Where Grace Came From

Grace was introduced a few months after the original six “Girls” workouts in 2003,joining Fran and Helen as one of the earliest additions to CrossFit’s benchmark lineup. Despite the deceptively short description, Grace has earned a reputation as one of the most humbling tests in the sport — plenty of strong lifters who can clean and jerk well over 135 lb for a single rep find that doing it 30 times unbroken (or close to it) is an entirely different problem.

Why Grace Is Such a Good Benchmark

Grace isolates barbell cycling almost completely. There’s no running, no gymnastics, nothing to hide behind — just your ability to move a loaded bar from the floor to overhead, over and over, while your grip, shoulders, and legs all fatigue simultaneously.

What Grace actually measures:

• Barbell cycling efficiency — how well you can string together clean and jerks without resetting your grip or breaking the bar path
• Technical economy under fatigue — sloppy technique costs exponentially more energy by rep 20 than it does on rep 1
• Anaerobic capacity — like Fran, Grace is short enough (often under 5 minutes) that it’s almost entirely about power output, not aerobic pacing

Good, Average, and Elite Grace Times

Rough community benchmarks for Rx men (135 lb):

• Elite: sub-2:00
• Advanced: 2:00–3:30
• Intermediate: 3:30–5:30
• Beginner: 5:30+

Rx women (95 lb) times run similarly, with a sub-2:30 generally considered elite.

Common Ways Grace Goes Wrong

• Muscling the clean instead of cycling it. Grace rewards a fast, low-effort touch-and-go clean over a powerful-but-slow one — the fastest Grace times come from athletes who barely lift the bar off the ground before it’s moving again.
• Full squat cleans when a power clean would be faster. Unless you need the extra depth to catch the weight, a power clean and quick dip-jerk combo cycles significantly faster than a full squat clean at this weight.
• Losing the jerk under fatigue. As the shoulders fatigue, the jerk (not the clean) is usually where reps slow down or get missed — dedicated jerk practice under fatigue pays off disproportionately here.

Curious whether barbell cycling is actually your limiter, or if something else — like gymnastics capacity or your aerobic engine — is really what’s holding your CrossFit back? Run your Grace time through CrossFit Limiter alongside your other benchmarks for a specific diagnosis.