: They are the various power intensities that you use to plan and execute your training. If you have used a heart rate monitor, you are familiar with the process of setting up your heart rate zones for your training. Power zones are similar, and we use seven of them: Active Recovery (zone 1), Aerobic Endurance (zone 2), Tempo (zone 3), Lactate Threshold (zone 4), VO 2 max (zone 5), Anaerobic Capacity (zone 6),and Sprint Power (zone 7). The primary difference between heart rate zones and power zones is that with power, we set each of the seven zones as a percentage of your Functional Threshold Power (FTP) instead of a percentage of a reference heart rate. But what on earth is Functional Threshold Power? Glad you asked; read on for the answer to the surest way yet to build your cycling fitness.
FTP–YOUR MOST IMPORTANT NUMBER
    The first time you set up your heart rate zones, you had two ways of doing it. In the early days of using a heart rate monitor, you may have used your “maximum heart rate” (MHR) to do this. Knowing that number, you’d then use percentages of MHR to assign zones. In recent years, there has been a shift toward basing heart rate zones on percentages of one’s “lactate threshold” heart rate, which you also may have heard called “anaerobic threshold” heart rate. The latter is a much more precise way of establishing zones, as it’s based on the point at which you begin to redline. This critical piece of information is unique to you and has a lot more application to high-performance racing than does MHR.
    Two athletes with the same MHR won’t necessarily have the same “lactate threshold heart rate” (LTHR). That presents a problem. If they have the same zones based on MHR, when they are working out, they will not experience the same sensations of effort. The one with the lower LTHR will be forced to work harder than the higher-LTHR athlete. The one with the lower LTHR needs to have lower zones despite his or her MHR. For this reason, setting up zones based on LTHR is now becoming the norm.
    The challenge of basing zones on lactate or anaerobic threshold (also sometimes referred to as ventilatory threshold, onset of blood lactate accumulation, or maximum lactate steady state) is the sciencespeak confusionfactor. The terminology simply isn’t user-friendly or clear for nonscientists. Few athletes know what all of these terms mean, so they feel compelled to go to a lab or clinic to be tested in order to simply set zones. Then once they have the lab-test data, they sometimes discover that there are different definitions in science of what lactate threshold means. And so the data often turns out to be useless. Money wasted and still no zones.
    In the sections that follow, I’ll explain a relatively new way of setting power zones that doesn’t require an understanding of physiology or an expensive visit to a lab or clinic. It’s a simple concept called “Functional Threshold Power.” We’ll look at a couple of ways you can determine your FTP, and then we’ll set your power zones as a percentage of your FTP.
What Is FTP?
    Functional Threshold Power is the brainchild of a sports scientist and road cyclist by the name of Andrew Coggan, PhD. He came up with the idea in the early 2000s. Dr. Coggan’s way of setting power zones is so simple it’s elegant. It is based on the notion that a fit athlete can maintain his or her lactate threshold intensity for about an hour. So rather than an athlete going to a lab or clinic to directly determine lactate threshold power, he came up with the idea of finding it by discovering the power that athlete can hold for 60 minutes. Brilliant!
    Besides the simplicity, what I like about this method is that it