Equipment profiles: pick the exact machines your gym has (with pictures)

[hamidrezahanafi]

Related conversations

• #602 — Different gyms as well as different equipment brands proposes gyms as location tags and equipment brands as exercise labels. It is about tracking the same movement on different brands, not about which machines exist.
• #106 — Gym Contexts asks for progression and history tied to a gym. It is about per-gym numbers, not availability.
• #541 — Instance-level equipment types proposes admin-added equipment types outside the catalogue. It is about adding new kit types, not narrowing existing machine types.
• Equipment configuration for plates, dumbbells and bars should be done in Gym profile #808 covers per-gym plates, dumbbells and bars. It can land independently.
• Explorer: equipment by group, each opening on its kinds #901 / A search filtered by a gym says how many matches it hid #905 improve equipment grouping and search visibility in the Explorer. Neither says which machines a profile has.

This request is deliberately the missing slice: a profile should be able to say "leg press yes, leg extension no". None of the above does that.

What problem this solves?

Equipment profiles stop at the catalogue's equipment type, and that is too coarse for machines.

"Leverage machine" covers 279 exercises — leg press, hack squat, leg extension, leg curl, chest press, pec deck, shoulder press, seated row, lat pulldown, calf raise and more. Smith machine covers 94, sled machine 48, assisted 43. A leg press is spread across three types: lever leg press, 45° sled leg press and Smith leg press.

So a profile can only say "all leverage machines" or "none". My gym has a leg press and a lat pulldown but no leg extension. Today that means:

• tick Leverage machine and the library, picker, routine flags, starter-plan fitting and Coach intake keep offering machines I cannot use;
• leave it unticked and they hide the leg press I can use.

This is not a weight-stack problem — v1.4.3 already lets a machine carry its own stack. It is an availability problem, and it is worst exactly where gyms differ most: the machines.

Mockups

These are concept mockups using openGym's design tokens and real catalogue stills. The counts and the 26-kind vocabulary are illustrative.

Machine picker	Saved profile

Proposed approach

Give each equipment profile a Machines section: a visual picker of machine kinds, not a list of exercises.

1. About 25 cards, grouped by body area. Legs (leg press, hack squat, pendulum squat, leg extension, leg curl, calf raise, hip thrust), Push (chest press, pec deck, shoulder press, triceps extension), Pull (lat pulldown, seated row, back extension), Assisted (assisted pull-up/dip, assisted leg press), Smith machine, and Other. Each card shows a representative image, the machine name, its exercise count, and a checkbox. Search matches names and aliases (leg press, LP, 45 degree, hack squat); each group has an "All" card and a "None" action.
2. A machine kind spans equipment types. "Leg press" covers lever, sled and Smith variants. The user should not have to know that a 45° leg press is filed under sled machine. Each catalogue exercise maps to exactly one kind, or to Other.
3. Kinds narrow machine availability, and only machines. If a profile has at least one machine kind ticked, a machine exercise passes only when its kind is ticked. Non-machine equipment, bodyweight and accessories behave exactly as today. If no kind is ticked, the profile keeps today's type-level behaviour, so existing profiles do not change. "Show all equipment" still overrides. Custom exercises without a kind stay as they are.
4. The picture is the recognition aid, not the data model. Use an existing catalogue thumbnail for each kind (one canonical exercise per machine), with the existing equipment icon as fallback. Every card keeps a text label and alt text; the grid is never the only cue. No new asset pipeline or dependency.
5. Compact after setup. The profile shows "Home · 14 machines · Edit"; the visual picker reopens for changes. The settings screen does not keep the grid.
6. Mapping. Either a generated machine kind field in catalogue/ (preferred: one value per row, checked by the build) or a curated lib/machine-kinds.js table read from the name, like accessoriesOf does for bench and pull-up bar. A test must fail if a new row with a machine eq has no kind. "Other" is an explicit fallback, not a silent skip.
7. Per profile, not global. "Home" and "Gym" keep separate machine lists. Sync merge and backup import need the new field; an empty list means "no refinement yet", not "no machines".

The smallest useful slice is the four strength machine types and roughly 25 kinds. Cardio machines, cable stations, equipment brands and per-exercise exceptions can follow.

How the best apps do it

The apps most often compared for this job, and where they stop:

App	Per-location profile	Machine-level selection	Per-exercise override	Notes
Alpha Progression	Yes — multiple gyms on Pro, each with equipment and available weights	Yes. Exact list includes Butterfly, Reverse butterfly, Leg extension, Leg curl, Leg press, Chest press, Smith machine, and "All other machines"	Yes — individual built-ins can be whitelisted or blacklisted	Closest competitor; proves the demand and the vocabulary
Fitbod	Yes — multiple locations, each with available equipment and weight increments	No documented machine kinds; equipment types and increments	Exercise exclusions are global, not per location	Strong AI planner; machine precision is left to custom exercises
Hevy	No per-location equipment profile documented	No — exercise-library equipment filter	Custom exercises only; Hevy's own advice is to duplicate an exercise per gym	Excellent tracker, not an equipment-profile benchmark
Jefit	No per-location profile documented	No — database categories Machine - Strength and Machine - Cardio	No	Large exercise database, coarse equipment filter
Boostcamp	No	No — program presets: Full Gym, Garage Gym, Dumbbell Only, At Home	No	Program library, not a per-gym model
openGym today	Yes — equipment profiles	No — leverage / Smith / sled / assisted only	No	This issue

Sources: Alpha Progression guide and gym profile glossary, Fitbod My Plan, Hevy feature guide and Hevy machine tracking, Jefit exercise database, Boostcamp programs.

What to borrow from Alpha Progression: the exact machine vocabulary, per-gym scoping, and the escape hatch of whitelisting or blacklisting a single exercise. Matching that list is table stakes for a planner.

What openGym can do better: Alpha's documented flow is an equipment list the user has to read through. A picture-first grid with search, aliases and exercise counts is faster for the user who recognizes a leg press but does not know what the app calls it; and openGym already has the catalogue thumbnails, so the pictures cost no new assets. "All other machines" stays as an explicit fallback instead of silently swallowing unmapped rows.

Alternatives considered

• More eq values (leg press machine, leg extension machine, …): duplicates the taxonomy, retags hundreds of rows, and touches LOADED_EQ, SELF_CONTAINED, EQ_PRIOR, aliases and imports. It also makes the profile checklist enormous.
• List every machine exercise with a picture: 464 cards is an exercise picker, not an equipment picker. Users think in machines, not in "lever seated leg press v. 2".
• Per-exercise allow/deny only: the Alpha approach works, but it asks users to find and exclude exercises one by one. Keep it as a later escape hatch beside the machine list, not the primary setup.
• A free-text note per gym: does not filter anything.
• Equipment brands instead of kinds (Different gyms as well as different equipment brands #602): useful for tracking the same movement on different machines, but it does not tell the filter which machines exist.

Scope

In scope: machine kinds for Leverage machine, Sled machine, Smith machine and Assisted; the visual picker; the mapping invariant; eqAvailable, plan fitting and Coach intake inheriting the same rule; sync merge and backup import; tests.

Not in scope: per-gym plates, dumbbells and bars (#808); equipment brands (#602); per-gym history (#106); admin-added equipment types (#541); per-machine weight stacks (already in v1.4.3); QR codes on machines (#531); machine photos, per-machine history, or cardio stations in the first slice.

Open questions

1. Generated catalogue field or a name-pattern table in lib/? The field is cleaner; the table is a smaller diff.
2. One kind per exercise, or can an exercise need two? Accessories already model the bench, so I would keep one.
3. When a kind is ticked, should its parent equipment type be auto-ticked, or do kinds become the only machine availability state? I would make kinds the source of truth and retire the four machine type chips in the picker.
4. Cardio machines in the first slice, or a follow-up?
5. Does per-exercise whitelisting/blacklisting ship with this, or after it?
6. If brands (Different gyms as well as different equipment brands #602) land later, should a kind and a brand compose (Leg press + Hammer Strength), or stay independent?

Dependencies

• This doesn't require adding a new dependency

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Moved from issue #922.