What counts as a "normal" FTP?
The short answer: there is no universal normal. FTP is a measure of your aerobic fitness at a specific point in time, and the range across trained cyclists is wide. A recreational cyclist putting in eight to ten hours a week might sit at 2.5–3.0 watts per kilogram. A well-trained amateur racing at regional level is often around 3.5–4.2 W/kg. Professional riders operate well above 5 W/kg. Those numbers float around a lot online, and comparing yourself to them without context is mostly a recipe for feeling discouraged. If you want a proper grounding in what FTP means for cyclists at different levels, start there before you decide whether yours is too low.
What actually matters is whether your FTP accurately reflects your current aerobic capacity — and whether the training zones you're deriving from it are producing results. If you've been riding consistently, doing structured work in the right zones, and not seeing any fitness gains over several months, then yes, your FTP might be worth questioning. But if you're in the early stages of structured training, or you did a rough 20-minute test on a bad day, the number on the screen may simply need a better test — not months of panic training.
The real reasons FTP comes in lower than expected
Most of the time when a cyclist feels their FTP is "too low," one of three things is happening. The first is that the test itself went badly. The 20-minute FTP protocol asks you to go as hard as you can sustain for the whole effort, then take 95% of that average power. It sounds straightforward. It isn't. If you started too hard and blew up at twelve minutes, or if you held back because you weren't sure how to pace it, the number you got is not your FTP. It's the result of a sub-optimal pacing strategy. The test is a skill, and it takes a few attempts to calibrate.
The second reason is fatigue. Testing when you're tired from a training block, or right after a hard week, will depress your output. Research on how FTP relates to physiological markers like lactate threshold consistently shows that it's sensitive to training status — meaning it goes down when you're run-down and goes up when you're fresh and well-trained. Testing in a fatigued state is one of the most common ways to end up with a number that feels discouraging and isn't representative of where you actually are.
The third reason is simply that your aerobic base is still developing. Let's be honest: many cyclists do far too much intensity and not enough volume at lower intensities. If you're spending the majority of your time riding in that murky middle zone — not easy enough to build real aerobic capacity, not hard enough to drive threshold adaptations — FTP won't climb the way you want it to. Aerobic fitness compounds slowly. The riders with the best FTP numbers usually have the most hours at easy and moderate intensities in their history, not the most hard intervals.
How to tell if the test is the problem
Before you conclude your FTP is genuinely low, it's worth ruling out a bad test. One practical check: go back and look at your pacing data from the test effort. A well-paced 20-minute time trial should start at a slightly higher effort and then stabilise, with power dropping only slightly (within 5–8%) from the first half to the second. If your average power in the last ten minutes was significantly lower than the first ten, you went out too hard. If it was higher, you were too conservative. Either way, the 95% calculation will produce a skewed result.
Another check is to look at how your training sessions feel at the prescribed FTP-based zones. If 90–105% of your assessed FTP feels genuinely sustainable for twenty minutes but almost too easy for sixty, your FTP may actually be underestimated. Conversely, if efforts at 95% of FTP feel borderline unsustainable after ten minutes, you may have over-paced the test. Once you've confirmed the number is accurate, setting your training zones properly from FTP is the next critical step — getting this wrong compounds the issue across every session you do.
It's also worth remembering what the science actually says about the relationship between FTP and time to exhaustion. Research published in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport found that median time to exhaustion at estimated FTP was around 35 minutes for recreationally trained cyclists, rising to about 51 minutes for professionals. The "FTP is the power you can hold for an hour" rule of thumb doesn't hold for most amateur riders. That matters because it means your zones might be slightly different from what a 95% multiplier assumes — and why testing in multiple formats or using a longer data history gives you a more reliable number than a single 20-minute effort.
Building FTP that actually sticks
If your FTP is genuinely lower than where you want it, the path forward is less mysterious than it might seem. The core driver of FTP improvement is the accumulation of training stress at intensities that sit just below, at, and modestly above your threshold — but that training stress has to sit on top of a solid aerobic base. Without adequate easy-day volume, threshold intervals produce diminishing returns, and recovery between sessions suffers. Most cyclists who plateau at a given FTP are either doing too much intensity too often, or not doing enough overall volume.
Practically, two to three threshold-focused sessions per week is about as much direct FTP stimulus as most amateur cyclists can absorb and recover from. A typical structure might look like: one session of sustained efforts at 90–95% of FTP (think two to three by fifteen or twenty minutes), one session of shorter, slightly harder intervals at 100–108% of FTP (four to six by eight minutes), and the rest of the week at genuinely easy intensity. Understanding the full picture of how cycling training zones work together helps you see why those easy days aren't wasted — they're where the aerobic machinery that powers your FTP actually gets built.
Give this structure eight to twelve weeks before testing again. FTP adaptations are slow. You're remodelling aerobic enzymes, cardiac output, and lactate buffering capacity — not something that shifts week to week. If you test too frequently looking for progress, you'll mostly find noise. Test every six to eight weeks, do it when you're fresh, pace it well, and trust the process in between.
One last thing worth saying: a lower FTP does not mean a lower ceiling. Some of the strongest training improvements happen in cyclists who start from a modest baseline, precisely because there's more low-hanging aerobic fruit to pick. Your current FTP is just information. Use it to train well, and the number will take care of itself.
Related reads
What FTP really means to cyclists
How to set your training zones from FTP
FTP for cyclists: the complete guide
Sources
- Lillo-Beviá JR et al. (2022). Functional threshold power is not a valid marker of the maximal metabolic steady state. Journal of Sports Sciences, 41(2), 147–154. tandfonline.com
- Menaspa P & Roux M (2022). Time to exhaustion at estimated functional threshold power in road cyclists of different performance levels. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 25(10), 840–844. sciencedirect.com
- Sitko S et al. (2022). Functional threshold power as an alternative to lactate thresholds in road cycling. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 36(11), 3179–3183. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov