You know your FTP. You know your weight. You probably know your W/kg number from whatever app calculates it for you. What you almost certainly do not know — with any confidence — is where those numbers actually place you among riders of your age, your category, and your discipline.
Most cyclists operate from vague folklore. "300 watts is good." "4 watts per kilo is where it gets serious." "Pros do 6." Those rules of thumb are directionally right, but they skip the detail that matters: which number is you, and what does that mean for what you should be training for.
This is the age-group FTP benchmarking framework we use with Not Done Yet coaching members in 2026. It pulls from two decades of Coggan's published W/kg reference tables, modern Zwift category thresholds, and the pattern of what we actually see when riders submit their power files. It is deliberately conservative. Nothing here is an aspirational ceiling.
The W/kg bands that actually matter
We work with seven bands because seven is how many distinct training implications there are. More bands feels scientific but delivers noise. Fewer bands blurs the transition points where the training needs to change.
Men's bands (FTP / body weight in kg):
- 2.0–2.5 W/kg — Entry recreational. New to structured training or returning after a long break. The first year of consistent riding pushes most new cyclists into this band within 8–12 weeks.
- 2.5–3.3 W/kg — Recreational. Rides regularly, enjoys fast group rides, probably rides a gran fondo or two a year. Most club members sit here.
- 3.3–3.8 W/kg — Good recreational. Finishes sportives in respectable times, contests sprint points on club rides, is thinking about racing for the first time.
- 3.8–4.2 W/kg — Strong amateur. Racing at Cat 4/3 in US or 4th/3rd Cat in UK and Ireland. Would be "Cat B" on Zwift under 2024 rules.
- 4.2–4.7 W/kg — Cat 2 equivalent. Consistently in the front group of regional races. "Cat A" on Zwift. Meaningful gravel or XC racing.
- 4.7–5.2 W/kg — Cat 1 / regional elite. Wins or top-tens in regional races. Could hang in lower-tier national events.
- 5.2+ W/kg — National / elite-amateur. National-series competitive. The floor for a pro contract is roughly 5.8–6.0 W/kg sustained, but sustained is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Women's bands are structurally similar but shifted down by roughly 0.4–0.5 W/kg at each transition. A woman at 3.5 W/kg is competitive in a category where a man would need 4.0. This reflects physiological differences in haemoglobin mass and lean body mass, not training difference. The relative progression rates between categories are identical.
These bands are derived from Coggan's reference tables, cross-checked against current Zwift category caps (2.62 / 3.20 / 4.00 W/kg for C/B/A on 20-minute averages) and the racing-licence cut-offs for British Cycling and USA Cycling categories. Treat them as structural rather than exact — the boundaries blur within 0.1 W/kg and depend on which test protocol produced your FTP.
What realistic progression looks like
The single most common question we get from Not Done Yet applicants: "how much should my FTP have gone up?" Here are the honest ranges, by starting point.
- Entry recreational (under 2.5 W/kg): 20–40% in year one if consistent. This is the biggest available gain of any band. Do not waste it on aggressive intensity too early — the gains come from establishing an aerobic base, not from VO2max intervals you cannot recover from.
- Recreational (2.5–3.3 W/kg): 10–20% in year one with structured training, slowing to 5–10% in year two.
- Good recreational (3.3–3.8 W/kg): 5–15% a year. This is where coaching starts to earn its keep — unstructured training at this level plateaus fast.
- Strong amateur (3.8–4.2 W/kg): 3–8% a year. Wins are less about raw wattage and more about race-specific repeatability, pacing, and weight management.
- Cat 2 and up (4.2+ W/kg): 2–5% a year, sometimes zero. Progression here is almost entirely discipline-specific — duration repeatability, sprint wattage, recovery capacity. Raw FTP often plateaus while real race performance keeps improving.
Two important caveats. First: these are year-on-year numbers for someone training 8–15 hours per week consistently across the full year. Three strong months followed by nine unstructured ones does not yield these rates. Second: progression is not linear. Many riders plateau for 6–9 months, then see a step-change of 10–15W in a single block. Both patterns are normal.
Age decline is smaller than people think
The widely-quoted figure is that peak aerobic capacity drops 5–10% per decade after 35. That number comes from cross-sectional studies of mostly-untrained populations. For cyclists training consistently with some intensity, the actual rate is closer to 1–2% per decade, and sometimes zero into a rider's late 40s.
Prof. Stephen Seiler's work on endurance athletes spanning multiple decades makes this point repeatedly: the decline most age-group cyclists experience is a decline in training consistency dressed up as age decline. Lost hours, lost focus, lost intensity — all of them masquerade as "I'm just getting older."
Masters cyclists who start structured training in their 40s or 50s, or who rebuild after a career break, routinely set power PRs 10–15 years past the assumed physiological peak. Our own coaching roster includes riders setting all-time FTP highs in their mid-50s.
What does decline with age, consistently, is recovery capacity. You can hit the same peaks. You cannot hit them three days in a row the way you could at 25. Training design has to respect that.
What the numbers cannot tell you
FTP is one number. W/kg is one number derived from it. Cycling performance is not one number.
A 280W FTP rider who can hold 260W for two hours is a different athlete from a 290W FTP rider who fades to 235W at the same duration. A 4.3 W/kg climber who weighs 62kg is a different athlete from a 4.3 W/kg rouleur at 82kg, even though their "benchmark" is identical. A 220W FTP time-triallist with a 260W one-minute peak will smoke a 280W FTP with a 320W one-minute peak in any break-sprint scenario.
Use FTP benchmarks to locate yourself. Do not use them to train. Training happens in duration-specific power, intensity distribution, and fatigue management. The FTP zones calculator is the starting point for that, not the endpoint.
Worked examples
Example 1: male, 42 years old, 78kg, FTP 260W.
3.33 W/kg puts him at the top of recreational, bottom of good recreational. Typical gran fondo finisher. A year of structured training targeted at the aerobic base plus two 8-week intensity blocks should deliver 285–295W (3.65–3.78 W/kg). That moves him firmly into good recreational territory and within sight of strong amateur. Recovery capacity becomes the ceiling for how much structured intensity he can absorb per week.
Example 2: female, 35 years old, 61kg, FTP 220W.
3.61 W/kg is strong amateur for women — equivalent to a man at about 4.0 W/kg. Cat-A on Zwift. Year-one progression realistically 10–15W on a good programme. Weight management within reason can push her to 3.8 W/kg without raw FTP change, which is where Cat 2 equivalent racing opens up.
Example 3: male triathlete, 45 years old, 74kg, FTP 265W, training for Ironman.
3.58 W/kg, good recreational on paper — but irrelevant to his race. What matters is his sustainable percentage of FTP for 4.5–5 hours (typical Ironman bike leg) and his fuelling capacity at that intensity. Training should probably stop chasing raw FTP and start chasing extensibility: raising the percentage of FTP he can hold for 4 hours from 65% to 72%. See our triathlon bike coaching approach for more on this distinction.
What we are doing with this framework in 2026
Later this year we are publishing crowdsourced benchmarking data from our Not Done Yet community — 300+ riders submitting anonymised FTP, W/kg, age, gender, discipline, and year-on-year progression. That release will let us validate or update the bands above against real community data rather than reference tables.
Until then, this framework is the best working approximation we have. If you want your numbers included in the 2026 community release, apply for coaching and we will collect them as part of the onboarding intake.
Citation
Cycling journalists, coaches, and publications are welcome to cite or adapt this framework with attribution. Roadman Cycling, Age-Group FTP Benchmarks 2026, 17 April 2026, roadmancycling.com/blog/age-group-ftp-benchmarks-2026.
