Cindy Workout: The CrossFit WOD, Good Scores, Pacing and Scaling

Cindy is a CrossFit benchmark workout: as many rounds as possible in 20 minutes of 5 pull-ups, 10 push-ups and 15 air squats. Your score is the number of rounds you finish, plus any reps into the next one, so a result is written as something like "14 + 8". It was first posted on CrossFit.com on 29 December 2004 and it's still one of the most repeated tests in the sport, mostly because it needs a bar, a patch of floor and nothing else (CrossFit's Cindy page).

On paper it looks gentle. Five pull-ups is not many, and nobody fears 15 squats. The trouble is that a round is 30 reps, and a respectable score means doing 400 to 600 of them without your push-ups falling apart at minute nine.

The workout and the rules

Set a clock for 20 minutes and work through this, in order, as many times as you can:

• 5 pull-ups
• 10 push-ups
• 15 air squats

There's no prescribed rest and no weight. You finish all the reps of one movement before moving to the next, and you stop when the clock does. If the buzzer goes when you're four push-ups into round 13, your score is 12 rounds plus 9 reps (5 pull-ups and 4 push-ups).

CrossFit's page tells you to keep "a full range of motion" under fatigue but doesn't spell out judging standards for Cindy itself, so these are the standards most boxes hold you to:

Pull-up. Start from a dead hang with arms straight and finish with your chin clearly over the bar. Strict, kipping and butterfly pull-ups all count as Rx. If you're still building strict strength, our pull-ups guide covers the technique, and scapular pull-ups teach the shoulder position that makes every rep cleaner.

Push-up. Chest touches the floor at the bottom and elbows lock at the top, with your body moving as one plank. Sagging hips and half reps are the first things to appear when you tire, which is why this movement decides most scores. The full technique is in our push-ups guide.

Air squat. Hip crease drops below the top of the knee, then you stand until hips and knees are fully open. Heels stay down.

Count honestly. A score of 17 with shallow push-ups tells you nothing next time you test.

What is a good Cindy score?

CrossFit publishes rough targets on its Cindy page, and they're the best reference available because they come from the people who wrote the workout. They're guidance for coaches and athletes, not competition standards.

Level (per CrossFit.com)	Target score	Average round time
Beginner, scaled version	8 to 10+ rounds	2:00 to 2:30
Intermediate, as prescribed	8 to 10+ rounds	2:00 to 2:30
Rx	20+ rounds	1:00 or faster
Elite	25+ rounds	0:48 or faster

The round times are simple division (20 minutes over the number of rounds), and CrossFit adds two pacing notes of its own: the fastest athletes finish a round in under 45 seconds, and getting every round under two minutes is a good goal for any level. Two minutes a round is exactly 10 rounds.

That leaves a wide gap between 10 and 20, and it's where most people who train regularly end up. Somewhere in the low to mid teens is a strong score for a recreational gym-goer with solid strict pull-ups, although that's our read of the gap in CrossFit's bands and not an official tier.

The volume is what catches people out, so here's the arithmetic:

Rounds	Pull-ups	Push-ups	Squats	Total reps
10	50	100	150	300
15	75	150	225	450
20	100	200	300	600
25	125	250	375	750

Twenty rounds is 100 pull-ups in 20 minutes. If your biggest single set is six, you won't get there on grit, and trying is how shoulders get hurt.

Pacing: the maths that decides your score

Cindy rewards the person who's boring. Pick a round time you can hold for all 20 minutes, then hold it.

Work backwards from your target. For 15 rounds you need a round every 80 seconds; for 12, every 100 seconds. Watch the clock at the end of each round for the first five minutes and you'll almost always find you're ahead of pace, because round one feels like nothing. That's the trap. Someone who opens with five 50-second rounds and then needs 2:30 per round by minute 12 finishes well behind someone who sat on 80 seconds from the start.

A few things that hold the pace together:

• Break the push-ups before you have to. CrossFit's own advice is to split them early, for example 5 reps, a quick shake of the arms, then 5 more. Once you hit failure on a push-up, the next set might be three reps, then two, and your round time doubles. Sets of 5 and 5 (or 4, 3, 3) from round one keep you away from that cliff.
• Treat the squats as your rest. Fifteen air squats at a steady rhythm take about 20 to 25 seconds, and your arms recover the whole time. Don't sprint them and don't stop mid-set; breathe out at the top of each rep.
• Keep the pull-ups unbroken for as long as you can, but drop to 3 and 2 the moment the fifth rep turns into a grind. A five-second break costs less than a failed rep.
• Shorten the walks. Do your push-ups and squats directly under the bar. Three seconds saved per transition is a full minute across 20 rounds.

Save the push for the last two minutes. If you've paced it properly you'll have one faster round left, and that's worth more than a heroic first minute.

Scaling Cindy

Scaling keeps the shape of the workout, which is 20 minutes of near-continuous movement, at a load you can sustain. CrossFit's rule of thumb is that you're ready for the prescribed version once you can do 5 to 7 or more pull-ups and 15 or more push-ups in a row. Below that, change the movement before you change anything else.

If you can't do pull-ups (or can only do a few). CrossFit prefers a vertical pull such as a leg-assisted pull-up and accepts a horizontal one such as the ring row.

• Ring rows are the easiest to adjust: walk your feet forward to make them harder, back to make them easier. A pair of gymnastic rings slung over a bar or beam does the job.
• Banded pull-ups keep the vertical pattern. Our assisted pull-up guide explains which band thickness to start on, and the best resistance bands round-up covers the long loop bands you need.
• Jumping pull-ups, from a box that puts the bar at about wrist height with your arms overhead, let you keep moving quickly when your pulling strength has gone.

If the push-ups break down. Put your hands on a bench or box for incline push-ups, or drop to your knees. Inclines are the better choice because your trunk still works as a plank and you can lower the surface as you get stronger.

If 20 minutes is too much. Halve it. A 10-minute half Cindy is a common scaled version, and CrossFit's own beginner variation is shorter and lighter still:

One more option sits between those: keep the 20 minutes and cut the reps to 3, 6 and 9. You still learn the pacing, with 40% less volume per round.

A 4-week plan to add rounds

CrossFit's position is that Cindy doesn't need specialised training, and that extra pull-up and push-up volume tacked onto warm-ups is enough. It suggests 3 easy rounds of 5 strict pull-ups and 5 push-ups. The plan below builds on that idea with two short sessions a week on top of whatever else you do, then a retest. Use your scaled movements throughout if you scale the workout.

Week	Session A	Session B
1	Test: full Cindy (or your scaled version). Note the score and where the push-ups broke.	EMOM 10 minutes: 1 round of Cindy every 90 seconds at an easy pace (about 7 rounds)
2	10-minute half Cindy at your target round time	5 sets of pull-ups at about 60% of your max set, then 5 sets of push-ups the same way, 60 seconds rest
3	2 x 8-minute Cindy with 4 minutes rest between, holding target pace	12 minutes: 1 round every 75 to 90 seconds, push-ups always split 5 and 5
4	Easy week: 3 rounds as a warm-up on two days, nothing to failure	Retest: full Cindy

If strict pull-ups are the limiter, add negative pull-ups once a week, 3 to 5 reps with a slow five-second lower. Expect one to three extra rounds on the retest if you were new to pacing; less if you'd already done Cindy several times.

Want a different test once Cindy's familiar? Burpees make a brutal single-movement AMRAP, and our HYROX weights guide lays out the station loads if you're tempted by a race.

Is Cindy safe for beginners?

For most healthy people, yes, provided the volume matches what you've trained for. The NHS already recommends muscle-strengthening work on at least two days a week, and bodyweight pulling, pushing and squatting fit that well. There are two specific risks to respect.

The first is your shoulders. A systematic review of CrossFit-style training found that shoulders, knees and the back are the areas injured most often, although it rated 11 of its 12 included studies as poor quality (Prevalence of Injuries in CrossFit and HIFT). A separate review of risk factors found limited evidence that people newer to CrossFit get injured more, and its authors argued that novices need closer coaching (Risk Factors for Musculoskeletal Injury in CrossFit). Neither paper studied kipping on its own. Our advice is the conservative one that most coaches give: earn a few strict pull-ups before you kip, and don't do 75 or more swinging reps on shoulders that can't yet control one slow rep.

The second is sheer volume. Exertional rhabdomyolysis, where damaged muscle leaks its contents into the blood, is rare, but case reports exist of previously healthy people being hospitalised after a single exhaustive CrossFit session, including a 22-year-old who needed six days of treatment (case report). A case report shows it can happen, not how often. The practical lesson is simple, though: 300 squats and 200 push-ups is a lot for a first attempt, so start with the 10 or 12-minute version. Severe muscle pain and swelling with dark, cola-coloured urine in the days afterwards needs urgent medical attention.

What you need to do Cindy at home

A pull-up bar and roughly two square metres of floor. That's the whole list.

The bar matters more than you'd think, because the type decides which pull-ups you can do:

• Doorway bars are cheap and need no drilling, but they're for strict pull-ups only. Don't kip on one. Our best pull-up bar round-up has the picks.
• Wall-mounted bars bolt into brick and stay put under swinging loads, with more headroom above the bar. See our wall-mounted pull-up bar guide for fixing advice.
• Power towers suit renters who can spare the floor space; the free-standing pull-up bar guide covers the stability checks to make before you buy.

If you own the wall and want one bar that'll cope with every style, the GYM MASTER Heavy Duty is the wall-mounted pick from our round-up, at about £55 at the time of writing.

Check the GYM MASTER wall-mounted pull-up bar on Amazon

No bar and no rings? Inverted rows under a sturdy table will get you through a scaled Cindy, though a bar is the first thing to buy if you plan to repeat it. A mat or a folded towel under your hands helps on hard floors, and a phone timer propped where you can see it from the floor does the rest.

Recommended reads

• Pull-ups: muscles worked and how to get your first one
• Push-ups: how to do them properly
• Ring rows: the best pull-up scale
• The best pull-up bars in the UK
• More workout guides