Fitbod selects exercises using five inputs: how effective an exercise is for your stated goal, what equipment you have available, how recovered each muscle group is, how much variety you've asked for, and the feedback you've given on specific exercises. Effectiveness is drawn from data across more than 87 million logged workouts.
Table of Contents
What Fitbod reads from your My Plan
The five factors behind each exercise
How to influence what you're given
How Fitbod learns without being told
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Getting the exercises you actually want
Key takeaways
- Exercise selection is driven by your My Plan settings combined with your logged training history.
- Only exercises matching your available equipment will appear.
- Fitbod prioritizes muscle groups that have recovered and avoids ones that are still fatigued.
- You can directly influence selection with Recommend More Often, Recommend Less Often, and Don't Recommend Again.
- Fitbod also learns passively. Every skip, replace, delete or manual addition informs future workouts.
- Recovery settings apply to main muscle groups; accessory muscle groups are limited to one or two exercises per workout.
What Fitbod reads from your My Plan
Before selecting anything, Fitbod builds a profile from your settings:
- Fitness goal: shapes your rep ranges, which exercises are considered, and overall workout intensity.
- Experience level: beginner, intermediate or advanced. Raising your level opens up more exercises.
- Available equipment: a hard filter. Only exercises you have equipment for will be recommended.
- Training split: Full Body, Upper/Lower, Push/Pull/Legs, and others.
- Workout preferences: duration, warm-ups and cooldowns, cardio, exercise variability, and supersets or circuits.
You can update any of these at any time in your My Plan.
The five factors behind each exercise
Exercise effectiveness: Fitbod draws on data from more than 87 million logged workouts to identify which exercises work well for a given goal.
Equipment availability: exercises are filtered to what you've said you have access to. If you gain access to new equipment, updating your My Plan immediately widens the pool.
Muscle recovery status: Fitbod prioritizes muscle groups that are fresh and gives fatigued ones time to recover. Note that recovery settings apply to main muscle groups. Accessory muscle groups are limited to one or two exercises per workout regardless.
Workout variety: Fitbod introduces new exercises over time to prevent plateaus, while still returning to movements you train regularly. How aggressively it does this is governed by your Exercise Variability setting, which defaults to Balanced, a mix of consistency and variety.
Your feedback: both the preferences you set explicitly and the choices you make during workouts.
How to influence what you're given
Fitbod gives you three levels of direct control, available from the "..." menu next to any exercise, or via Workout tab → My Plan → Preferences → Manage Exercises:
Recommend More Often increases how frequently an exercise appears. Your other settings (equipment, recovery, goal, workout length) still apply, so this raises likelihood rather than guaranteeing an exercise every session.
Recommend Less Often reduces how often an exercise appears without removing it. Useful for movements you can do but would rather not do often.
Don't Recommend Again removes an exercise from future recommendations entirely. This takes effect immediately. If the exercise is in a workout you haven't started, it's replaced right away. You can still add an excluded exercise manually if you change your mind.
One caution: excluding a large number of exercises limits the pool Fitbod has to build from, which can constrain workout generation. If you're excluding heavily, Recommend Less Often is usually the better tool.
How Fitbod learns without being told
Beyond explicit preferences, Fitbod treats your in-workout behavior as signal. Every time you skip, replace, delete or manually add an exercise, that informs future recommendations. The algorithm tends to favor exercises you've logged consistently over time.
If an exercise isn't right for you, you can also replace it with an alternative targeting the same muscle group, which keeps the workout balanced.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Why do I keep getting the same exercises?
Two things drive this. Your Exercise Variability setting defaults to Balanced, which is a deliberate mix of consistency and variety rather than maximum variation. On top of that, the algorithm tends to favor exercises you've logged consistently over time, so regular training reinforces the pattern. Raising your variability setting will widen the rotation, and marking specific movements as Recommend Less Often pushes them down without removing them.
Why can't I find a particular exercise in my workouts?
Usually one of three reasons. It may require equipment you haven't listed in your My Plan, since equipment is a hard filter. It may sit above your current experience level, as raising your level opens up more exercises. Or it may have been set to Don't Recommend Again at some point. You can always add an exercise manually, including one you've excluded.
Can I reset my exercise preferences?
Not in bulk. There's no single reset, so preferences have to be changed one exercise at a time through Workout tab → My Plan → Preferences → Manage Exercises, where you can filter by exercises you've already rated. This is worth knowing before you exclude heavily, since undoing it takes longer than doing it.
Getting the exercises you actually want
Exercise selection responds to two separate channels, and both are always on. The first is what you set deliberately: your equipment, goal, experience level and exercise preferences. The second is what you do in the app, since every skip, replacement, deletion and manual addition is read as a signal. If your workouts aren't landing right, it's worth checking both. Sometimes the fix is a setting, and sometimes it's that a few in-the-moment choices have pulled your recommendations somewhere you didn't intend.
Read next
- How Fitbod Creates Your Workout
- Recommend More, Less, or Exclude
- [How does Fitbod know my muscles are still recovering?]