Power Zones - WKO - Garmin..

JBcycl1st said:

So.. Hello everyone. First post on these forums. Picked up a powertap wheelset last week and I've been reading the new edition of Racing and Training with a power meter. I've learned a lot so far and look forward to learning more as I go.

I picked up a license for WKO+ and I use a Garmin 705 on my bike.

I'm confused though..

In the book they recommend 7 power zones.. However in WKO only 5 zones are automatically created for me. I used the chart in the book to create my 7 zones and manually put them in. On the Garmin there are 7 zones as well.

What is best? 5 or 7 zones? I thought that since the book so strongly pushes the use of WKO that they would match up and I would see the same number of zones. A friend of mine trains with 5 zones and his team also trains with 5.

Just curious what you all think on the subject.

-Jon

1. They're not zones, but levels.

2. WKO+ will automatically create seven levels, but you may need to use the up/down scroll controls to see them all.

3. Five levels is okay when using heart rate to guide your training, because the upper limit is set by your maximal heart rate. When training with power, however, you essentially can cover two additional ranges, i.e., anaerobic capacity and neuromuscular power.

I use 5 levels for heart rate already and recently retested to see what my max is.. and at 27 I can still manage 201bpm.

For power though when I put my FTP in and select calculate levels using the Coggan power levels menu I only get 6 levels.
Active recovery
Endurance
Tempo
Threshold
VO2 Max
Anerobic Capacity

Would these levels be my 1-6 and level 7 would be everything past there in the neuromuscular range?

Yeah....level 7 is your all-out sprint not really lasting more than 15 seconds.

You tested for your max heart rate to use that number as a reference point. Most HR based zone plans use max HR as the reference. Now you need to test for your FTP. Find that and get a number, then you can make sense of those seven levels as a percentage of your FTP. It's all in the book. The good news is that testing for your FTP, though hard, is not quite in the misery category of testing for your max HR, which for me would have to involve someone putting a gun to my head.

JBcycl1st said:

I use 5 levels for heart rate already and recently retested to see what my max is.. and at 27 I can still manage 201bpm.

For power though when I put my FTP in and select calculate levels using the Coggan power levels menu I only get 6 levels.
Active recovery
Endurance
Tempo
Threshold
VO2 Max
Anerobic Capacity

Would these levels be my 1-6 and level 7 would be everything past there in the neuromuscular range?