Every zone system in the menu, and how ours is built
Open the zone settings in TrainingPeaks and you're choosing between more than a dozen systems built by different people, from different reference numbers, for different reasons. Here's what each family actually is, how ours works, and the questions worth asking whoever set yours.
The screenshots in this article are from my own TrainingPeaks account. That's my threshold heart rate, my bike power, my run power, and the menus exactly as they appear when you open the settings almost nobody opens.
Here's why I'm showing you. Every zone chart you've ever trained from is a set of percentages of one reference number, cut up by one method, chosen from a list. The test you did gave you a number. The dropdown decided what that number means. And in most accounts, the dropdown was set once, by somebody, years ago, and never looked at again.
So this is the whole menu, opened up. Heart rate on the bike and the run. Power on the bike. Power on the run. Pace. What each system in the list is anchored to, where it came from, and how it gets derived. Then ours, in full, with the reasons — because if I'm going to ask you to ask your coach hard questions, I'd better be able to answer them myself.
The screen nobody looks at
Before you ever pick a zone method, TrainingPeaks asks you a quieter question, and it's the more important one. Look at the first dropdown: Choose Type. Lactate Threshold. Maximum Heart Rate. Max and Resting Heart Rate. LT and Maximum Heart Rate.
That's not a list of methods. That's a list of reference numbers — the thing your zones will be a percentage of. Everything downstream inherits this choice. Pick a threshold type and your bands hang off something you can measure in a real effort. Pick a maximum type and they hang off a number most people never actually measure, and most software estimates from your age.
Three of my numbers are sitting on that screen: a threshold heart rate of 161, a maximum of 190, a resting rate of 60. Only one of the three runs my training. The other two are context.
The type dropdown in my own account. Before any method gets chosen, this screen decides what kind of number the zones will be cut from.
Use it like this. Open your own settings and find this screen. Note which type is selected, then ask yourself whether anyone chose it on purpose. That single setting shapes every colored band you've ever trained to.
Three questions that sort the whole menu
Every system in every dropdown can be sorted with three questions, and the rest of this article is just those questions asked over and over.
One: what is the reference number? A threshold you performed, or a maximum somebody estimated? Two: how was it measured — a field test on you, a formula off your birthday, software watching your uploads? Three: where do the boundaries sit, and did anyone place them at something real in your physiology, or at numbers that divide neatly?
Ask those three of any zone system and it has nowhere to hide. Ask them of ours too. That's the deal.
Use it like this. Keep the three questions in your head as you read the menus below. You'll notice the systems stop looking like a wall of names and start sorting themselves into a small number of families.
The heart rate menu
Here's the heart rate method list from my account. Our own entry sits at the top — ANC Zones — and underneath it, presented as equals: Joe Friel in three flavors, Andy Coggan, USAC, USAT for cycling and for running, CycleSmart, Durata Training, CTS for cycling and running, 80/20 for running and cycling, MyProCoach. The number in brackets after each is how many zones it draws — five, six, seven, ten.
Read the names again. Coaches, coaching companies, and federations. Every one of these was built by somebody with a reason, most of them by people who've thought hard about training. The list isn't a collection of mistakes. It's a collection of different answers to the three questions, and the platform can't tell you whose answer fits you, so it presents them alphabetically and lets a human decide.
The heart rate method menu in my account. Coaches, companies and federations, side by side, each drawing a different number of zones from a different logic.
Use it like this. Count the zones in brackets across the list — five, six, seven, ten. If zone counts were physiology, they'd agree. They're design decisions, and that's the first clue that a zone is a tool rather than a fact of nature.
The threshold heart rate family
Most of that menu belongs to one family: systems anchored to your lactate threshold heart rate, the heart rate at the top of your sustainable range. That's a real thing, measured from a real effort, and it's why this family is the credible end of the heart rate world.
The best known is the seven zone system carrying Joe Friel's name — the one many coaches grew up on. Its derivation is a thirty minute solo time trial: you ride or run it alone, all out, and take the average heart rate of the final twenty minutes as your threshold. Seven zones then get cut from that number, with the run and bike charts drawn differently below threshold, and the top end split into three narrow slices. It's a genuinely tested anchor, and the seven zone architecture is a choice about resolution — more bands, narrower targets.
USAT's versions run off the same kind of anchor, with a protocol their coaches teach: warm up fifteen to twenty minutes, go thirty minutes at race effort, average the heart rate of the last twenty. CTS, CycleSmart, Durata and 80/20 are coaching companies with their own threshold-anchored charts — 80/20 built around keeping the large majority of training genuinely easy, Durata drawing ten bands where others draw five. Same family, different resolutions, different emphases.
Here's what the whole family shares, good and bad. The anchor is real — you performed it. And the anchor is one point. A thirty minute time trial tells you where your threshold heart rate sits. It cannot tell you where your first turn point sits — the top of easy, the boundary three quarters of your training lives under. Every system in this family places that lower boundary at a fixed percentage of the threshold and hopes, and the distance between those two landmarks genuinely differs between athletes and changes as you get fitter. One measured point, two boundaries that matter. Something has to be assumed.
Use it like this. If your zones come from this family, respect the anchor — it's real. Then ask the question the family can't answer: where's the evidence about my easy ceiling? A drift test answers it. A percentage assumes it.
The estimated maximum families
The other two families in that type dropdown are built on your maximum heart rate, and this is where the ground gets soft.
Maximum heart rate is almost never measured. Measuring it properly means a maximal test that most athletes will never do and shouldn't do casually. So in practice the number gets estimated — usually from your age. The famous formula, 220 minus your age, was never derived as research: it was a line drawn by eye through pooled data in 1971. When researchers went back and refitted the original data, the correlation was weak and the error enormous — their published verdict was that the formula has no scientific merit for exercise prescription, and that no acceptable method of estimating maximum heart rate currently exists. The better equation, 208 minus 0.7 times age, fixes the bias and still carries about ten beats of scatter around it. Ten beats at the top of the chain is ten beats of error in every band below.
The max-and-resting family — the Karvonen approach, from 1957 — is smarter. It takes a percentage of the gap between your resting and maximum heart rates, then adds resting back on. Your resting rate is real and measured, and it reflects your fitness, so this genuinely improves on a flat percentage of maximum. But look at what's still inside the calculation: an estimated maximum. A better formula wrapped around a guess is still built on a guess.
None of this makes those systems useless. For a brand new athlete with no test history, an age-derived easy ceiling is a fair starting point — it gets you out the door running easy enough to build volume. The moment there's a goal time or structured work, the error bar stops being acceptable, because now specific decisions are being made from an approximate number.
Follow any zone system backward to the thing its percentages are cut from. The families separate cleanly: estimated for you, or measured on you.
Use it like this. Find the highest heart rate you've genuinely recorded — a race finish, the last repetition of a brutal session — and compare it against 220 minus your age. That gap, whatever it is, is baked into every band of any max-anchored chart you use.
The bike power menu
Now power, from my bike settings — threshold set at 233 watts in this account. Our entry draws ten zones. Underneath: Andy Coggan, Durata, CTS, USAT, 80/20, MyProCoach, and Stryd.
The dominant reference here is FTP — functional threshold power — and the Coggan levels built on it are the closest thing bike training has to a shared language. FTP is defined as the greatest average power you can hold for about an hour. Almost nobody tests it that way, because an hour flat out is brutal and hard to repeat, so the standard field test is twenty minutes maximal with five percent subtracted. Six levels then get cut from the result, endurance riding down around fifty-six to seventy-five percent, threshold work around ninety-one to a hundred and five.
The derivation is honest and the weak joint is the correction. TrainingPeaks itself publishes that real FTP falls anywhere from 86 to 96 percent of twenty minute power. That's a ten point spread across riders, handled by one fixed five point subtraction. For a rider at the top of the spread, the number lands. For one at the bottom, it's several percent high — and every zone under it inherits the error in the same direction. Nothing in the result tells you which rider you are.
Then look at the bottom of the menu, because Stryd is doing something different. Their zones are percentages of critical power, calculated automatically from about ninety days of your running. Their published definition is worth quoting: critical power is the threshold at which the dominant type of fatigue your body experiences changes. That's the same family we anchor in — a boundary defined by how long you can hold something, not by a corrected test. The difference between their approach and ours is who's watching: software inferring from your history, or a coach measuring with deliberate maximal efforts and checking the result against how you actually train.
The bike power menu. FTP-anchored systems in the middle, and at the bottom, Stryd — anchored to critical power, the same family we build from.
Use it like this. If your bike zones are FTP-based, ask one question: twenty minutes minus five percent, or something better? The answer tells you whether your threshold is a measurement or a corrected estimate, and the ten point spread is why it matters.
The run power menu
Run power is the newest of these menus and the thinnest — my account shows our zones, Jim Vance's seven zone system, 80/20, MyProCoach and Stryd, with threshold power at 274 watts. Jim Vance wrote the book that established run power training, and his zones anchor to a running threshold power the way Coggan's anchor to FTP.
Run power deserves a moment, because it solves a real problem. Pace lies on hills. Speed only measures horizontal progress, and climbing turns much of your work into vertical work no pace field contains — so on a six percent grade your pace reads slow while your effort is enormous. Watts don't care about the gradient. On rolling ground, run power is the honest signal and pace is the misleading one.
Here's our position, and it's specific. Run power is useful and it doesn't get to be the anchor. We establish critical speed first, from real maximal efforts, and then hang run power off it — the manual's protocol is four or five 800s at critical speed pace with full recovery, taking the average watts as your reference. When your watts and your tested critical speed disagree, the tested critical speed wins, because it came from performances rather than from a device's model of you.
Use it like this. If you run with a power meter, use it where it's strongest — hills, trails, wind — and check where its threshold number came from. If the device estimated it, anchor it to a tested critical speed before you trust the bands.
The pace menu, briefly
There's a run pace menu too, with the same shape: the seven zone system's pace version, a pace zone index, CTS, USAT, 80/20, MyProCoach. Most anchor to a threshold pace from a time trial, or to recent race results. The logic mirrors everything above — a real tested anchor at best, a single point stretched to cover multiple boundaries at least.
Ours anchors pace to critical speed, and I'll show you exactly how in a moment, because pace is where our chart does something that looks strange until you know the reason.
How ours is built
Now ours, with the reasons. Everything below comes from our coaching manual, and it starts in a different place from every system above: not with a formula, and not even with a single test protocol, but with a map of your physiology.
Between easy and flat out, your body crosses four real landmarks, in a fixed order. LT1, the first lactate turn point — the top of easy, where lactate stops sitting flat at baseline and starts to lift. Then OGC, the oxidative-glycolytic crossover — where carbohydrate takes over from fat as your main fuel, because the cheap, stable way of making energy can no longer keep up on its own. The band from LT1 up to OGC is what we call the metabolic-state window, and it's where long course racing lives. Then LT2, the second turn point — the last point of balance, the hardest intensity where what you produce and what you clear still cancel out. And then the anchor itself: critical power on the bike, critical speed on the run. That's LT2 located in the field — the same boundary a lactate curve finds in a lab, reached instead through your own maximal efforts. Three minutes, six and twelve on the bike. A 400, an 800 and a 3200 on the run.
Our zones are drawn so the boundaries land on those landmarks. That's the whole design principle, and it's the honest answer to question three: the edges sit where your body changes what it's doing, because a zone boundary that doesn't mark a real change is just a stripe of color.
The four landmarks on one rising cost curve. Our zone boundaries are placed on these, and that placement is the entire argument.
Use it like this. Whatever system you use, ask which physiological landmark each boundary is supposed to mark. If the answer is none — if the edges are just even slices — the chart is a decoration on top of a number, not a map of you.
Our numbers, and the reason for each one
Here are the actual figures, with why. On the bike, everything is a percentage of your critical power. Recovery sits below 65 percent — genuinely cheap movement, unlimited duration. Zone 1 runs 65 to 79, and it stops at 79 because that's where LT1 sits — the ceiling caps your durability base exactly at the top of easy. Zone 2 runs 79 to 89, ending at OGC, the fuel crossover, so the band covers the metabolic-state window and nothing beyond it. Zone 3 runs 89 to 100, closing exactly on your line — reach one hundred percent of critical power and you're standing on the boundary itself. VO2 Max work lives above it, 100 to 120, spending reserve by definition.
On the run the same architecture sits at higher percentages of critical speed — recovery below 75, Zone 1 from 75 to 85 with LT1 at its ceiling, Zone 2 from 85 to 95 ending at the crossover, and then the one that looks like a typo: Zone 3 runs 95 to 105. Your line sits inside the band, not on top of it.
That's deliberate, and here's the reason. Running is noisy. Pace gets pushed around by surface, gradient, economy and stride mechanics in ways watts aren't, so the same internal effort shows up with more scatter in the number. The band is drawn wide enough to hold that scatter honestly instead of pretending it away. The consequence is real and we teach it: the upper half of run Zone 3 is above your line and spending reserve, so those repetitions come prescribed short, with recoveries that aren't optional. Run power, by contrast, tops out at 100 — watts measure the work directly, so they don't need the widened band. Two run charts, two different ceilings, both correct, for a stated reason.
Heart rate gets a different treatment entirely, because it's a different kind of signal — it measures cost, not output. Our heart rate bands are percentages of your threshold heart rate: recovery to 76, Zone 1 from 76 to 86, Zone 2 from 86 to 93, Zone 3 from 93 to 100. Two things about them. They touch — every band ends exactly where the next begins, because the manual's instruction is blunt: do not blend the edges. And the table stops at one hundred percent, because above your line heart rate lags and flattens and arrives after the decision is over. Up there it's lagging confirmation only, and effort and structure carry the session. We also don't set that anchor from one test — we watch what your heart rate does against your measured critical speed across real aerobic sessions and races, and refine the ranges as evidence arrives.
The bike chart. Every boundary is a percentage of critical power, and each edge lands on a landmark rather than a round number.
The run chart, drawn at higher percentages, with the line sitting inside Zone 3 — noise held honestly rather than pretended away.
Use it like this. Notice what you can now do that no dropdown lets you do: point at any boundary in the chart and say what physiological event it marks, how the anchor under it was measured, and when it was last checked.
Why our TrainingPeaks build shows ten zones
One thing in my screenshots deserves its own explanation, because a sharp reader will have caught it. Our heart rate entry draws five zones. Our power entry draws ten. Same system — so why the difference?
Clarity in execution. The teaching model is five bands, and five bands is how you should think. But a band like Zone 1 on the bike is fourteen percentage points wide, and when a session says ride Zone 1, the bottom of that band and the top of it are meaningfully different rides. So in TrainingPeaks our power bands are loaded subdivided — the working zones split into low and high halves — so a prescribed target lands in a narrower window on your head unit. Ten labeled slices, five real zones. The architecture didn't change; the resolution did, in the one place resolution helps: mid-ride, when you're trying to hold a number.
Heart rate stays at five, because heart rate is a verification signal read in ranges, and cutting a cost signal into thin slices implies a precision the signal doesn't have.
Use it like this. If your platform shows more zones than your coach talks about, ask whether they're subdivisions of the same architecture or a different system entirely. The answer should come back in one sentence.
One word, five different places
Now you can see why zone names never transfer between systems, and why the most quoted instruction in endurance sport — go do Zone 2 — is meaningless until you know whose.
In the Coggan levels, Zone 2 is easy endurance riding, fifty-six to seventy-five percent of threshold power. In the seven zone run system, Zone 2 is a band of threshold heart rate in the high eighties. On a Garmin, it's sixty to seventy percent of an estimated maximum. In the three zone model most research is written in, Zone 2 isn't a slice at all — it's everything between the two turn points. And in ours, Zone 2 is the metabolic-state window: steady durable work from the top of easy up to the fuel crossover, as a percentage of an anchor measured on you.
Same two words. Five different intensities, anchored to four different quantities, on the same athlete. A training plan written in one system and executed in another isn't approximately right. It's a different plan.
The practical translation, and the one that catches every athlete who joins us: what most of the internet calls Zone 2 is our Zone 1. Our chart isn't softer. It's cut from a different number.
Use it like this. When anyone — a podcast, a friend, a plan — says Zone 2, ask what it's a percentage of before you spend a single session in it. That one question converts between systems better than any chart.
Ask your coach
So here's where all of this lands, and it isn't that our menu entry is right and the other fifteen are wrong. Several of those systems are built on real anchors by people who coach well. The point is that every entry in the menu is a set of decisions — a reference number, a measurement method, a boundary logic — and somebody made those decisions about your training, and you're allowed to know what they were.
So ask. Why this method over the others in the list? What is my reference number, and was it measured on me or estimated for me? Which physiological landmark does each boundary mark? When was the anchor last checked, and what would make it move?
A good coach answers those in plain language, whatever system they use — and if their answers are good, you're in good hands, whether or not the method matches ours. Our answers are the ones in this article: anchored to critical power and critical speed measured from your own maximal efforts, boundaries placed on four named landmarks, heart rate as a verification range built from your real sessions, retested every six to eight weeks, and every link in that chain explainable from your effort to the number on your screen.
What you shouldn't accept is silence, or a shrug, or it's what the software came with. The dropdown decided what your test means. Somebody should be able to tell you why.
Use it like this. Send your coach the four questions this week — ours included. The answers take five minutes and tell you more about your training than a month of files.
Where these numbers come from
Our zones, landmarks, protocols and heart rate method come from the ANC coaching manual — the same document our coaches are educated from. The screenshots are my own TrainingPeaks account, unedited.
The origin and error of the 220 minus age formula: Robergs, R. and Landwehr, R. (2002), The surprising history of the HRmax equals 220 minus age equation, Journal of Exercise Physiology Online 5(2) — the refit of the original 1971 data, the seven to eleven beat prediction errors, and the quoted verdicts. The improved age equation and its roughly ten beat standard deviation: Tanaka, H., Monahan, K. and Seals, D. (2001), Age-predicted maximal heart rate revisited, Journal of the American College of Cardiology 37(1), a meta-analysis of 351 studies and 18,712 subjects. Heart rate reserve: Karvonen, M., Kentala, E. and Mustala, O. (1957), Annales Medicinae Experimentalis et Biologiae Fenniae 35.
The FTP definition, the twenty minute field test, and the published 86 to 96 percent spread come from TrainingPeaks' own educational material. The thirty minute time trial derivation of the seven zone system and the USAT field protocol come from those systems' published coaching materials. Stryd's critical power definition is quoted verbatim from their published documentation. The zone counts and method names are exactly as they appear in the TrainingPeaks zones calculator, shown in the screenshots.
This is part of How We Coach.
Our education series for athletes — the physiology, the testing, the zones, and how all of it turns into the training in your calendar.
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