How Hard Can Tom Holland’s Viral Spider-Man Workout Be?

I looked longingly at the orange latex-coated gloves on the stranger next to me. Wish I’d thought of that. Or that I’d brought climber’s chalk, or something. Calluses I’d hardened over a half-decade were ripping in real time. The tiny muscles between my metacarpals were quivering.

Watching this guy float from a round of air squats back to the pull-up bar, I started to feel paranoid. Are we doing the exact same workout? If so, he’s lapping me.

This suspicion snapped when he started performing Australian pull-ups underneath the parallel bar. That’s not part of this workout. But you could forgive me for assuming that every 32-year-old guy working out on the playground is trying to topple Tom Holland. It’s all I’ve seen on my social feeds for weeks.

Tom Sets the Bar

At an event last month for Bero, Holland’s non-alcoholic beer, the 30-year-old actor nominated the 20-minute Cindy as his “go-to workout for when [he’s] short on time.” That might’ve been enough in itself to activate the macro bros. But Holland gave us stats, too. At his best, he says, he’s managed to do 27 rounds of Cindy in the allotted time. On an off day, he can still hit 20.

A round of Cindy looks like this:

• 5 pull-ups
• 10 push-ups
• 15 air squats

So: Holland’s basically saying he treats Cindy like an “every minute on the minute” (EMOM) workout, even if he’s zapped. His floor is 20 rounds. I explained this to an older, fitness-obsessed friend who isn’t on any form of social media, and he got visibly agitated. He didn’t believe Holland has those numbers in him, even if he just played Peter Parker and Telemachus in the same summer.

No wonder this guy and this guy and this guy and a thousand other TikTok warlords (including this guy, who is actually Chris Daughtry) have crawled out of the woodwork to take the so-called “Spider-Man workout” for a spin. But as I discovered testing it myself, there are a few key reasons this protocol has resonated — and registered millions of impressions — beyond the masochistic joys of chasing down a celebrity.

Cindy, a Brief History

It’s sort of amazing that Cindy is now synonymous with “the Spider-Man workout” in the year 2026. By CrossFit’s standards, Cindy is a classic. The fitness movement’s very first Workout of the Day (WOD) was uploaded in the winter of 2001, and Cindy appeared only three years later. CrossFit.com calls it a “benchmark workout” with “low-skill gymnastics elements” and “complementary movement functions.”

In other words, it’s something anyone can try, and returning to it over the years offers a useful appraisal of your muscular endurance. The workout also perfectly divvies up responsibility (push, pull, legs) while cramming a titanic effort into less than 2% of your day.

CrossFit moderators declare that “the fastest athletes will complete rounds in under 45 seconds,” but finishing rounds in less than two minutes is “a great goal for all levels to shoot for.”

Spidey Senses

That time-priority aspect has always been important to the CrossFit faithful, but it’s having a real moment across the entire strength-training complex right now. Bite-sized bodyweight workouts, filmed in driveways, living rooms and parks, perform inordinately well across social media. They orbit a similar ethos: I don’t care how old you are, how many responsibilities you have, how small your apartment is. I know you have 20 minutes to put in work.

These workouts are an obvious byproduct of the COVID/WFH era, when many exercisers learned to get by without gym access. But they’re also, I think, a rebuke of that era’s many peter-outs: the equipment people invested in but never used, the expensive fitness subscriptions they felt stuck in for months on end. It’s become empowering, literally, to know you can pencil in a suitable strength workout anywhere you have a patch of grass or floor.

This has actually been a focus of mine all summer, well before Holland’s press tour. I’m in between gym memberships at the moment (too much travel; all my friends are getting married), so aside from some home weights, I’ve been making do with strength sessions at the local playground. Sometimes I’ll go after my morning run. But these low-weight, high-rep workouts tend to favor fresh muscles. So I’ll I usually save my trips for early evening, when I get home from work.

It always helps to have some direction from online experts. The Spider-Man workout arrived at a high time for both calisthenics and casual “daily reps” content, when even bruiser types seem as interested in basic movement patterns and injury prevention as they do conventional bodybuilding.

Meanwhile, it definitely helps to have a distinct challenge to shoot for. That’s the internet’s bread and butter. Cindy was already a desirable back-pocket workout. But its repackaged form turned it into the can’t-miss fitness challenge of the summer.

So: How’d I Do?

I entered my first Cindy feeling ambivalent about Holland’s number. I’m a long-distance runner; I don’t look like this. I’m sure a lot of guys stepped into the ring determined to eat Peter Parker’s lunch, but I just wanted to post a respectable number.

That said, I also underestimated the absurdity of his off-day stats. I completed the first round in the first minute, as if I were shooting for 20 rounds total. Keeping up that pace proved incredibly difficult. It took me over four minutes to complete the first three rounds (at which point I started to lust over that stranger’s latex gloves).

A workout this efficient is quick to reveal your inefficiencies. The pull-ups slowly obliterated me. As the rounds stretched on, my form completely unraveled. I flared my elbows more and found it harder to pull my shoulders back. That meant I started relying more on my biceps to get my head over the bar…which only made my arms more tired. There’s not much you can do at that point, short of ingesting drugs or queuing up the perfect song, so I hobbled to the finish with a final score of 12 rounds.

I left that playground with my head high, though. I’d done 60 pull-ups, 120 push-ups and 180 air squats in 20 minutes. Not bad for a day’s work! Your head is more attuned to counting “rounds” than “reps,” so they pass by in a blur. What’s more: while Holland had set the market at 20 rounds, CrossFit.com says “8-10+ rounds, as prescribed,” is a decent score for an intermediate trainee. That works for me.

For Next Time…

Reflecting on the experience, I think I’d consider shifting down to three pull-ups per round in order to protect my form. I had a slight shoulder tear years ago and I’m not trying to spend the whole fall at Spear Physical Therapy again. I’d also consider just applying this exact same model to a different trio of exercises (as this guy did with a kettlebell).

While this workout will help you get shredded, keep in mind it’s ultimately a conditioning-oriented circuit for someone under a time crunch. You could modify it by doing fewer rounds, more reps to failure and adding weight (e.g., turning air squats into goblet squats) for more of a strength focus.

Do I think Holland actually hit 27 rounds once? The comments sections don’t think so. (All these yoked influencers are flaming out around 25 rounds.) But what do I know? He was a gymnast growing up and sort of has Tom Cruise energy. I wouldn’t be surprised if he went full maniac for 2026.

Here are my stats for the brunch I wolfed down right after the workout: six eggs, two slices of sourdough and several dollops of Cholula in under five minutes. I’m sure you guys will have no trouble matching those marks.