Coggan Power Zones, Zone by Zone

Andrew Coggan and Hunter Allen’s seven-zone scheme is the reference table for power-based cycling training. Every zone is a percentage of your functional threshold power, so the table is universal and the wattages are yours alone. Enter your FTP to see both at once:

The seven zones

Zone	Name	% of FTP	How long you can hold it
1	Active recovery	up to 55%	indefinitely; conversation never stops
2	Endurance	56–75%	hours — the classic long steady ride
3	Tempo	76–90%	long, but it takes concentration to stay there
4	Lactate threshold	91–105%	about an hour at the top end, ridden as 10–30 min blocks
5	VO2 max	106–120%	3 to 8 minutes per interval, 30–40 min total at most
6	Anaerobic capacity	above 121%	30 seconds to 3 minutes
7	Neuromuscular power	not defined as a percentage	seconds

Why the last two rows look different from the rest

This is the detail most reproductions of the table get wrong. Zones 1 to 5 are closed bands. In the tables that circulate, zone 6 is written as an open one — above 121% of FTP, with no upper limit — and zone 7 carries no percentage at all, because average power over a five-second standing start does not describe what makes the effort a zone 7: the load is musculoskeletal rather than metabolic, and the useful comparison is against your own previous sprints, not against your threshold.

One caveat about provenance, because it changes how much weight the paragraph above can carry. The primary source for the scheme is Allen and Coggan’s book Training and Racing with a Power Meter, which is not open access; this page could not consult it, so it does not claim what the original text prints. What we could open is a 2024 cycling training study that prescribed its whole intervention from this model, citing that book. It used six power zones: under 55% zone 1, 56–75% zone 2, 76–90% zone 3, 91–105% zone 4, 106–120% zone 5 and above 121% zone 6. In that study zone 7 is not an unbounded band — it simply does not appear. That is one intervention study rather than a survey of the field: the narrative review of power profiling also used on this page does not discuss zones at all.

Charts that print “121–150%” for zone 6 and “above 150%” for zone 7 — the calculator above included — are supplying a boundary we cannot trace to any published source. Some number has to appear in a table, so it is a workable implementation convention. It is still a convention.

What each zone is actually for

Zones 1 and 2 carry the volume. Zone 1 is recovery spinning between efforts and after hard days; zone 2 is the aerobic base, ridden for hours, and it is where most of a well-built season lives. Neither hurts, and that is the point.

Zone 3 is the ambiguous one. It feels productive and it is genuinely useful, but it costs more recovery than zone 2 for adaptations that overlap heavily with it. Group rides drift here without anyone deciding to.

Zone 4 is the zone the whole scheme is anchored to, since it brackets your FTP. Because it is mentally taxing, it is trained in repeats rather than continuously.

Zones 5 to 7 are the sharp end: three to eight minute efforts for maximal aerobic power, short maximal efforts for anaerobic capacity, and seconds-long sprints for neuromuscular power. They need to be scheduled when you are fresh, and consecutive days in them rarely work.

What the zones do not tell you

The model is prescriptive, not physiological. A 2022 review notes that FTP itself lacks a physiological definition and represents a single point on your power-duration curve, so zone boundaries inherit whatever error your test carried. Treat the table as a shared vocabulary for prescribing workouts, and retest consistently rather than chasing decimals.

To turn the percentages into watts, use the FTP training zones calculator. To find the FTP the whole table depends on, start with the 20-minute test.