Benchmarks

What a CCB Benchmark is

A Benchmark is a standardized test within CCB's Functional Endurance system. Every official Benchmark runs the same canonical structure — twelve stations, fixed order, sixty-second Work Phases — and varies only the difficulty of the standardized Targets and Burdens the room is expected to reach.

A Benchmark is not a workout of the day. It is a named, versioned configuration of CCB's standardized format. Two facilities running the same Benchmark on the same version are running the same test.

The five official Benchmarks

CCB ships five official Benchmarks. Each has a public purpose that describes what the Benchmark trains.

The Benchmarks are ordered from orientation to peak demand. A new facility typically starts its athletes on Classic, advances through Engine, Grinder, and Storm, and reserves Inferno for the official test of record.

What stays fixed

Every official Benchmark uses the same shared architecture. Across the five Benchmarks, these elements do not change:

• Twelve stations. Every official Benchmark uses exactly twelve stations.
• Fixed order. The official station order is the same in every Benchmark and every facility. The sequence rotates through the stations in the same order every time.
• Sixty-second Work Phases. Every active station works for sixty seconds at a time. The Freeze locks results at the minute mark.
• Eight bodyweight, four conditioning. The structure is eight bodyweight stations and four conditioning stations, with conditioning at positions 3, 6, 9, and 12.
• Locked official machines. The four conditioning stations use Concept2 BikeErg, Concept2 RowErg, Concept2 SkiErg, and the Rogue Echo Bike, each in its assigned position.
• Two-bodyweight → one-conditioning rhythm. The cycle repeats in pairs of bodyweight stations followed by one conditioning station.

The shared structure is what makes a result comparable across facilities, regions, and seasons. See the Stations page for the full station library and what a facility must equip.

What changes

What changes between Benchmarks is the difficulty of the standardized Targets and Burdens. Difficulty increases through higher Targets and heavier Burdens, not through different movements or a different station order.

The qualitative progression runs from the introductory Baseline of Classic up to the official test of record at Inferno. Numeric difficulty is intentionally not part of the public surface; the standardized Targets and Burdens are provided to facilities through the CCB system and coach-education program.

For how a Benchmark plays out across Work Phases, Evaluation, and Burdens, see the Session Flow page.

Official versus Custom

A Benchmark is not the only way to run a Session. Coaches can also configure a Custom Session — a free-form configuration where every station is filled in by hand.

Custom Sessions are useful for coaching the room around injuries, equipment limitations, or experiment-shaped training. They are not official Benchmarks and they do not produce comparable official Benchmark results. The five official Benchmarks remain the surface for an official, comparable result.

Versioned standards

Every official Benchmark is versioned. A facility's historical results retain the ruleset they were run under — a Classic session run today is judged against the same Target and Burden values as another Classic session run earlier in the same version.

When the Benchmark system is updated, the change is published as a new version. Results from prior versions are not re-scored against the new values; they remain anchored to the ruleset under which they were performed. This is what makes historical Benchmark results durable and comparable over time.

Official specifications are provided through the CCB system and facility program. The facilities that run the official system use the same version-pinned values the room's historical results were originally captured against.

For facilities

CCB is more than a documentation surface. A facility that runs official CCB Sessions receives:

• the complete operating system and Benchmark values for the current version;
• coach education on the standardized format;
• access to the platform tools that run the Work Phase clock, capture results, and publish Burdens;
• the version-pinned Benchmark values the room's official results will be judged against.

Facilities interested in running official CCB Sessions can request more information through the CCB system. Public documentation describes the format; the licensed operating material is delivered through the facility program.

What this page deliberately leaves out

This is the public explanation of the Benchmark system. It deliberately does not list the exact Target values, the exact Burden values, or the formulas from which they are derived. The official ruleset — including exact Targets, exact Burdens, and complete movement standards — is part of the CCB specification and the facility program, not the public documentation.

The plain-language summary above is the canonical public explanation. The CCB Core Specification defines the authoritative rules.