Tom Holland has never pretended his training is complicated. The actor laid out exactly what he turns to when the schedule is tight and the gym window is short: a CrossFit staple that asks for nothing but a pull-up bar and a bit of floor space.
“I do a CrossFit workout called ‘Cindy’. It’s 5 pull-ups, 10 push-ups, 15 squats,” Holland said. The workout is one of CrossFit’s benchmark sessions, part of the “Girls” series used to track fitness over time.
The format is simple: cycle through that trio of movements for as many rounds as possible in 20 minutes, then write down your total. Every time you repeat it, you’re chasing that same number, which makes progress easy to measure and hard to fake.
For an actor who has spent the better part of a decade swinging through New York as Spider-Man, that kind of built-in accountability makes sense. Holland’s frame in the movies has always leaned toward lean and functional rather than bulky, and a workout built entirely around bodyweight movement fits that mold.
And Holland doesn’t just dabble in Cindy. He’s competitive with it. “I think my record is 27 rounds,” he said, a number that would hold its own in most serious CrossFit boxes. To put it in perspective, each round covers 5 pull-ups, 10 push-ups and 15 squats, so 27 rounds means 135 pull-ups, 270 push-ups and 405 squats inside 20 minutes. That’s not a casual warm-up.
Part of the appeal, according to Holland, is how little mental energy it demands. “It’s great, you don’t have to think about anything, you just count your rounds,” he said. There’s no programming to plan, no decisions to make mid-session. You just move, and the round count takes care of the rest.
He’s also worked out how to scale the session depending on what his body has to give that day. On days when he’s dragging, he swaps the all-out format for a steadier structure: “If I’m feeling tired, I’ll do one round on the minute, every minute, so you do 20 rounds.”
That EMOM version trades intensity for control, spacing the same 5-10-15 combination across 20 discrete minutes instead of racing the clock non-stop. It sounds like the easier option. It isn’t.
Holding pace for a full round every 60 seconds for 20 straight minutes is its own test of endurance, which is exactly why Holland treats it as his fallback for low-energy days rather than something to phone in.
When he wants to push the difficulty further, Holland doesn’t reach for extra equipment so much as extra weight on his own frame. “I’m always training in a weighted vest, it’s the only way to do it!” he said. Strapping on a vest for Cindy turns every pull-up, push-up and squat into a heavier proposition without changing the movements themselves, a small tweak that can turn a familiar workout into a noticeably tougher one.
