A free exercise library: see what each move trains.

Why an exercise library matters for balanced training

Most people who have been lifting for a year or two have the same problem: they know a handful of exercises well and keep repeating them. The chest gets trained from every angle, the rear delts get three sets a week if they are lucky, and the lower back is either ignored or overtrained through deadlifts alone. The cause is almost always the same — a limited mental library of what is available.

A well-organised exercise library solves this in a practical way. Instead of searching YouTube for 'back exercises' and landing on a 40-minute video, you open a searchable database, filter by muscle group, and see every option the gym equipment you actually have supports. Each entry tells you which muscles work as the primary movers and which assist. You can build a week of training by filling gaps rather than doubling up on what you already know.

For evidence-based programming, the exercise-muscle relationship is the foundational data point. Every principle — from MEV (Minimum Effective Volume) to frequency recommendations — is expressed per muscle group, not per exercise. Without knowing which muscles an exercise actually trains, you cannot apply those principles to your own programme.

How to find exercises by muscle group

The most practical way to use an exercise library is to start from the muscle you want to train rather than from an exercise name. This is how balanced programming works in practice: you identify a muscle group that is underdeveloped or under-trained in your current programme, then browse what is available for it.

SammaGym's exercise library organises all 150+ movements by muscle group. The top-level categories follow the standard training split anatomy: chest, back, shoulders, arms (biceps and triceps separately), legs (quads, hamstrings, glutes, calves), and core. Each muscle group shows a count of available exercises so you can see at a glance whether you have been neglecting a category.

• Select a muscle group from the category list to filter the full exercise index down to only relevant movements.
• Scan the list for equipment you have access to. Each exercise entry notes the primary equipment required — barbell, dumbbell, cable, machine, or bodyweight.
• Sort by difficulty if you are looking for beginner-friendly options or want to identify more advanced variations to progress towards.
• Use the search bar when you already know part of a name — searching 'row' returns every rowing variation across muscle groups, letting you compare them side by side.

A useful habit: once a month, open the library for a muscle group you rarely target and read three or four entries. You will almost always find at least one movement you have never tried that fits your available equipment. Adding one unfamiliar exercise per mesocycle is a low-risk way to expand your training vocabulary.

Reading a muscle profile: primary vs secondary muscles

Every exercise entry in SammaGym includes a muscle profile: a breakdown of which muscles are involved and to what degree. Understanding how to read this makes the library significantly more useful.

Primary muscles are the main movers — the muscles the exercise is primarily designed to develop. Under progressive overload, these are the muscles that accumulate the most hypertrophic stimulus. When counting your weekly sets per muscle group for volume management, you count primary-muscle sets.

Secondary (synergist) muscles assist the movement and receive meaningful but smaller stimulus. They may benefit from the exercise but should not be relied on as the primary source of volume for their development. The triceps in a bench press are a classic example: they work hard, but if your goal is triceps hypertrophy, dedicated isolation work is still warranted.

The table above shows the pattern clearly: compound lifts almost always have meaningful secondary involvement, which is why they are efficient but also why you cannot rely on them alone for full development. A pulling programme built only on pull-ups will train the lats well and the biceps to a degree — but dedicated biceps work will accelerate arm development faster than adding more pull-up volume.

Technique cues and common mistakes

Knowing which muscles an exercise trains is step one. Step two is knowing how to perform it in a way that actually trains those muscles — and not something else. Poor technique on compound lifts frequently redistributes load to the wrong structures: a rounded-back squat shifts stress from the quads and glutes towards the lower back; a flared-elbow bench press shifts stress from the pectorals towards the anterior deltoid and biceps tendon.

Each exercise entry in SammaGym's library includes a concise set of technique cues — the one or two setup points and movement points that matter most for that exercise. These are not exhaustive tutorials; they are the cues most likely to prevent the most common loading errors.

Common mistakes are documented separately from the technique cues. This distinction is deliberate: knowing what to do and knowing what to avoid are different types of information, and beginning lifters benefit from having both stated explicitly rather than needing to infer the mistake from the cue.

• Setup errors — foot position, grip width, bar path, bracing — are listed first because they affect every rep in the set. Correcting setup is higher leverage than correcting mid-rep form.
• Compensation patterns — the way your body reroutes load when a muscle is weak or fatigued — are described so you can recognise them as they develop rather than only in video review.
• Breathing and bracing notes appear for exercises where intra-abdominal pressure management is relevant to both performance and safety.

For a systematic approach to writing your own programme — including how to combine technique-dependent compound lifts with isolation work — see the guide on how to write a training program.

Smart equipment substitutions when a machine is busy

Every regular gym-goer has the same experience: you arrive for leg day and the leg press is occupied, the squat rack has a queue, and you have to improvise. The quality of that improvisation depends entirely on understanding which muscles the original exercise was targeting and which alternatives train the same muscles with available equipment.

An exercise library organised by muscle group makes this trivial. If the cable machine is busy and you planned a cable lateral raise for medial deltoid, open the medial deltoid category and scan for alternatives using equipment that is currently free. You might land on dumbbell lateral raises, a machine lateral raise, or a plate-loaded side raise — all of which train the same primary mover with slightly different resistance curves.

The principle extends to injury-driven substitutions. If a shoulder impingement makes overhead pressing uncomfortable, filtering the anterior and medial deltoid categories for exercises that do not involve shoulder elevation above 90 degrees lets you find acceptable alternatives rather than skipping the muscle group entirely until you recover.

• Same primary muscle, different equipment — the most common substitution. A lat machine pull-down when pull-up bars are busy. A leg extension when the hack squat is taken. These are direct swaps.
• Same primary muscle, different movement pattern — slightly higher skill requirement. A Romanian deadlift replaced by a Nordic hamstring curl when a bench is available. The stimulus is similar; the strength curve differs.
• Compound-to-isolation swap — lower efficiency but useful in a crowded gym. Replacing a barbell row with a dumbbell rear-delt fly and a straight-arm pulldown covers much of the same back musculature when the rack is occupied.
• Unilateral variants — when a bilateral machine or barbell is unavailable, the dumbbell unilateral version is almost always available and often preferable for detecting and correcting asymmetries.

See the full exercise library and the training guides for worked examples of equipment substitutions by muscle group.

Building a balanced programme from the library

The library is most valuable not as a one-off reference but as a planning tool you return to every four to six weeks when designing a new mesocycle. The workflow is straightforward once you approach it by muscle group rather than by exercise.

• 1Audit your current programme by muscle group. List every exercise you are doing and tag its primary muscle. Count weekly sets per muscle. Most people find 2–4 muscles that are either not trained at all or are trained with fewer than the minimum effective volume (MEV) for their experience level.
• 2Use the library to fill the gaps. For each under-trained muscle, open its category and identify one or two exercises that fit your equipment and training schedule. Prioritise movements that also have useful secondary involvement in muscles you already train — this improves the session efficiency.
• 3Replace, do not just add. Adding exercises without removing others leads to programme bloat and junk volume. For each exercise you add to address a gap, identify one you are currently doing that overlaps heavily with something else.
• 4Vary movement patterns across sessions. For a muscle trained twice a week, the library makes it easy to use a horizontal-loading movement in one session and a vertical-loading movement in the other — a simple way to expose the muscle to different mechanical stimuli.
• 5Log everything in the same app. When you find an exercise in the library and add it to your routine in SammaGym, the previous-set inline display activates from the first session — you will always have your last performance visible as a reference.

For a detailed walkthrough of programming principles — volume, frequency, exercise selection, and progression — start with the guide on how to write a training program. Then open the exercise library alongside it and treat the guide as a framework and the library as the catalogue you fill it with.

Ready to put the library to use? Open app.sammagym.com, browse the exercise library, and start building a programme that actually covers every muscle group.