CrossFit Timer App: The Four Clocks a WOD Actually Needs

A CrossFit session runs on four clock shapes: AMRAP, EMOM, For Time with a cap, and Tabata. A timer app is worth keeping if it can produce all four in about fifteen seconds each, because every workout on the whiteboard is one of them, or two of them stacked.

The settings themselves are three or four numbers. What separates a timer you use for a year from one you delete is whether you can hear it from the floor with the screen dark.

The four clocks, in one table

Here is the whole mapping. Work, rest and rounds are the fields nearly every interval timer asks for, whatever it calls them.

Two of those rows deserve their own paragraph, because they are where people misconfigure a timer and only find out at minute nine.

AMRAP: one long countdown, count the rounds yourself

AMRAP means as many rounds as possible in a fixed window. The timer’s only job is to count that window down and stop. One interval, one round, no rest, no beeps in between.

The mistake is building AMRAP 20 as twenty rounds of sixty seconds. That gives you a beep every minute, which tells you nothing during an AMRAP and actively breaks your pacing, because a minute has no relationship to your round.

What you do want is a cue at the halfway mark and at the last minute, if your app offers one. Halfway is where you learn whether the pace you picked is real. Set a 10 second lead-in as well, so the clock does not start while you are still walking to the bar.

Round counting stays manual, which surprises people expecting the app to do it. Tap a round counter if the app has one, or put a chalk mark on the floor at the end of each cycle. If you can only remember one number at the buzzer, remember rounds and reconstruct the partial reps afterwards.

EMOM: sixty seconds, zero rest, rounds equal minutes

Work 60 seconds. Rest 0 seconds. Rounds equal to the number of minutes. That is the whole configuration, and the rest field is the one people fill in wrongly.

An EMOM has no separate rest interval. Your rest is whatever is left of the minute after the reps are done. Set 60 seconds of work with 20 seconds of rest and you have built an 80 second cycle, which puts you three rounds out of step with the class by minute ten. The full breakdown, including E2MOM and alternating variants, is in the EMOM timer guide.

Pick reps that take you about 40 seconds. Twenty seconds of work makes it a warm-up, 55 seconds makes it one unbroken set with a beep in the middle.

For Time with a cap: counting up to a hard stop

For Time is the one shape that runs the other direction. Your score is elapsed time, so the display should count up, and the cap is a hard stop that ends the workout whether you finished or not.

Set a single count-up timer with the cap as its ceiling: 10:00 for Fran, 20:00 for a longer couplet, 25:00 or 30:00 for a chipper. When you finish the last rep, the number on the screen is your score. When the cap arrives first, your score is the reps you completed, usually written as a rep count or as the cap time plus a penalty depending on the gym.

Some apps only count down. That still works: run the cap as a countdown, and your time is the cap minus whatever is left when you stop. It costs you one subtraction and it costs you the satisfaction of watching the number climb, which is a genuine reason to prefer count-up if you have it.

The cap is a training decision more than a timekeeping one. A 21-15-9 that should take seven minutes gets a 10 minute cap, so somebody having a bad day stops at ten rather than grinding out a fifteen minute version of a workout designed to be fast.

Tabata: 20 on, 10 off, eight rounds

Twenty seconds of work, ten of rest, eight rounds, four minutes on the clock including the final rest. Those numbers do not change, and every detail behind them is covered in how to set a Tabata timer.

The CrossFit-specific version is the mash: four movements, eight rounds each, back to back. Set 20 seconds work, 10 seconds rest, 32 rounds, and switch movement every eighth round. Your score is the lowest round on each movement added together, which is why a spoken round number matters here more than anywhere else. Miscount at round 17 and the score is fiction.

Hearing the cue over a busy floor

A gym floor at 6pm is bars dropping onto rubber, three rowers, and somebody’s playlist through a speaker built for a room twice the size. A polite little chime loses that fight every time.

What survives:

• A short high beep rather than a spoken word. Speech sits in the same frequency range as the music and the coach. A sharp tone cuts through both.
• Different pitches for work and rest. You should know which state you are in from the sound alone, without turning your head.
• A three second countdown before every work interval. This is what gets you back on the bar on time instead of arriving a beat late.
• Cues that duck the music rather than pausing it. An app that stops your playlist every twenty seconds turns a Tabata into a fight with your phone.
• A volume test before you rely on it. Play the cue once with the phone in your pocket, standing next to the rower. Adjust before the workout, not during it.

The phone works face down on the floor

Put the phone screen-down next to your mat and you have solved most of the problems a timer creates. It cannot get kicked into a puddle of sweat as easily, it cannot get chalk ground into the display, and you cannot be tempted to look at it between rounds.

That only works if three things are true. The timer keeps running when the screen locks. The audio keeps playing while another app is in the foreground or the phone is in a pocket. And when you do need to pause, because a plate rolled away or somebody needs the rig, the control is reachable without unlocking, typing a passcode and hunting for the app.

The last one is what Rounds was built around: the round, the seconds left and the next movement live on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island, with pause and skip right there. It is an iPhone interval timer in open beta through TestFlight at the moment.

A whiteboard WOD, translated

Here is what the translation looks like in practice. Three workouts as a coach writes them, and the settings underneath.

“Cindy” / AMRAP 20 / 5 pull-ups, 10 push-ups, 15 air squats. One countdown of 20:00, one round, zero rest, 10 second lead-in. You tally rounds. A round of Cindy is 30 reps, so twelve rounds and change is a common score to write down.

EMOM 16 / odd: 12 cal row / even: 10 burpees. Work 60 seconds, rest 0, rounds 16. Nothing else changes between rounds, and you never look at the screen. The odd and even split lives in your head, or on the whiteboard behind you.

“Fran” / 21-15-9 / thrusters 43kg / pull-ups / cap 10:00. Count up, hard stop at 10:00, one round, no intermediate cues at all. Beeping at a Fran is noise. The only two numbers that matter are the one on the display when you drop the bar and the cap that says stop.

A timer that can produce those three from a cold start in under a minute each covers the vast majority of what a CrossFit gym asks a clock to do. Everything else on the whiteboard is a variation on the round count.

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