Cindy: The 20-Minute AMRAP Tom Holland Trains With
Cindy is 5 pull-ups, 10 push-ups, 15 air squats, as many rounds as possible in 20 minutes. A fixed clock turns a workout into a measurement you cannot fake.
Fix the clock and the score becomes the truth. There’s nowhere for the number to hide.
- Cindy is a CrossFit benchmark first posted on CrossFit.com on 29 December 2004: five pull-ups, ten push-ups, fifteen air squats, as many rounds as possible in twenty minutes.
- No weights, no equipment beyond a bar, no programming to memorise. The whole workout fits in one line.
- Tom Holland’s best is 27 rounds. That’s 135 pull-ups, 270 push-ups and 405 air squats, roughly 44 seconds a round for twenty straight minutes.
- The movements aren’t why it lasted. The clock is.
The Workout
| Reps | Movement |
|---|---|
| 5 | Pull-ups |
| 10 | Push-ups |
| 15 | Air squats |
Twenty minutes. Count your rounds. That’s the entire specification.
You can run it here: the 20-minute interval timer speaks every phase change, so you count rounds instead of watching a clock.
Holland described the appeal to Men’s Health in one sentence: “It’s great, you don’t have to think about anything — you just count your rounds.”
Fixed Time Beats Fixed Work
Most workouts fix the work and let the time float: five sets of five, and you stop when you’ve done them. Cindy does the opposite. The time is fixed at twenty minutes and the work floats.
That inversion is the whole point.
- Fixed work, variable time. You finish when you finish. Slow days hide inside a longer session, and the record says only that you did it.
- Fixed time, variable work. The session is over at 20:00 no matter what. A slow day shows up as a smaller number, in the same units, against the same clock.
The first is a task. The second is an instrument. Cindy reads out a single integer that is directly comparable to every previous attempt you have made, because the denominator never moves.
A benchmark you can negotiate with is not a benchmark. Cindy is honest because it takes the negotiation away.
What Your Number Means
Published ranges put a first attempt at roughly 10 to 15 rounds, 20 rounds in advanced territory, and 30-plus among elite competitors. Holland’s 27 sits between the last two.
Those bands matter less than the trend. The instrument is calibrated against you, not against him. The number’s only real job is to be compared with the number you posted last month.
The EMOM Variation
There’s no programmed rest in Cindy. If you want rest, you buy it with speed: finish a round in forty seconds and you’ve got twenty seconds before you start the next one.
The EMOM version makes that explicit. One round at the top of every minute, twenty minutes, twenty rounds. Whatever is left of the minute is yours. Same three movements, but the pacing decision is made for you. That’s the right trade while you’re still learning what your sustainable round time actually is.
Run It
I built a 20-minute interval timer for this. Set work to 60 and rest to 0 and it becomes the EMOM. Set both to 60 and you get ten rounds of work-then-rest.
Start whatever you train to first, then start the clock. It counts you in, calls every phase change out loud, and talks over your own music instead of replacing it, so the phone can stay face-down on the floor where you can’t read it anyway.
Then write the number down. That’s the part that makes it a benchmark instead of a hard twenty minutes.
References: Cindy on CrossFit.com; Men’s Journal on Tom Holland’s Cindy record; the reel that started this
Related: the ten-layer map of physical training for where conditioning sits in the stack; or Law 4: Make It Satisfying on why the written-down number is the habit, not the workout.