Beginners Guide To Power Zones - 5 Adding Power To Zones

Fitness varies by zone. Some riders are great at short distances, some at long, some at all. Combining power and zones provides a means to understand in a precise way for each individual athlete.

There are a number of different ways to do this. The one I would recommend is the simplest in concept.

First: Pick a sample duration for each of zones 4-7. A recommendation would be 5s for Zone 7, 1 minute for Zone 6, 5 minutes for Zone 5 and one hour for Zone 4. The reason for suggesting these is that they make comparisons with other riders easier as we shall see shortly. But feel free to choose others or have more than one duration per zone if you like.

Second: set aside a couple of weeks and plan sessions aiming to go as hard as you can for each duration. You will probably already know what brings out your best. If you have already been recording rides with power say on Strava or another tool like Zwift you can pick your bests from there. (Do not use “estimates” of power from any software tool though. You have to be using a real power meter.) Go hard, that is more important than holding the full duration. So for Zone 4 if you give it all you have but pop after 40 minutes that is fine.

Honestly, if you do not feel you have hit your best it really does not matter. One key benefit to training with a power meter is that it is an iterative process. If you results are too low they will soon go up as you start your workouts.

If time permits then it would also be nice to get an example of Zone 3 and Zone 2 but these are not essential. They can be added as and when you feel you have the data.

The result of will be a table that looks something like this, (which shows my bests for the current year)

Zone	Duration	Watts	Comment
7	5s	748	Hard sprint on final straight towards home
6	60s	485	False flat into first climb out north
5	5 minutes	373	Race first 5 minutes to establish break
4	1 hour	301	Race full on from start to finish
3	2.5 hours	269	Alpe du Zwift repeats
2	5	212	Best 5 hours of 7 hour gran fondo

That is it. Once done you will have your starting power zones. Now to put them to use.