Please be gentle with me. This is a project website that I built out of frustration a few years ago. I know there are things that need improving and a lot of things that could be adjusted. I work full time at Brave Software (brave.com) and simply don't have time to put a ton of effort into MuslceWiki.
I do however have a big backlog of videos to add and I've slowly been working on an app. We have also re-drawn the homepage images and my long term plan is to move away from gifs to webm or MP4.
FWIW, for some reason I was unable to log into my HN account. I made a new one, but the posts seem to be limited. So looks like I'll be replying in the morning.
Thanks for building this! I love that this exists, and want to encourage you to continue.
Like a lot of people working in tech, I've had persistent neck and posture issues for years. I'd love to see you expand to cover those, focusing on the many smaller muscles in the neck like SCM/Scalenes/Occipitals/etc.
Another great area to expand is 'click where you have pain' and it would recommend certain stretches, weights, trigger points, etc. There are common pain referral patterns that most people do not know about and I imagine that would be very helpful for people who don't have easy access to physical therapy or even feel they are candidates for it.
After casually mentioning my neck issues to people over the years, I've found so many people open up about persistent pain they have but that they're not addressing because it hasn't reached a bad enough point. I think that's an ideal audience to target with online resources like musclewiki.
A great niche to target would be assistance for people who have a muscle group they don't use because of long-time postural issues or simply never having learned to use it.
For an issue like this, it doesn't work to simply do an exercise that supposedly works the muscle. Even if the muscle is the limiting link in the lift, if your body isn't using it, it won't get stronger. For example, my mid-upper-back was lax because of typical nerd posture. Even though it limited my squat, years of squatting didn't force those muscles to do anything. I just had a really weak squat that relied on other muscles compensating. Then one day I ran across a suggestion to do bat wings and hold at the top for 20-30 seconds, and I became close friends with some muscles in my back that I barely knew existed.
A web site showing you how to discover each muscle or muscle group in your body (bat wings for deep mid-back, glute bridge for glutes, etc.) would be AMAZING, and I bet people would get referred there all the time from places like r/Fitness where people go for advice.
Do you really need exercises to target niche muscles ( can understand if you are doing rehab post injury or actually bodybuilding to enter a contest)? Most folks who want to be fit, only need to focus on compound movements ( bench/incline presses, squats, deadlifts, pushups, pullups) which target all muscle groups.
In general I agree that compound movements are the best, but in my personal experience most people have postural weaknesses and habitual movement patterns that they just might not be aware of that even compound movements have a hard time addressing. When you start exercising your body may overcompensate for these weaknesses by recruiting muscles that might be less than ideal for the movement, which can lead to injury (which happened in my case).
For me personally, one of those postural imbalances turned into an injury (shoulder), and I found doing exercises that targeted a very specific muscle (infraspinatus) really helped in my recovery.
I think everyone could benefit from spending some time exploring their body by targeting muscles that may be easy to ignore in larger compound movements, if only for bringing awareness to them (which should benefit the main movements in the long run by making them more efficient).
I agree about posture, see too many people with postural issues, almost makes me want to tell them to go see a physical therapist/personal trainer. Body awareness, I realized is only possible if you have been athletic all your life, for most people that awareness is just not there.
Yoga is great - it stresses strength, flexibility and balance. And the complex movements bring attention to those "weak" muscles. I do it once a week with weight training and it has improved my flexibility and kept me injury free.
Absolutely, once you start working on your own postural issues you start noticing it in everyone around you as well. I do think anyone can gain that body awareness though, it's not just for those that have been athletic all their lives. I didn't come to having a physical exercise practice until my early 30s and the amount of internal body awareness I've gained in the past few years has been amazing. It really deepened my seated meditation practice as well.
Yoga definitely is great and I practice asana 5x per week. I will say that my injury came up during an asana class, though, and it wasn't until I really targeted my weak scapular muscle groups that it got better.
I'd wager many of us need rehab despite any apparent injury, but rather due to years of abusing our bodies by sitting still for the majority of our waking hours, and sitting with poor posture. Specific targeted exercises at the start can get people into a condition where the compound movements and other exercises are even feasible (that is, sustainable or less likely to cause injury).
The comment you are replying to explicitly gives an example where compound movements weren't generating results, because of compensation by other muscles. This is the sort of thing a real trainer would provide (but a big-box 'trainer' might well never notice, even if they had you doing compound lifts).
The thing is - there would not be a one-size-fit-all exercise for each muscle group; you would rather need an exercise for each combination of A, B in "muscle A is weak but surrounding muscle B is strong"
I'm not sure if the B dimension affects exercise choice. If it does, it could be covered by providing a short list of exercises to try for activating each muscle group A. That way the user doesn't have to figure out which muscle(s) B are compensating, which could be challenging for a lot of people who need this information. In my case, I'm still not sure exactly how my body was compensating for the muscles in my back that weren't being utilized.
I think that there are fewer likely culprits than you might think. Most lifting coaches end up heavily relying on only a few cues per exercise, because there aren't that many common pathologies. So something like this could be useful if couched in the normal "not medical advice" sort of way. Yeah, this might not apply to you, but if you find that you e.g. squat with too much forward lean, here is a small set of exercises to augment your workout that you should try for 6 weeks and see if it helps.
Something like that would seem useful to a lot of lower-mid weightlifters who don't have a real lifting coach.
Smart people tend to overthink things, i.e. looking for exercises that isolate smaller muscles. If you have neck, back, or posture issues the chances are you will benefit greatly from just lifting weights. Before I started training I had terrible back pains and spontaneous spasms in the neck, which went away within weeks of regular training. Moreover, if I ever miss training for too long the pain returns. Focus on building up the strength to do respectable weight on the main compound lifts. Your body will thank you.
On the other hand, I spent a year ramping up my bicycling, and then went on a 7-day trip spanning 535 miles. I did some serious damage to my knees because while my main cycling muscles had the strength for the trip, some of my stabilizing muscles did not.
I couldn't get back on the bike without knee pain for months. Now I am totally out of shape. I could go to PT, as I was given a referral, but it's expensive, and I prefer self-help resources.
PT may be expensive, but a good therapist is worth it. I abused my body by basically not moving throughout my 20s, and even once I got in shape I was prone to various injuries. The PT got me through a lower back injury, a hip injury, a shoulder injury, and a leg injury. These were not caused (except for the back) by traumas (in the case of the back, trauma exacerbated an existing issue), but mostly by some combination of weak muscles, poor form, poor flexibility, or overuse (overuse for me, a person in even marginally better shape wouldn't have had issues at my activity level). I kept up a lot of the things I did/learned there and, other than the back which will be a perennial issue, have not had any recurrence.
There's a lot of benefit to finding someone that teaches you both what to do and how to do it, and is also better informed and more competent than most fitness trainers. The good ones will also walk you through a basic physiology course so you can understand the why of it all (why did I become injured, why does this prevent or reduce the risk of a future injury).
> There's a lot of benefit to finding someone that teaches you both what to do and how to do it, and is also better informed and more competent than most fitness trainers. The good ones will also walk you through a basic physiology course so you can understand the why of it all (why did I become injured, why does this prevent or reduce the risk of a future injury).
This is a big part of why I have avoided it thus far... I have a hard enough time getting a doctor that I feel like cares about my issues (rather than just getting me out the door as quick as possible) enough to listen and understand. I don't want to spend a bunch of time and money trialing different therapists. I wish there was a resource for this online.
I agree though, if I plan to continue the type of cycling I did last year, it's probably going to become a necessity.
That's a fair concern. I went on word-of-mouth reputation from coworkers (younger with sports injuries; older with age related issues, mostly knees, hips, and shoulders) to select a clinic. My first PT was decent, but not communicative, but I was there long enough to see which PTs were better than the rest and when I had to go back a couple years later was able to select who I wanted.
I train regularly (5 days a week), back still hurts.
It is super possible to have imbalances even with regular training. Muscles that are weak will not be engaged during compound lifts unless specifically made to engage, either through isolation exercises, or through awareness. A personal trainer or physical therapist can help with either path.
> Like a lot of people working in tech, I've had persistent neck and posture issues for years. I'd love to see you expand to cover those, focusing on the many smaller muscles in the neck like SCM/Scalenes/Occipitals/etc.
I did some things on-and-off for posture (mostly rear delts), but what I did consistently, and think helped the most, was heavy (for me) deadlifts.
I'm curious: how many pullups can you do? I ask because they take a lot of lat strength, and your lats do a lot of work holding up your back.
Another vote for deadlifting here. With a desk based day job and being a keen cyclist my posterior chain muscles were under-developed compared to my quads etc - deadlifting helped strengthen my glutes, hamstrings and lower back significantly and pretty much all of my back pain has gone.
I didn't use a coach, but did study a lot of videos on deadlift form and also videoed myself to check I was doing it properly.
Unfortunately I'm limited in what I can do overhead due to an old neck injury, so pullups are out. Most upper body stuff causes me pain so I have to be extra careful dialing in the right movements, weight, and reps.
I've heard deadlifts are one of the best exercises, I can't wait to get back to PT and get a personal trainer so I can do those correctly. I doubt I've done enough with lats.
Lateral pulls are basically sitting pullups, and tend to be a lot easier on the neck. They're associated with a big ol' piece of gym equipment, which might be.... tough to get your hands on right now, but definitely look into them.
You're right, though, that deadlifts (performed correctly and safely!) are pretty amazing for your back in general.
I came to comment the same as you, I saw it in the traps muscle, it's shown as one, but it is interesting to know that it has 3 parts[1], and there are other exercises more effective for the mid section like face pull.
About the "where you have the pain idea" I love it, it would be also cool to learn about the antagonist muscles.
(Disclaimer I'm not an expert).
I think a common bad posture in-front of the computer is the one that rotates your shoulders forward which overloads some muscles in the chest, which are antagonist of the middle traps, middle traps get weak, and your back falls forwards, face pull is great exercise to make them stronger.
Another common one for those sitting long hours, is the tightness of the psoas, which can cause hip problems, and knee problems if you try to run without stretching, I think the antagonist is the buttocks, that gets weak from sitting and you would need to exercise to correct the hip problems.
Don't trust my comments, I just wanted to put two examples of mechanism that I learned, but I don't have enough knowledge to explain it properly or be 100% sure this is correct, always consult with a pro.
Gravity boots have fixed all of my back/neck/posture problems from sitting at a computer.
Inversion is the key to decompressing the spine/hips/neck and you only need to do it a few times a week for ~10min each time. I go to a local park and hang upside down from a sturdy pull-up bar for 2-4min three times.
You could also do it at home with a pull-up bar, or get even fancier and buy an inversion table for ~$200.
I know I'm sounding like an infomercial here, but it really works.
Others likely have covered this, but to add my experience I also had neck/posture issues and pain until I started doing compounds (squats, deadlifts) at least three times a week.
For me, physical therapy did nothing, and I suspect my issue was fundamental in that my musculoskeletal system was underdeveloped and working out was the only way to fix it.
That guidance wasn't needed, really. It's refreshingly free of trendy design, and straightforward to use. And other things, like the ads not being in the way of the content. I'm sure you've got a list you're working on, but what's there looks great.
One minor suggestion...there are some paths that lead you to a "muscle not found" page, like this: https://musclewiki.com/Barbell/Female/Calves/. Some way of preventing landing there in the first place would probably be more intuitive. Like a popped hint when you hover over a calf if Female/Barbell is pre-selected. Or some semi-transparent overlay to suggest Calves can't be selected, etc.
If OP has lurked HN before, chances are they’ve seen how HN can respond to other sites. Even if it wasn’t necessary, can understand why they might think it was.
And not that all responses aren’t well intended, but they can sometimes come across a bit tough, especially if someone wasn’t looking for feedback.
Extra/complimentary suggestion to that: when the mouse cursor hovers over a muscle group further to the 'red patch', have a pop-up small text box with name and brief description of the specific red-ed part. It would be fun/educating for the regular folk (like me, who doesn't know each muscle group and/or their names) to just 'browse' the human body and see the name of that muscle group and what it does.
Edit: on the parts that are not a muscle group (e.g. face, "love-handles", feer/hands, 'throat', etc.) maybe paint them grey so they are visibly distinguishable from the 'muscle groups'. I was veri curious to see if the 'love-handles' region has any use apart storing fat.
One suggestion: A lot of folks don't go to gym, lack access to exercise equipment etc. It might be worthwhile to have a section on how to work out the specific muscles without any equipment and in minimal space using only bodyweight/calisthenics; eg. Yoga stretches, deep squats, pushups(both Normal and Hindu) etc.
On another note: technically, for forearms you'd want to have your hands facing away from you when doing a chin-up. Hands facing towards you is better for biceps.
Forearms are also one of the main muscles (groups?) targeted by rock climbing. Depending on where you live, you could likely find some boulders with very low traverses, which would require exactly no equipment (though climbing shoes would help immensely)
No you can easily do them at home by clasping your hands together and making your arms work against each other. It just isn’t as efficient as compound exercises (e.g. pull-ups that also exercise your back).
That sounds very inefficient. Here’s something that gets good results quickly. Tie a string/top to a filled 2L bottle. Attach the other end of the rope to the center of a short wooden pole. Wind up the bottle. Wind down the bottle. Repeat ad infinitum. Quick and easy.
I'm recovering from a hand injury and doing grip exercises to strengthen the forearm muscles responsible for finger movement - when I clicked forearm it listed wrist exercises rather than grip strength. Maybe clicking the hands can lead to grip strength exercises?
Since the purpose seems for workouts rather than rehab work, I wanted to check if it had rotator cuff exercises similar to this:
to second this, I have a recurring shoulder tendonitis from weak scapular mobility so I would also hope to find similar exercises. The site is a great concept though!
Great site - I love seeing easy to understand sites related to working out.
One thing to note - the exercises shown for the forearms only target the flexors, and none of them cover the extensors, which must be worked out if you are to have healthy forearms and hands. A common problem if you only work the flexors is golfer's elbow, which I am just recovering from now. for the sake of lifters, climbers, golfers, pitchers, and plenty of others, please include these.
I like the feature of being able to select what equipment you have available. Lots of us lost access to a gym with COVID and don't have the ability to put a power rack in our abode. A simple concept, but great execution!
PS: Do you know where I can download more RAM for my computer? It's been a bit laggy recently.
Drop an email to the admins at <hn@ycombinator.com> and they may be able to help, if they haven’t already, since you’re a content creator responding to a post about your own site.
More than could possibly be imagined :) Not very good at proactive distance social still, but if you’d like to chat, reach out any time (fox2 can reconnect us, and any of my old details still work too.)
Great website and kudos for making it. Noting you have limited spare time feel free to ignore but: I would love to be able to select a collection of exercises and see a visual of which muscle groups I do and don't have covered in the chosen exercises. Perhaps with some suggestions on exercises to cover those that are missing.
Yeah, very reasonable question. I suppose a somewhat simple version could be to add exercises to a 'cart' and then change the colour muscle groups on the home page based on cart contents. Would then be pretty easy to click back and forth and colour in the desired groups. If I could then look at my cart when I'm happy I have good coverage that would probably be enough for my needs of 'does my workout plan have any blind spots'.
Wow, this might be the most relevant and genuinely useful website I've come across in a while. I really appreciate the "stretches" option for those of us who don't have access to gym equipment. Thank you.
I don't know. But it could be that a female would be more inspired by seeing a female doing something hard. Whereas seeing a really pumped up dude doing it would be... well this guy is also on something. So I think it is a very good idea.
Great site! I daydreamed about creating a similar site about ten years ago, after I started exercising seriously, but I never went beyond daydreaming. Congratulations on actually doing it.
When I was daydreaming, I thought of demonstrating the exercises with human-like animated figures rather than videos of real people. I had the impression that the well-built, athlete-type people who often appear in exercise videos can discourage beginners and people with body-image issues. I may have been wrong, though. In any case, your videos look good to me now.
Thanks for building this. Interestingly simple and Amazingly useful. Never found a user intuitive way to access muscle group and find stretches. Please don't change the home page.
This is really, really awesome. Well done. There are sooo many things you could do with this idea. I could totally see this becoming a huge thing, keep working on it!
If you're looking to move away from videos entirely, it would be really cool to see the models in 3D, and then when you select a muscle, the 3D figure animates and shows you the exercises. Then the videos could be supplemental. That would be so neat lol.
You are right though, it is very time consuming process and sometimes we get it wrong and have to go back and re-film. I have a pretty big backlog to edit and upload. It's a slow going process. Seeing this on HN has motivated me to do some extra work this weekend.
While I go to the gym myself, I pay for a PT and I'm also relatively new in the grand scheme of things to the fitness world. Similarly, I rarely do self directed gym stuff so this site is actually really handy as far as what areas might be handy to focus on and just generally building an index of things to try out so thanks!
Echoing other comments: this is a great clean site and I’d like to see smaller muscles as well.
But my main comment is why not turn it in to an actual wiki? Maybe even put it on github and let people submit pull requests. With a submitter agreement you’d still be free to make an app and profit, but it might help remove you as the bottleneck
Yeah. Dumbbell section was added a few months ago. I have about 150 videos left to edit, upload and write instructions for. All of the dumbbell exercises being about 50 of those videos.
Awesome website! Love the radio button for equipment type, and the demo videos are really great. I also like that the videos play immediately, but also have links to youtube.
Humble suggestion: if you have "slots" where you know you have videos to upload, I wonder if you could say as much rather than show the 404 page. That way, you can simply click through to other "equipment levels" without breaking the sequence.
I like it. I would embrace your humanoid muscle map fully, and try to show it with every exercise with colored in all the muscles you are working on. For example Incline Barbell Bench Press and Barbell Bench Press are both for chests muscles primarily, but work with different muscle groups.
Great site. Such a great idea. Gonna check it out more when I have time. I know everything there is to know about shoulder/rotator cuff muscle exercises due to my shoulder dislocation injuries over the years, so I'll gladly contribute with that if some exercises are missing.
You made a great thing. It's so simple and effective.
I've read a handful of workout plans, considered hiring personal trainers, and sifted through YouTube videos without ever being able to establish a good workout routine. This is EXACTLY what I needed.
Echoing the much-deserved praise you've received here, this is very nicely done. It embodies everything that's right with the web, and none of what isn't.
One small request: a persistent dark mode toggle would be a nice addition.
Fantastic website! My GF is using it right now at the gym. Just wanted to report a bug; when you click on “more” in the female abdominals, you get a server 500 response. Anyways, really good job and very user friendly.
Your website is a great resource and fantastic!I've been using it for a year!! I was looking to replace all the movements I did in the gym but at home with kettlebells ( after covid, I lost access to the gym).
It would be nice to add benchmarks to the exercises. E.g. how many push ups in a row (in a specific timespan, at a certain pace) a healthy person is expected to be able to do.
I suspect there is no really useful number to give for most such benchmarks due to the massive variance within "healthy people" an in fact how "healthy" is defined.
Look how many different figures/calculations are banded around for questions like "how many calories do I burn running X distance or Y minutes" for instance.
Could we start off by sourcing numbers from various physical training programs and fitness exams? e.g. policemen, firefighters, the military, professional athletes.
Thank you for creating this. Due to lack of access to my gym, I am moving exclusively to kettlebell routines at home. It’s new to me and this is very helpful.
Having to enter email to get the results of the fasting guide is unacceptable. It should be illegal to waste people's time like that, and it should be required to say something along the lines of "to get your results, you will need to enter an email address" prior to wasting precious time. I closed the site after.
The only tools i see there is Calorie / Macro / One Rep Max calculators along with exercise guides.
Did you click on an ad?
Also here is a quick fasting guide: "Eat less."
You can word it however you want, you can spread those two words out on a 6 months program and fill-in with a bunch of newage-bullshit but it IS that simple.
Please be gentle with me. This is a project website that I built out of frustration a few years ago. I know there are things that need improving and a lot of things that could be adjusted. I work full time at Brave Software (brave.com) and simply don't have time to put a ton of effort into MuslceWiki.
I do however have a big backlog of videos to add and I've slowly been working on an app. We have also re-drawn the homepage images and my long term plan is to move away from gifs to webm or MP4.
FWIW, for some reason I was unable to log into my HN account. I made a new one, but the posts seem to be limited. So looks like I'll be replying in the morning.