maratoolHow to find the right exercise for any muscle or equipment
Pick the muscle you want to train and the equipment you actually have — the database returns every matching exercise with instructions.
Most workout databases either bury exercises under a search box or dump them all into one long list. The Exercise Database has 1,035 exercises you can filter by muscle group, equipment, category, and difficulty — each one with step-by-step instructions and a front/back muscle map.
How it works
- Choose a muscle group, or filter by the equipment available to you — barbell, dumbbell, bodyweight, machine, and more.
- Scan the results — narrow further by category (strength, stretching, plyometrics) or difficulty level.
- Open any exercise for step-by-step instructions and a muscle map.
Primary vs secondary muscles
Every exercise lists a primary muscle — the one doing most of the work — and often several secondary muscles that assist. A bench press is a chest exercise, but it also recruits the triceps and shoulders. The muscle map on each page shows this: the primary muscle in terracotta, secondary muscles in a lighter tint, on both a front and a back view of the body.
This matters when planning a session. Training chest and triceps back to back means the triceps are already fatigued from pressing. The muscle maps make that overlap visible at a glance, so you can group exercises that do not compete for the same recovery.
Where the data comes from
The database combines two openly-licensed sources. Vector illustrations come from Everkinetic, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 — each exercise has a start and an effort phase, which is what makes the animation possible. Photographs and the broader exercise list come from free-exercise-db, released into the public domain. Full details are on the attribution page.