The magic zone – A deep dive into zone 2 and how taking it steady has become the WorldTour's go-to training strategy

Illustration showing a pro cyclist with a scale of number zones illustrated in the background in a green to red colour scale.

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.