CrossFit Benchmark Calculator: Rank Your Fran, and Every Girl WOD

Methodology

Your score is placed against published normative values for five benchmark workouts, split by sex and by the study's own three age classes.

The source is a 2018 paper in Sports Medicine – Open, "Normative Values for Self-Reported Benchmark Workout Scores in CrossFit Practitioners". The authors scraped 133,857 CrossFit Games athlete profiles between May and August 2017 and analysed a random sample of 10,000, publishing means, standard deviations and deciles for Fran, Grace, Helen, Filthy Fifty and Fight Gone Bad.

Percentiles here are computed from the published mean and standard deviation rather than by reading off the decile table. That is not a shortcut: the published deciles are themselves a normal approximation from those same two figures, and their 10th and 90th percentile values reproduce to within a second at z = ±1.28. Computing the curve gives the same answers without leaving a reader stranded between two buckets.

Four of the five workouts are scored for time, so a lower number ranks higher. Fight Gone Bad counts reps and inverts.

The Girls, as written

Every workout on this page is transcribed from the CrossFit Journal articles that introduced them: issue 21 (September 2003) for Angie, Barbara, Chelsea, Diane, Elizabeth and Fran, and issue 27 (November 2004) for Isabel, Jackie, Karen, Linda, Mary and Nancy, with Grace and Helen introduced between the two.

Loads are stored in pounds because that is what the workouts were written in. Kilograms are converted and rounded to the nearest half kilogram, which is what a gym can actually load. Storing the kilogram figure as canonical is a genuine trap: 65 lb rounds to 29.5 kg, and calling it 29 kg is a different bar.

Where a workout prescribes no load — Angie, Barbara, Chelsea and Mary are bodyweight, Linda is relative to bodyweight — the column is left empty rather than filled with an invented number.

Interpreting your result

Take the percentile as a rough position rather than a precise placing. The spread on these workouts is enormous — the standard deviation on a woman's Fran is three minutes — so a handful of seconds moves you very little, and chasing a single percentile point is not a training goal.

The age class matters more than most people expect. A five-minute Fran is below average for an open-age man and above average for a master. If you are 48 and comparing yourself to the open-age field, you are not being humble, you are using the wrong table.

The next rung shown under your result is the more useful number. It is the score that would move you up a band, which is a target you can train towards.

On the Girls

The point of a named benchmark is repetition. A single Fran time tells you almost nothing; the same Fran six months later tells you a great deal, and that only holds if you do the workout the same way both times, at the same load, to the same standard.

The loads are less important than they look. Grace at 61 kg is not primarily a strength test — most people who can clean and jerk 61 kg once can do it thirty times, and the score is decided almost entirely by how efficiently they cycle the bar. Jackie's near-empty barbell is the same trick from the other end.

If a prescribed load would change what the workout tests, scale it. Fran is meant to be a short and brutal sprint. If the prescribed thruster turns it into a twenty-minute grind you are no longer doing Fran, and the number will not compare to anything, including your own next attempt.

Limitations

• The scores are self-reported and were not judged. No one checked the range of motion, the load, or the clock. The authors flag this themselves.
• The sample is people who log. Athletes who record benchmark scores on a public profile are a faster and more committed population than everyone who turns up to a class. Your percentile is your place among them, not among everybody who has ever done Fran.
• The data was collected in 2017. The sport has grown and the standard has risen since, so a rank here probably flatters slightly.
• Scores represent peak performance on one workout, not overall fitness. A brilliant Fran and a poor Filthy Fifty is an extremely common shape.
• Only five benchmarks have published normative data. The rest of the Girls do not, which is why they are not rankable here.
• The women's loads are convention, not original. The 2004 definitions carried a single load, the men's. Women's prescribed weights were standardised later, through the Open. They are shown here as currently published.
• Movement standards have been refined since 2003 — what counts as a full squat or a locked-out overhead position is more tightly defined now than it was.
• Several Girls have common variants in the wild, particularly on target height and kettlebell weight. The figures here are the prescribed ones, not what a given gym happens to run on the day.
• Only five of these have published normative data behind them, so the other nine cannot be ranked.
• Nothing here is a judgement about whether a workout suits you. Several of the Girls involve high-skill gymnastics and are a poor choice for a beginner regardless of load.

Sources

Pull the receipts, 3 cited sources

FitTools · sources

1. 01 Sports Medicine – Open (2018): Normative Values for Self-Reported Benchmark Workout Scores in CrossFit Practitioners
2. 02 CrossFit Journal issue 27 (Nov 2004): The New Girls
3. 03 CrossFit.com: Fran

Every formula cited ✓