The Road Cycling Performance Manual

SETTING ACCURATE TRAINING ZONES AND LEARNING HOW THEY APPLY TO YOUR RIDING IS AN ESSENTIAL STEP TO MAXIMISING YOUR CYCLING PERFORMANCE.

WHETHER YOU’RE TRAINING, riding a sportive or racing, it is essential to have an awareness of how hard you’re working and the effect of this work on your body. Accurate pacing and being able to judge intensity are probably the key determinants of cycling success. If you don’t have a way to objectively measure intensity, you’re riding blind and almost guaranteed not to reach your true potential. How quickly you burn through your body’s carbohydrate stores, whether you can tap into fat reserves, whether you can take on and process more fuel, and how long your leg muscles can keep working are all determined by the intensity at which you’re riding. The majority of problems that riders typically encounter, including cramping, digestive distress or simply running out of gas, can usually be accounted for by poor pacing and intensity awareness. If you try to ride on feel alone, you’re likely to struggle. An intensity that may feel okay on the first climb of a ride, when you’re fresh and buoyed up by the excitement of the day, is likely to be above your ability and you’ll end up paying for it later on. From a training perspective, unless you’re able to monitor accurately the intensity you’re riding at, you won’t be able to ensure that you’re targeting the correct physiological system that the specific session demands. Most riders who fail to monitor their riding intensity end up riding too slowly when they should be going hard and too fast when they should be taking it easy. They tend to settle into the same intensity for every ride, which fails to stimulate their bodies to adapt and become fitter, and just accumulates fatigue. It’s a ‘physiological no-man’s-land’ that inevitably results in diminishing returns, training plateaus and frustration.

‘When I’m training, for the majority of my workouts, I train alone and it’s all about hitting the numbers. Easy rides will tend to be social but, when I do these rides with friends who aren’t pros, they’re always staggered just how slow I go. I always tell them, I promise you, you will want to go harder than I go. It’s hard to find someone who can train with me when I’m going hard but it’s harder to find someone who can ride easy with me and not just drop me.’

If you’re unfamiliar with training using either a heart rate monitor or a power meter, the information in this chapter might appear initially to be a bit daunting, slightly intimidating and complicated. However, stick with it and, once you start applying it to your own riding, it’ll soon start making sense. Even if you don’t feel that you’re quite ready to embark on a full structured training plan or are only just starting to develop your cycling fitness, investing and starting to use a heart rate monitor is still a good idea. You can begin to learn how your heart rate correlates to your perceived effort, what heart rate you can sustain on climbs and when you’re pushing into the red. In doing this and beginning to develop an idea of riding intensity and increased body awareness, when you do decide to take the next step and follow the testing and zone setting methods described in this chapter, it’ll be far more intuitive.

What we’re looking to do, by using a simple test, is find either the heart rate or power output that you’re able theoretically to sustain for an hour. This level is known as functional threshold (FT). If using power, it’s referred to as functional threshold Power (FTP) and if using heart rate, functional threshold heart rate (FTHR). It’s an incredibly relevant metric to endurance performance as it’s effectively your ‘red-line intensity’. Ride below it and you’ll be able to sustain the effort, go above it and you’re on limited time. Once you know this key value, you can then use it to calculate accurate and personalised training zones. These zones, which are described in detail later in the chapter, range from Zones 1 and 2, representing steady paced endurance riding, through Zone 4, which encompasses that key FT value, and right to the near maximal efforts of Zone 6. Because you’ve tested for your FTP or FTHR, these zones will accurately reflect your personal cycling ability and physiology at that moment in time. By using them to pace your cycling, you’ll be able to ensure that you’re riding conservatively enough on endurance rides to last the distance and pushing hard enough on intense interval sessions to stimulate physiological change in your body. Trying to train without using accurate training zones would be analogous to attempting to drive without a speedometer, rev counter or fuel gauge.

As discussed in Chapter 1, there are a number of considerable advantages to training with a power meter and you should make buying one your number one upgrade priority. Their use has become ubiquitous among pro cyclists, and although they have their critics, who say they reduce the spontaneity and excitement of racing, that’s only because they’re such effective pacing tools. The testing protocol for FTP and FTHR is the same and if you have a power meter and a heart rate monitor, you can find both figures during the same test. However, for the reasons previously discussed, you should base your training zones around FTP and train predominately using power. It’s valuable, though, to have an awareness of your FTHR and heart rate zones, as major discrepancies between the two sets of zones can be an indicator that something is amiss. For example, if you were riding in Zone 2 according to power but your heart rate put you in Zone 4, this could be indicative of illness or excessive fatigue. If buying a power meter is completely out of the question, you can still train well and achieve great results using heart rate alone. However, get saving and put off buying those new wheels, I promise it’s worthwhile.

There are many training plans and coaches that advocate the use of maximal heart rate to set training zones. However, this is largely a training relic and the use of FT, whether heart rate or power, is now ubiquitous across the sport. British Cycling trialled it with all levels of riders, from the Great Britain Cycling Team to novice sportive riders, and found it to be the most practical and accurate way to easily calculate training zones.

There are a number of problems with using maximal heart rate. Pushing yourself to your genuine maximal heart rate is very painful, and both physiologically and psychologically extremely difficult. In fact, there are credible theories that suggest that going to your true maximum might actually be impossible, with your body effectively having its own safety cut-off. You need to be incredibly motivated to push that hard and, if you are not quite up for it, your result will be significantly off. If you’re not properly rested or have an underlying bug or virus, which may not even manifest any symptoms, you won’t be able to get anywhere near to your maximum. However, the sub-maximal effort of an FT test is less affected and is therefore a far more robust test.

Also, unless you’re a track sprinter, your maximal heart rate isn’t especially relevant to your performance. However, the intensity that you’re able to sustain for an extended period is pertinent to practically all other areas of cycling performance. It therefore makes sense to test for this value and to base subsequent training zones on it.

An apparently simple way to find a theoretical maximum heart rate and set training zones is to use a generic age-based formula. The classic one is deducting your age from 220 to determine a maximal heart rate figure. However, the original studies that came up with this formula never intended it to be used for performance focused training. They were looking at a safe and conservative method for estimating activity intensity for cardiac rehabilitation patients. Variations on this formula, such as the Karvonen formula, which also factors in resting heart rate, are no better really than the original as they still rely on clumping athletes together by the sweeping generalisation of age. The maximal heart rate figure that such formulas yield tends to be wildly inaccurate and therefore any zones calculated from it will be too.

Although simply plugging your age into a formula is a lot easier than performing an FTHR test from a personal effort point of view, there’s no comparison between the two resulting sets of training zones. One set is personalised, accurate and tuned to your current fitness level, whereas the other is little better than a random guess. Incidentally, many of the training zone auto calculate functions on heart rate monitors use a variation of these formulae. They should be overridden and custom zones based on FTHR entered instead.

As already stated, FT is the intensity that you should be able to sustain for an hour, so it makes sense that the way to test it is to go out, ride an hour-long time trial and record your average heart rate and power for the effort. Realistically, however, it takes a huge amount of motivation, mental strength and pacing experience to ride such a time trial, and finding a suitable route for such an effort is very difficult. Fortunately, it’s been shown that a 20–30-minute test can be used to deduce FT accurately, and the results I’ve taken from such tests do correlate very strongly to approximately hour-long race efforts such as a 40km (25 mile) time trial. Even shorter protocols are available, 8 minutes being popular, but these have been known to give inflated results.

There are a number of different protocols available for a 20–30-minute test, but the aspect common to all of them is a 20-minute effort where you go as hard as you can and record your average heart rate or power. Where they tend to differ is the warm-up and efforts prior to the recorded 20-minute one. My personal preference is the British Cycling protocol, described below, but if you find another method that you prefer, that’s fine as long as you use it consistently.

1That you are well rested, having had at least one full recovery day before performing the test.

2That you avoid eating for 2–3 hours before the test. This will vary from rider to rider but you should follow the same nutritional protocol that you would before an intense training session. If you’re unsure about this, you can find guidelines in Chapter 6.

3If performing the test outdoors, that you have a route that allows you to ride continuously for 30 minutes without significant downhill stretches or having to stop for junctions.

4If performing the test indoors, that you’re able to record and replicate the settings on your bike and indoor trainer.

5A heart rate monitor and/or power meter that allows you to record and recall your average heart rate or power for the test period.

Warm up for at least 20 minutes. Once you know your FT and training zones, you can use the session warm-up described in Chapter 4, but if it’s your first time performing the test, raise the intensity gradually so you feel as though you’re working fairly hard 15 minutes in. Spin easily for the final 5 minutes.

Ride as hard as you can sustain for 30 minutes. Aim to hold a consistent cadence. On a flat course this should be in the 90–100 rpm range but may be lower if testing on a climb.

Ten minutes in, hit the lap button to record your average heart and/or power for the final 20 minutes of the effort.

‘Sometimes we’ll test the riders’ FTP in a laboratory but we’ll usually test out on the road, often on a climb in Majorca. Over the last 5–6 years working with professional riders I’ve seen how test data correlates to training zones and whether riders are able to ride and train in those zones. Field testing definitely yields far more usable zones than testing in a laboratory. It’s a real life effort and so produces real life zones that the riders can genuinely relate to and ride to. Typical laboratory protocols on an ergometer will ramp up the power every 2 minutes or so and then determine FTP from these values. However, FTP is a sustained output, up to an hour, so it’s no wonder that the zones produced from laboratory tests can be unrealistic. On a real climb you can be sure that the numbers they produce are a value that they can sustain.

For testing, we’ll typically use climbs that take 15–30 minutes to ride. The riders will warm up for 30–45 minutes by riding to the climb and then we’ll ask them to go up the climb hard. They’ll know how long the climb is and we’ll make sure that they ride a consistent effort, not going off too hard. If they’re motivated and well rested, they’ll ride at FTP.’ ANDREAS LANG, TEAM PHYSIOLOGIST, CANYON/SRAM

If training using heart rate, the average heart rate you achieved during the 20-minute effort equates to your FTHR.

If training using power, you need to subtract 5 per cent from the average power achieved during the 20-minute effort to find your FTP.

Example: Average power from 20-minute test = 250 watts. FTP = 250 × 0.95 = 237 watts

You can then calculate your training zones by applying the percentage bands in the tables below to your FTHR or FTP respectively.

Once you have these zones, you’ll be able to apply them to all of your riding. Program them into your bike computer, heart rate monitor or power meter head unit, or, if you’re a bit old school like me, print them out and tape them to your stem.

You’ll notice that no percentage band is given for heart rate Zone 6. This is because, at this high intensity, any effort would be over by the time you’d elevated your heart rate to the designated level. Many riders also struggle to pace Zone 5 for this reason and this perfectly illustrates one of the benefits of training with power. Right from the first couple of pedal strokes, you know you’re in the correct zone.

Now you have your training zones, it’s important to understand what they mean and how they apply to your riding.

What it feels like: Very easy. In this zone, your perceived effort shouldn’t be much above brisk walking. You should be easily able to maintain a full conversation and experience no sensations of fatigue.

When you’d be in this zone: Recovery workouts, sitting in the wheels on a club run on the flat or freewheeling downhill. You’ll also ‘spin easy’ in Zone 1 during warm-ups, cool-downs and rest periods during interval sessions.

What it feels like: This should still feel sustainable and comfortable, and you should still be able to maintain a conversation fairly easily. However, especially towards the upper end of the zone or after a long time spent in it, you may have to start concentrating to maintain it.

When you’d be in this zone: Also known as ‘extensive endurance’, this is the go-to intensity for the bulk of a long sportive or endurance ride.

What it feels like: Sometimes referred to as ‘intensive endurance’, this is a sustainable but purposeful effort. You have to concentrate to hold this intensity, any conversation would be in shorter sentences and, after time spent in this zone, you’ll start to experience sensations of fatigue.

When you’d be in this zone: Longer ‘tempo efforts’ typically of 20–40 minutes duration. During a sportive, you would be pushing up into this zone on sustained climbs.

What it feels like: The upper end of this zone is what you sustained during your FT test, so you know what it feels like. Hard sustainable discomfort is a good description, with any conversation limited to short one-word answers. This is your red-line zone and you’re hovering right on the edge of what you can sustain. Expect burning legs and hard breathing.

When you’d be in this zone: In theory, FT is sustainable for an hour but you’d have to be extremely motivated and well trained. Time trialists will target this intensity for a 40km (25 mile) event. However, in training, threshold efforts are normally in the 15–20-minute range. For tough climbs on long rides, you may well go into this zone, but remember, this is your red line and holding it for too long may come back to bite you later on.

This is the intensity where you’re working at your absolute aerobic limit, breathing in and using the maximal amount of oxygen you can. In a sports performance lab, this point can be tested to give a value of millilitres of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute and this figure is referred to as VO2 Max. A world class rider would typically have a VO2 in the range of 75–90ml/kg/min compared to a typical Cat 3 rider who will be around 50ml/kg/min. Although VO2 Max is trainable to an extent and can also be improved by controlled weight loss, your upper limit is probably genetically predetermined.

What it feels like: Hard, really hard. You’ll really be having to focus and both legs and lungs will be burning. No talking at this intensity, a grunt is probably all you’ll be able to manage!

When you’d be in this zone: Hard efforts and intervals lasting between 3 and 8 minutes. During longer sessions, you could hit this zone attacking a short and steep climb but it’ll take a lot out of you. When training for the Tour of Flanders sportive, with its steep cobbled climbs, I threw plenty of these efforts into my long rides.

Once you’re pushing this hard, your body is having to produce energy without oxygen, or ‘anaerobically’. Anaerobic capacity refers to the total amount of energy you’re able to produce in this way.

When you’d be in this zone: During sprints and high-intensity interval work. Efforts can be as short as 5 seconds but up to a minute. You wouldn’t use heart rate for this intensity as it’ll lag behind the effort too much. Just go for it full bore!

‘SWEET SPOT’

There’s an extra training zone, known as ‘sweet spot’, which I’ll refer to in the ride and workout plans (see Chapter 4). Covering mid Zone 3 to mid Zone 4, it’s a very beneficial zone for riders to train in. It’s hard enough to elicit gains in FT but not as challenging and exhausting as full-on threshold work. This means you can train in your sweet spot and still recover to put in some decent efforts the following day or even later in the same ride. This makes it especially useful for commute training and for spicing up endurance rides. It can also be good for in-season maintenance training when you don’t want to build excessive fatigue in your legs.

Now that you are aware of the importance of testing for FT, it is only fair to let you in on some bad news: you’re probably going to have to do the test twice as there’s typically a discrepancy between the values you’d observe out on the road and the values you’d achieve on an indoor trainer. In the last chapter, we talked about how useful and important an indoor trainer is for building cycling fitness. As using one will probably form a key component of your training, it’s important that your training zones when using it are accurate.

It is important to be aware that, unfortunately, most riders find that their FT can differ considerably between outdoors and indoors. The difference tends to be more pronounced when training with heart rate. When riding indoors, riders’ self-perception of the effort they’re making will often be above what their heart rate is showing. There are a number of possible reasons for this, such as less use of the muscles in your upper body and trunk for balance lowering heart rate, overheating raising perception of effort, and just the boredom and lower motivation of training indoors. Riders will often see a downward shift in their zones by 10 beats per minute or more and attempting to train to your higher outdoors zones will result in incomplete sessions and frustration. Power users usually see less of a difference, especially if they have decent fans and are able to stay cool, but the sheer psychological challenge of pushing hard indoors can result in lower values.

In light of this, it is advised to test for FT and set zones for indoors and outdoors. You may find that the results are fairly close and, if within 5bpm or 10 watts, you can probably work with the same zones. Don’t forget that you’ll need to schedule in a rest day before both tests, but they’re great stand-alone workouts anyway.

Training zones are not static and should change as your fitness develops. If you’re training with power and testing for FTP, you should see this value creeping up as you gain fitness.

For heart rate users, the gains aren’t quite as tangible. With training, FTHR can go up, drop or even remain static. This can be confusing and even demotivating but it’s important to remember that FTHR, unlike FTP, isn’t a measure of ‘fitness’. FTHR is just how hard your heart is beating when you’re riding at your threshold, it’s not a measure of the speed or power you’re producing. It’s still important to test regularly for it, as any changes can result in your training zones shifting significantly. If you can accurately replicate test conditions, only probably possible on an indoor trainer, you can also record average speed or distance covered and this could give a better indicator of changes in your fitness.

Whether training with heart rate or power, you should aim to retest for threshold every 8–12 weeks. It’s important that you’re well rested before testing so allow at least one recovery day before it and ideally schedule testing at the beginning of a week that follows a recovery week.

Many riders who are new to monitoring their intensity when riding and training to zones struggle to stay in the lower zones. This particularly applies to heart rate users and riding in Zones 1 and 2 during endurance sessions. They find they have to make a real effort to slow down in order to stop their heart rate creeping up into Zone 3 and even 4. Understandably they find this frustrating, especially when they see they’re riding their regular routes slower or are being dropped by their ridemates. The problem stems from that ‘physiological no-man’s-land’ that I mentioned at the start of the chapter. For many riders it can feel like a comfortable and sustainable pace, but the reality is that it’s not. It can be okay for 1, 2 or even 3 hours, especially if there’s a leisurely café stop at some point, but if you try to ride at that intensity for a long continuous sportive or training ride, you’ll find yourself blowing up and significantly slowing down later in the ride.

For sportives, Zone 2 is your default riding intensity on the flat and you have to train your body to be able to function in it. Fail to do this and you’ll never fulfil your cycling potential. In Zone 2 you’re able to take on and process carbohydrates and, if you’re well trained at riding at that intensity, also utilise your body’s fat reserves. This means that you’re able to maintain your body’s carbohydrate supply and keep riding strongly. This especially applies when the road kicks up; you’re forced to up your effort into Zones 3 and 4 for the climb and, at that intensity, you’ll be almost totally reliant on carbohydrates. If you ride in Zones 3 and 4 predominately or haven’t invested time in training your body to perform in Zone 2, you won’t be tapping into your body’s fat reserves and will be rapidly burning through your body’s limited carbohydrate supplies. At that intensity, you won’t be able to properly process the fuel you take on to replenish those supplies and, even if you could, the maximum you can use – about 90g (3oz) per hour – isn’t enough to fuel your effort without the help of those fat reserves. Your carbohydrate supplies steadily dwindle as the ride goes on and, although you may feel fine, it’s a ticking time bomb. Eventually, usually on a climb in the fourth or fifth hour, you come to a grinding halt.

Although it can be hard and frustrating at first, you have to be disciplined at sticking to those lower zones for the key endurance rides. Developing your fitness at this key Zone 2 intensity forms the foundations of being a successful endurance cyclist and can’t be skipped. The good news is that after 8–12 weeks of structured training to zones, most riders find that their bodies adapt and their pace and ability to ride in Zone 2 significantly improves. During that adaptive phase, however, especially if you’re a Zone 3 cruiser, there are a number of steps you can take to make the process a bit easier.

PICK YOUR ROUTES ACCORDINGLY It’s much easier to control your heart rate or power if the route is flat. If a session calls for extended periods of riding in Zone 2, try to avoid the hills.

FIT LOWER GEARS If hills are unavoidable, fit some really low gears and don’t feel embarrassed about spinning up even the gentlest incline.

RIDE IN A GROUP Riding in a group and following the wheel of another rider can reduce the effort by up to 30 per cent. Explain to the riders you’re with what you’re trying to achieve from the ride and that you’re not just shirking your pull on the front.

RIDE SOLO Conversely, sometimes riding in a group can bring out that competitive spirit and you may find yourself goaded into riding harder than you want. If this is the case, or your ego just doesn’t allow you to ease up and let the group go, a block of solo training might be a good idea.

CARBOHYDRATE-FASTED TRAINING Carbohydrate-fasted training can help to develop your body’s ability to burn fat as a fuel and so improve your efficiency and ability to stay in lower zones. We’ll talk more about carbohydrate-fasted training, and how and when to do it, in Chapter 4.

CHECK YOUR ZONES Double-check that you’ve calculated your zones correctly – you wouldn’t be the first cyclist to struggle with maths! There’s also the possibility that your FTP/FTHR result was inaccurate, although it’s a fairly robust test and protocol. If you were tired or had an underlying illness, it’s possible that you may not have been able to give it your all or that your heart rate was suppressed. This could produce a low result and correspondingly low-skewed training zones. Also, if it’s your first time performing such a test, you might not have got the pacing right and not quite emptied the tank. If you suspect this might be the case, you can repeat the test. The more familiar you become with the test, the more accurate it becomes.

One big mistake that riders new to training to zones often make is to rely on average heart rate or power. They’ll see that a session requires 2 hours in Zone 2 but will go out and ride with barely a glance at their computer. They get home, download their ride data and see their average heart rate or power bang in the middle of Zone 2, job done. The problem is, it’s possible to achieve such an average, especially if a route is hilly, having spent hardly any time in the target zone. On the climbs, they may have been battering themselves in Zones 4 or 5 but then, on the descents, freewheeling in Zone 1. So despite what the average showed, there was no riding in the target zone and none of the training and physiological objectives of the session have been achieved. A good analogy is a man standing with one foot in a bucket of ice and the other in a bucket of boiling water. Is he averagely comfortable?

You have to be constantly aware of and monitoring your intensity throughout the ride or effort. Set your computer to show zones, current wattage or heart rate and make sure you look at it and adjust your intensity to what it’s showing. Power meter users will probably find it easier to display 3-second average power as this tends to fluctuate far less and is easier to ride to than current power. With experience, you’ll soon develop a feel for your zones and an occasional glance will suffice.

A big problem, especially for power meter users, is that you can find yourself faced with a huge and bewildering amount of ride data. There’s no doubting that power meters are incredibly powerful training tools and that we’re only just scratching the surface of the power and pedalling analysis that they allow. However, although I strongly advise all riders to consider buying one, you don’t need to spend hours looking at power data files to gain a lot of benefit from using one. Simply testing for FTP regularly, using it to set accurate training zones and then learning how to use them to accurately pace your riding will massively improve the performance of most riders. With time, you’ll want to take advantage of additional metrics, such as Training Stress Score (TSS), which gives an objective rating of how hard a session was, and use more sophisticated session analysis and planning tools such as TrainingPeaks and GoldenCheetah. However, don’t think you have to spend hours learning how to use a power meter and understand all of the metrics and data before you can start using one. If you’re spending more time planning or analysing workouts than actually riding, you’re getting it badly wrong.

Training and riding to zones is essential if you want to get the most out of your cycling and, for the majority of your rides, you should know what you want to achieve and the zones you should be focusing on to achieve it. However, it’s also important to remember why you started cycling, to occasionally leave the heart rate monitor or power meter at home and just to ride for pleasure. Whether it’s in the off season or during a break from structured training, not all rides have to be training. The Sunday club run probably isn’t the place for you to be riding to your numbers either. You’ll either end up driving up the pace of the group or constantly slowing it down as you try to stick to your zones, neither of which is going to make you very popular. Also, if you’re in a race situation, sometimes riding to your numbers can limit both your performance and your ability to react to the race. In a circuit race, you’re not going to bail out of a break just because your power meter is telling you you’ve exceeded the amount of time you can hold Zone 5 for! Although invaluable for pacing time trials, I’ll sometimes tape over my power meter and ride to feel instead. I’ve set PBs doing this and, when I’ve checked my data after the event, found out that I needed to bump up my FTP and zones.

Monitor intensity

If you don’t already use a heart rate monitor or power meter, you’re severely limiting your likelihood of progressing as a cyclist. Without them you’re effectively riding blind and wasting valuable time in the saddle.

Test for FTP/FTHR

Testing for your FTP/FTHR is the essential and unavoidable first step to effective training and reaching your cycling potential. Relying on inaccurate generic formulae or zone auto calculate functions is a shortcut that will mean all subsequent training is fundamentally flawed.

Test indoors and outdoors

Some riders find that their FTHR and even FTP can vary depending on whether it’s tested on an indoor trainer or out on the road. Test for both and set two sets of training zones.

Retest regularly

Ensure you retest FTP/FTHR every 8–12 weeks. Don’t worry too much what your FTHR does, it’s not an indicator of fitness. Although it’s a test, it’s still a great workout and shouldn’t be thought of as a missed session.

Be disciplined

Once you know your zones, stick to them. This applies to hitting high zones in hard sessions and riding in lower zones during steadier, endurance-focused workouts.

Zone	Low end (% of FTHR)	High end (% of FTHR)
1	n/a	67%
2	68%	82%
3	83%	93%
4	94%	105%
5	106%	120%
6	n/a	n/a

Zone	Low end (% of FTP)	High end (% of FTP)
1	n/a	55%
2	56%	75%
3	76%	90%
4	91%	105%
5	106%	120%
6	121	150