Workouts and exercises

Progress ships with a catalog of around 500 exercises and a library of ready-made workouts, and lets you build your own. Every exercise has an illustration, the muscles it trains, the equipment it needs and a description. The whole catalog, illustrations included, is stored on your phone, so browsing and building work without a connection.

The exercise catalog

Exercises are shared across sports. A pull-up is the same exercise whether you climb, do calisthenics or lift in a gym, so your history for it never splits. Each sport (bouldering, calisthenics, yoga, gym, running, Hyrox and more) is a filter over that one catalog.

Progressions are grouped into ladders. Related exercises such as Tuck Front Lever, Straddle Front Lever and Full Front Lever show up as one card, ordered from easiest to hardest. Open the card to see every rung, and the exercise page tells you where you are ("Rung 4 of 6"). Yoga poses are grouped the same way, but as families without an order.

One side at a time. Exercises done one side at a time, such as split squats or single-arm rows, are marked as such. In a live workout each set becomes a Left row and a Right row. Which side comes first is your choice under Settings → Start side. Your history keeps the sides apart.

Your own exercises

Tap Create exercise to add a move that is not in the catalog. Custom exercises are private to you. If you have an account, they sync to your other devices once you sign in, and edits sync from then on. Deleting a custom exercise asks you first. It also takes the exercise out of any workout you built with it, and past sessions that used it no longer show its name.

How a workout is built

A workout is a list of exercises grouped into sections, and sections can be grouped under a phase heading such as Warmup, Strength or Finisher. The section type decides how the exercises are performed:

• Linear: once through, set by set.
• Circuit: the group repeats for a set number of rounds.
• Superset: back to back, no rest inside the group.
• AMRAP: as many rounds as possible inside a time cap.
• EMOM: a set every minute, on the minute.
• Timer: a Tabata, Rounds or Stopwatch timer drives the exercises.

Each exercise carries its prescription: sets, reps, weight, hold time, or distance and pace for cardio. Each exercise also carries its own rest time.

Building your own

The Create Workout screen is one scrolling page. Add a phase, add a section under it, then add exercises or cardio into that section. Tap Add rest on an exercise to set its rest time. Reorder switches to a drag list where you can move exercises within a section or whole sections between phases. Saving checks the workout first: a missing name, a set without reps, or a circuit with only one exercise is pointed out on the spot.

Finding things

The Search tab searches exercises and workouts together, offline, best match first. Before you type it shows your recent searches, a browse-by-muscle-group grid and workouts you use most. The top result shows your personal record, when you last did it and how often you have logged it.

Sport pages

Settings → Sports lists every sport. Open one for an introduction: what the sport involves, its disciplines, race formats where they apply, and training programs. Tapping a program opens the Plan Maker with its schedule filled in. This content is curated on our side and updates without an app update.

What it does not do

There are no exercise videos yet, only illustrations. Workouts nest two levels deep, exercises in sections, and no deeper.

Workouts you build yourself are stored on your phone only for now. They do not sync to your account, so they do not come back after a reinstall or show up on another device. Favourites stay on the phone too. Workouts that are part of a training plan do sync. Every sport has its own page in the app with information about it, kept up to date from our side, so sports can be added without an app update.