The Best Times for CrossFit Workouts

"What's your Fran time?" This question, and others like it, is traded between CrossFit athletes the world over. The fitness program, designed to challenge participants with varying workout durations, intensity and movement types, features benchmark workouts that are identical no matter where or when they are performed. Athletes can compare the time taken to tackle them with other participants across the globe.

  1. "For Time"

    • Many CrossFit Workouts of the Day (WODs) are structured as a set scheme of repetitions and rounds. The write-ups for this WOD type contain the language "for time" to indicate that participants should complete the work as quickly as possible. For example, a time-variable WOD might read like this: Four rounds for time -- 30 squats, 20 lunges and 10 pushups. The athlete's score would be the time it took her to complete the movements listed four times and in the given order.

    Benchmark WODs

    • Some benchmark WODs take only a few minutes to complete.

      Early in CrossFit's development, its founders created a set of benchmark WODs called "The Girls." The individual workouts are named "Angie," "Barbara," "Chelsea," "Diane," "Elizabeth" and "Fran," and athletes completing them as they are prescribed do the same set of movements and reps no matter where they are in the world. Each of the first three "Girls" typically takes 20 to 30 minutes to complete and involves a mix of bodyweight gymnastic movements: pull-ups, pushups, situps and squats. The latter three are much shorter in duration -- usually taking athletes only a few minutes to complete -- and higher in metabolic intensity. "Diane" involves handstand pushups and deadlifts; "Elizabeth" involves ring dips and squat cleans; and "Fran" consists of pull-ups and thrusters, a movement that combines a barbell front squat with an overhead press.

    Other Benchmarks

    • Hero WODs are CrossFit workouts named for members of the military.

      Since CrossFit's inception, roughly 20 other named workouts have been added to the list of "Girls," including "Isabel," "Mary," "Christine" and "Cindy." Each features a different set of movements and repetition schemes, and athletes completing them as prescribed can compare their times to each other. CrossFit also developed another set of workouts -- "The Heroes," or "Hero WODs" -- to honor fallen members of the United States military. WODs of this type, including "Badger," "Murph," "JT" and "Danny," tend to be longer in duration, sometimes taking between 30 to 90 minutes to complete.

    Comparing Your Results

    • The CrossFit website features a daily WOD post with a section for user comments. Participants often post their times and discuss different aspects of each workout in that space. If you participate in CrossFit at a local affiliate, your gym may maintain its own website with space for members to post and compare their results. Inside many CrossFit gyms, you'll find an erasable whiteboard describing the WOD and showing participants' times and scores throughout the day's classes. Some gyms maintain records of the best all-time performances on benchmark WODs.