AMRAP pacing
Most AMRAPs are lost in the first ninety seconds. The score tracks how evenly you split your rounds far more closely than how fast your best round was — an athlete whose rounds all take about the same time almost always beats one who opened faster and faded, on the same workout.
Measuring how evenly you paced
There is a simple way to put a number on it. Take your round times, then compute the spread between the slowest and the fastest as a percentage of your average round:
(slowest round − fastest round) ÷ average round × 100
We call this the Pace Variance Index, and AMRAP With Friends computes it for every mission. A low number means your rounds looked alike. A high number means the workout took something from you that you never got back.
What the bands mean
| Variance | Reads as | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Under 10% | Elite pacing | You picked a pace and held it for the whole cap. |
| 10–20% | Standard | Normal degradation. You slowed, but not badly. |
| 20–30% | Power leak | You went out too fast and paid for it later. |
| Over 30% | Collapse | The back half looks nothing like the front half. |
Except on the shortest missions — five minutes and under — the first round is excluded from the calculation. Everyone's first round is fast because they are fresh and have no feedback yet; including it would mark honest pacing as a collapse. On a five-minute clock there are too few rounds to discard one, so every round counts.
How to actually hold a pace
- Decide the round time before you start. Look at the movements, estimate what one round costs, and pick a number you believe you can repeat for the whole cap — not your best possible round.
- Break sets before you have to. Ten push-ups as six and four, from round one, beats ten unbroken in round one and a grind from round four.
- Move on the transitions. The seconds between movements are free time nobody trains. In a 20-minute AMRAP they are worth more than a faster set.
- Log every round. You cannot correct a split you cannot see. Round times mid-workout are the only feedback the format gives you.
Longer caps punish this harder
In a 5-minute AMRAP there is barely time to pay for a fast start. In a20-minute AMRAP the cost compounds for fifteen more minutes. The longer the cap, the more the score is a pacing test wearing a workout costume.
Related questions
Should you rest during an AMRAP?
Plan short breaks rather than taking them when you break. A five-second pause before a set you know will be hard costs less than the thirty seconds you lose after failing mid-set. Unplanned rest is a symptom of a pace you already could not hold.
Why is my first round always the fastest?
Because you are fresh and there is no feedback yet telling you otherwise. That is normal, which is why we exclude the first round from the variance calculation on every mission except the shortest, five minutes and under. The question is not whether round one is fastest — it is how far the rest drift from it.
How do you pace a 20 minute AMRAP?
Decide on a round time before you start, then hold it. Break each movement into planned sets rather than going to failure, and check your split every few rounds. The score is decided in minutes twelve to twenty, and what happens there is set by what you did in the first five.
Run an AMRAP with your friends
One shared countdown, one leaderboard, everyone on the same clock — wherever they are training.