The Girls are a set of benchmark workouts with women's names. The story goes that they were named the way weather services name storms: anything that leaves you flat on your back deserves a name.
The point of a benchmark is that you come back to it. Do one now, write down your score, retest in three months. Same workout, better number, real proof you're improving.
The app has thirteen of them. We've ranked them from least to most painful. This is a ranking by suffering, not difficulty, so a short workout with a skill you can't do yet isn't automatically near the top. [Reorder freely. Your crew's verdict beats ours.]
13. Grace
30 clean and jerks for time. Over in minutes, and that's the mercy. Your lungs burn, your shoulders complain, and then it's done. The tip: fast singles from the first rep.
12. Isabel
30 snatches for time. Grace's more technical sister. Power or squat snatches both count. Scale the load to keep it under about eight minutes, because a heavy snatch done slowly is a different, sadder workout.
11. Nicole
A 20-minute AMRAP of a 400 m run and one max set of pull-ups. Your score is total pull-ups. It's ranked low because you control the pain: run at a pace that lets your grip recover. It's ranked at all because your grip won't fully recover.
10. Diane
21-15-9 deadlifts and handstand push-ups. Short, but the handstand push-ups go from fine to failure with no warning. Keep the deadlifts in big sets and break the handstand push-ups early. Pike push-ups are the scale.
9. Elizabeth
21-15-9 squat cleans and ring dips. The cleans tax your legs and lungs, and the dips tax everything that's left. The best tip in the whole app lives here: break the ring dips before they break you.
8. Mary
A 20-minute AMRAP of 5 handstand push-ups, 10 alternating pistols and 15 pull-ups. A skill test disguised as a conditioning test. Scale pistols to a box, keep handstand push-ups in small sets, and accept that your legs will shake on the stairs.
7. Chelsea
5 pull-ups, 10 push-ups and 15 air squats every minute for 30 minutes. Minute one is a joke. Minute fifteen is not. By minute twenty-five, the rest period is about four seconds long. Aim to finish each minute in 35 to 40 seconds early on, so you have room later.
6. Nancy
Five rounds of a 400 m run and 15 overhead squats. Runs get your lungs; overhead squats need a stable midline you no longer have. Warm up your overhead position properly, and run hard enough to count, but not so hard you wobble under the bar.
5. Angie
100 pull-ups, 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, 100 air squats, in that order. Each movement must be finished before the next. That's the cruelty: no rotating, no recovery. Pure volume. Break every movement into repeatable sets from rep one.
4. Amanda
9-7-5 ring muscle-ups and squat snatches. If you have muscle-ups, it's short and sharp. If you don't, you'll meet a wall and spend a long time there. Scale to ring rows and dips, and do singles on the snatches.
3. Barbara
Five rounds of 20 pull-ups, 30 push-ups, 40 sit-ups and 50 squats, with three minutes of rest after each. The rest is a lie. It feels long for round one and shorter every time. Your score is total work time, and the goal is keeping every round within a few seconds of the first. Nobody does.
2. Nasty Girls
Three rounds of 50 air squats, 7 ring muscle-ups and 10 hang power cleans. It's in the name. Fifty squats sounds fine until you try a muscle-up straight after them with shaking legs. The muscle-ups are the bottleneck; keep the squats steady and save your energy for the rings.
1. Eva
Five rounds of an 800 m run, 30 kettlebell swings and 30 pull-ups. That's 4 km of running and 150 reps each of swings and pull-ups, budgeted at about an hour. Eva doesn't hurt more per minute than the others. She just hurts for longer than all of them. Pace every run the same, and break swings and pull-ups into sets of 10 from the start.
Disagree? Good.
Rankings are meant to be argued over.
The best way to prove us wrong is to do all thirteen, record your scores, and come back with receipts. Find The Girls in the app, star them as favourites, and start working through the list, FATBOY.
Fatboy Fitness isn't affiliated with CrossFit. Benchmark workout names are used only to describe the workouts.