Each organization can create its own database of exercises to customize how exercises are individualized and presented to athletes. FYTT does not ship with a pre-built exercise library, as most coaches prefer their own videos and descriptions. You can bulk import videos and descriptions to expedite the process.

Here are some general principles to consider when building out your exercise library:

Establishing a standard exercise naming convention is a worthwhile pursuit, especially for a collaborative software platform like FYTT where multiple stakeholders work together to create content. Professionals often have varying preferences, which results in a lack of consistency, and can sometimes lead to confusion for both coaches and athletes.

The ultimate goal of a naming convention is to convey instructions about what athletes need to do as clearly and concisely as possible. Any part of a convention that fails to accomplish this goal should be critically evaluated.

A secondary goal of a naming convention is to enable professionals to communicate using a standard nomenclature. This provides clarity when discussing exercise-related topics, and allows individuals to move from one organization to another without having to learn new terms and vocabulary.

A reasonable starting point is an article titled, Towards Standardization of the Nomenclature of Resistance Training Exercises, by Matthew C. Jackson, Lee E. Brown, Jared W. Coburn, Daniel A. Judelson, and Nick Cullen-Carroll. This article provides a good overview of why naming is important and some of the different strategies already out there.

The article concludes with the following recommended pattern: [specification][equipment][exercise]. We generally like this format, but there are nuances you may want to consider.

This includes things like bilateral/unilateral designation, bar placement, grip, stance, rack position, etc. This category is somewhat broad, so it potentially makes sense to break it down into separate pieces to ensure consistency.

The equipment is important because the nature of how equipment is moved by the body can affect exercise mechanics and muscle activation. There is a question about whether to use full equipment names or abbreviations ("barbell" as opposed to "BB"). The full name leaves the least room for confusion and misunderstanding, but requires more space on the page. The abbreviation is more concise, but assumes that the athlete knows what it means.

In most cases, the exercise component is pretty straight forward. We assume that our athletes will acquire some basic knowledge, so there is no need to re-invent the wheel and be overly descriptive. However, there may be cases when a movement needs to be laid out in more detail.

Consider whether or not you should shy away from using proper nouns or slang in favor of explicit descriptions. i.e., "Straight Leg Deadlift" instead of "Romanian Deadlift" or "Semi-Supinated Dumbbell Curl" instead of "Hammer Curl," etc.

Make sure to identify what assumptions you're making about what athletes know, or what you expect them to learn in order to understand your instructions. In other words, you probably expect them to learn common terms and what they mean, like press, curl, row, etc. But how much should you rely on "assumed" knowledge versus being descriptive?

For example, if we were to exactly follow the [specification][equipment][exercise] pattern, the full specification for the traditional "Back Squat" would actually be "High-Bar Back-Rack Barbell Squat." But generally the high-bar is assumed and the back-rack is shortened, and people quickly learn what it means to do a back squat. So decide if you want drop the high-bar and only add low-bar to specify a variation from the default, or just be fully descriptive in every case.

Use the description to add any necessary instructions an athlete might need to correctly perform the exercise. The exercise description will be accessible by athletes on the mobile interface when they receive their workout.

Exercises can be created at the institution level and at the team level for teams with a private database. Exercises in the database are shown as autocomplete options when adding exercises to workouts within the workout builder.

Exercises created at the institution level can be utilized by any team at the institution. To create an institution exercise, navigate to the institution dashboard, click the exercises item, then click the button to create a new exercise.

Exercises created at the team level will only be available when creating workouts within the context of the given team. To create a team exercise, the team must have the "private database" setting turned on. Then you can navigate to the team dashboard, click the exercises item, then click the button to create a new exercise.

The exercise builder is where you can configure the details for custom exercises in your database.

Adding tags to exercises can be extremely helpful in organizing your database and making exercises easily accessible.

When adding exercises to workouts, you can search and select exercises from the database by tag. This can provide significant time savings as you build workouts.

In order to be useful, all coaches need to understand the tagging system, and it needs to be applied consistently. Here are some things to consider when implementing an tagging strategy:

You can add videos to the exercises in your database so that athletes can view them when following workouts on the mobile or tablet interface. Videos can be added in one of two ways:

The athlete experience of viewing videos is essentially the same for either format. Your uploaded videos are only viewable by athletes within your organization.

Videos are displayed to athletes within the workout interface for each exercise in the workout, along with the exercise description, if present.

FYTT allows you to define what metrics are associated with an exercise by default. Every time you prescribe the exercise with the "Auto" metric selection, the system will look to your configuration to determine which metric to use for prescribing the attribute. You can add multiple metrics so that if an athlete does not have a measurement for the first metric on the list, it will check if the athlete has a measurement for the second, and so on.

For example, suppose you had "Incline Bench Press" in your exercise database. You could specify that the first choice for prescribing weight for this exercise should be 100% of the "Incline Bench Press: 1RM." You could then specify that the second choice for prescribing weight is 80% of the "Bench Press: 1RM." You can add as many derivatives as you want.

With this example configuration, you could now prescribe the incline bench press exercise within a workout and select "Auto" for the metric option.

When the workout is individualized to an athlete, FYTT will first check to see if the athlete has a measurement for the incline bench press metric. If not, it will then check to see if the athlete has a measurement for the bench press metric. Once the system finds an applicable metric, it will apply the appropriate calculations.

So using our numbers from the examples above, if the athlete only had a bench press metric of 200 lbs, it would apply our second metric derivative of 80% of the bench press 1RM, then apply the prescription of 70% for the set (200 x 80% = 160 x 70% = 112).