The strongest rider on your local group ride might have an FTP of 350 watts. If you’re in the company of cycling’s elite, maybe there is a rider with a 380w or even 400w FTP, or functional threshold power – meaning the highest average power that rider can produce for an hour. A true FTP test is a lung-bursting effort, an all-out, one-hour time trial.
FTP is seen as the absolute limit, the hardest that you can go for a sustained period of time. Zone 2 is something completely different – it is your aerobic threshold, the highest average power that you can produce without accumulating a significant amount of lactate. In other words, your body can clear lactate as quickly as it’s producing it when you’re riding in zone 2.
Article continues below
If you are the team leader and the out-and-out race winner, you want as much explosive power as possible so that you can attack and drop your rivals. On the other hand, a domestique doesn’t typically care how much power they can produce for three to five minutes. Instead, they need to be able to ride on the front of the peloton all day – sometimes every day, for three weeks straight in a Grand Tour.
How do the pros define zone 2?
Zone 2 has nearly as many definitions as FTP. It may change depending on who you ask, but it is typically defined as the steady state aerobic threshold, the point at…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at CyclingNews RSS Feed…