Creating custom exercises

Basic  Protocol ships a base exercise library, but the best programming uses your movements, cues and demos. You can add your own exercises and they show up in the library everywhere you build workouts.

Two ways to create

• Quick-create while building. In the exercise picker, under Can’t find what you’re looking for?, Create new exercise opens a compact dialog: name it, attach a demo, set the basics, and it drops straight into the workout you’re building.
• From the library. Vault → Training → My Exercises → New exercise asks only for a name, then opens the full editor. Everything saves as you type, and the top bar says All changes saved.

The editor

The exercise’s name is the page title and you type over it directly. Below it sits the hero media, then a two-tab card, with a sidebar of three cards down the right.

Instructions is your coaching notes and cues, with formatting. It is the tab that opens first.

Classification is what powers the library’s filters, so it is worth filling in:

• Exercise type: Strength, Cardio, Flexibility, Balance, Plyometric, Functional, Stretching.
• Primary muscle groups: what the movement works.
• Required equipment: everything it needs.
• Difficulty: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Elite.
• Movement: whether it is compound.
• Risk level, 1 to 5: how demanding or injury-prone it is.

Variations holds alternative exercises, the similar movements offered as substitutions when you or a client swap this one out. Default tracking shows what the exercise is measured in.

Extra fields your team has set up

Some accounts catalogue exercises on axes of their own on top of the built-in ones: an age band, a level, a focus, whatever the coaching approach actually turns on. If yours does, those fields appear in Classification directly under Difficulty, named and worded by your team rather than by us, and the exercise list gains a filter for each one.

You will see one of three kinds of control:

• A fixed set of choices: pick from the list your team agreed. Anything outside it is refused, so the library stays filterable.
• An open field: pick a listed value or type a new one. Typing is how the vocabulary grows. Suggestions only ever offer values already used on more than one exercise, so a typo cannot spread by being clicked instead of retyped.
• A free-text note, for anything that is not a category.

Two things worth knowing:

• A value is never deleted behind your back. If your team removes an option from the list, any exercise already carrying it keeps it, marked no longer offered, and you decide whether to clear it. Nothing is silently rewritten.
• Filling them in is what makes the filters useful. An exercise left blank on a field simply does not appear when someone filters on it.

To fill the same field on many exercises at once, tick them in the library and use Set fields… on the bar at the foot of the list.

Most accounts have none of this and see nothing extra: the section is absent rather than empty. Setting the fields up is an account-level change; ask us if you want it.

Media sets

The Media sets tab is where the demos live, and it is organised by set rather than by file. A set is one version of the movement, and every set has the same three slots:

Default is the first set: the exercise as you normally show it. A Loop checkbox on its video makes the clip preview-loop.

Under Additional media, Add set offers the three roles the app understands:

• Explanation: you talking through the movement, rather than the silent demo.
• Easier variant: a regression of the same movement, for a client who is not ready for the full version.
• Harder variant: a progression, for a client who has outgrown it.

Because a set holds one video, one cover and one audio, a complete variant is three files that belong together: the harder movement, the cover a client sees, and the voice-over cue that makes it safe. There is nothing to tag and nothing to clash: the set is the role.

Remove set takes a whole variant off. Clips attached before sets existed appear under Other media; they still show on the exercise, and you can give one a set or remove it.

Why bother: these sets are what let the app offer a client the right version of a movement without sending them off to a different exercise.

Bulk-create from Vault videos

Uploaded a whole batch of demo videos at once? You don’t have to create each exercise by hand.

1. Go to Vault → Content and select the videos (tick their checkboxes).
2. Choose Create exercises on the bar that appears at the bottom.
3. In the dialog, pick a naming style: Clean up and capitalize each word, Clean up and capitalize first letter only, or Keep exact file names. Cleaning up turns underscores and dashes into spaces and drops the file extension. A live preview shows how a few of your file names will come out.
4. Optionally pick a folder, or leave the selection on No folder (root).
5. Hit Create: one exercise per video, each with that video attached as its demo.

Only videos in your selection are used; any other selected files are skipped, and the dialog tells you how many. The new exercises are created Active with sensible defaults (Strength, Intermediate), so you can refine muscle groups, equipment and cues in the editor whenever you like. The whole screen is described in The content library.

Folders, status and sharing

The library’s left rail is folders, and Move to folder appears both on a card’s menu and on the selection bar, so you can file one exercise or fifty.

The Status filter above the list has three values: Active (usable in workouts), Draft, and Deleted (retired, but kept so old workouts still read correctly).

Select exercises and use Share with team to put them on the Team Exercises tab, or Remove from team to take them back off. New exercise on the Team tab creates one already shared, if that is where it belongs from the start.

Tip: good variations and accurate muscle groups and equipment pay off later. They drive the suggested alternatives when swapping an exercise, and the filters in the library.

Next: how clients do the workout, in Logging workouts on mobile.