Your Gym & What It Changes
Setting up gym profiles so the program generator only picks exercises you can do, and the plate calculator loads real plates.
Most programs assume a gym. Yours might be a garage with one bar, a commercial floor with everything, or both depending on the day. Your equipment list is the setting with the widest reach: it changes what the app programs, what it substitutes, and what the plate calculator tells you to load.
One profile per place you train
Set up a profile for each place you train. Each one has its own equipment, ticked from a standard list across barbells and plates, dumbbells, cables and pulleys, machines, bodyweight, bands, and specialty kit like a trap bar, safety squat bar or GHD.
Separate profiles cover travel and the home-versus-gym split: the day's session resolves against the gym you are in, rather than an average of everywhere you have trained.
What it changes
Two things read your equipment directly. The program generator picks exercises filtered by the active gym's equipment, so a program won't open with a lift you have no way to perform. Exercise swaps use the same filter, so swapping something out mid-session offers alternatives you can do.
A typed bar brings its exercises with it
Bars are added from a catalog: Olympic, women's, deadlift, trap, EZ-curl, safety squat, cambered, Swiss, axle. Owning one switches on the work it makes possible: a safety squat bar on the shelf is what makes SSB work programmable.
Bars and plates in detail
Barbells record weight, shaft diameter, collar type and length. Plates record weight, collar type, whether they are metal or bumper, and how many you have.
The plate calculator uses that detail to load from your real inventory rather than an idealised set. It tells you what to put on the bar given the plates in the room, which is a different answer when you own one pair of 15s.
Gaps worth filling
The app tells you which missing item would unlock the most exercises for you, and how many. The count comes from the same equipment filter the generator runs, so it measures what you could be programmed, whether or not you buy anything.
Where to go next
More guides
MuscleBuddy 101: What's Where and Why
A quick orientation to the app: what Plan, Train, Nutrition, Health and Community do, and how they connect.
Logging Your First Workout
The logging flow: starting a session, recording sets, RPE/RIR, and how offline mode keeps you covered.
Understanding Your Program & Progression
How double progression, linear, RPE and the other progression methods set your training loads from what you log.
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