If you ride for an hour, there’s a generally accepted ladder for power-to-weight: around 1W/kg is off the couch; 2W/kg is beginner territory; 3W/kg is solid amateur; 4W/kg is strong amateur; 5W/kg puts you on the edge of domestic pro territory; and north of 6W/kg is World Tour stuff.

That scale is useful. But it also asks an important follow-up question: What happens when you get older? A 65-year-old rider is not supposed to judge their climbing using the same benchmark as a 30-year-old; yet that’s exactly what a lot of cyclists do! They look at a chart, look at the number they used to hit, look at the number they hit now, and decide something has gone wrong. Usually, nothing has gone wrong; they simply got older.

“W/kg still matters. It’s still one of the cleanest quick benchmarks for performance…”

W/kg still matters. It’s still one of the cleanest quick benchmarks for performance, because it measures power relative to body weight; and once the road tilts up, that ratio usually tells you more than raw watts alone. But ageing changes what ‘good’ looks like.

According to cycling coach Frank Overton, answering the question posed above is tricky, because age alone doesn’t tell the whole story. Training history matters, as does riding volume, weight gain, lifestyle habits – and how long you’ve been doing this seriously. A rider who has been training consistently for decades is not the same as someone who got serious at age 58.

Overton says the better comparison is often not to use some universal chart, but rather to compare yourself to where you were five or 10 years ago. Even so, there are decade-by-decade ranges that can be useful as rough guardrails. Overton’s practical benchmarks for one-hour power look like this:

• 50s: 3-3.5W/kg is typical; 4W/kg+ is top-end territory
• 60s: 2.8-3.2W/kg is typical; around 3.6W/kg is high-level
• 70s: 2.4-2.8W/kg is typical; around 3.2W/kg is excellent
• 80s: 2-2.5W/kg is typical; around 2.8W/kg is genuine outlier territory

For women, Overton says a general adjustment of about 0.5-0.7W/kg lower is reasonable. 

READ MORE ON: Older athletes Power-to-weight Q&A