What a 60-Minute Class Fits In

People arrive expecting an hour of shouting and burpees. It's a fair thing to expect from the internet.

The sixty minutes, in full.

0:00–3:00, the brief. Three minutes, first thing, every single class. The coach puts the whole hour on the board and talks through it — what the strength is, what the workout is, what the movements are. Nobody walks into an unknown. If you've been dreading the not-knowing, it's over three minutes after you arrive.

3:00–15:00, warm-up. Twelve minutes. Mobility first, then general movement to raise your temperature and heart rate, then work that rehearses the shapes you'll need today.

15:00–22:00, build-up. Seven minutes on the specific thing. If it's a skill day, that's the skill progression. If it's a lifting day, you build to your working weight in stages — broomstick, then an empty bar, then a technique load, then your weight. Nobody's first rep of the day is a heavy one.

22:00–36:00, strength. Fourteen minutes, coached, unhurried, loaded to you specifically. Between sets there's rest, and conversation, and a coach correcting things. Add the build-up and that's over twenty minutes of the hour spent getting stronger, most of it not out of breath.

36:00–42:00, metcon prep. The movements get rehearsed at the weight you'll use, and your version of the workout gets agreed with you — the load, the reps, the standard. This sits here rather than at the start deliberately: do it up front and you've gone cold by the time the clock starts.

42:00–55:00, the workout. The bit everybody pictures. Typically 12 to 15 minutes. The exception is a Saturday partner session, which can run 30 minutes or more and compresses everything else in the hour to make room.

55:00–60:00, cooldown. Five minutes of coming back down and putting kit away. A lot of the reason members are still here in five years happens in the standing-around bit afterwards.

From November the order shifts — the metcon moves in front of the strength work, because the unit is cold and bodies lift better warm. The blocks are the same, they just swap places.

A first class runs slightly differently. You'll be asked to come ten minutes early and the coach will take you through the movements separately before anything starts. That's the standard anywhere worth training — nobody should be learning a movement on the fly in front of the room.

So the hard part is twelve to fifteen minutes, after three minutes of explanation, twelve of warm-up and thirteen more of building up to it. The rest is instruction, preparation and people.

There are nine a day on weekdays — 5:30, 6:30, 7:30, 9:30 and 11 in the morning, 12:15 on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays, then 6 and 7 in the evening. Saturdays run at 7:30, 8:30 and 9:30, and Sunday has CrossFit at 8:30 and Hyrox at 9:45.

Come and watch one if you'd rather not commit to doing it. Standing at the side of a class for an hour tells you more than any website will, and it costs nothing.

Or skip straight to fifteen minutes on the phone with Jeremy or Beth at crossfitchiltern.com. Free, no obligation, no hard sell.