Training around an injury: what GoWorkout does with what you tell it

Declare an injury during setup and GoWorkout removes the movements most likely to aggravate it before a plan reaches you. How that works, and exactly where it stops.

First, what this is not. GoWorkout is software. It cannot examine you, watch you move, or tell you whether you are ready to train. If you have an injury or a medical condition, get medical clearance before starting a new programme, and stop if something hurts.

What it can do is make sure a plan built for you does not casually hand you the movements most likely to make a known problem worse. This is how.

What you tell it

One of the setup questions is about your health. For injuries, you pick the body parts affected, from eight:

Knee
Shoulder
Back
Hip
Wrist
Ankle
Elbow
Neck / spine

You can also describe it in your own words. The body parts are what the rules act on; the description goes to the model that writes your plan, as context — which side, how long, what hurts.

Those eight are exactly the areas GoWorkout has rules for. It does not offer a body part it cannot do anything about.

How an exercise gets removed

Every exercise in the catalogue records which muscles drive it and whether it is high-impact. The rules work from that, rather than from a hand-kept list of names:

An exercise is removed when the injured area's muscles are its main movers. For a knee, that means quadriceps-driven movement: squats, lunges, step-ups, the leg press.
For knees, ankles, hips and the spine, jumping and running are removed too, because impact loads a joint well beyond what the muscles involved would suggest.
A short list of named exceptions covers what muscle data cannot show. A burpee is not driven by the quadriceps, but it lands on your knees. Push-ups and planks load the wrist bent back under your body weight, which no list of muscles captures.

Judging by what an exercise does, rather than what it is called, matters most for exercises added later. A new movement is checked from the day it arrives, instead of counting as safe until someone remembers to list it.

What deliberately stays

The rules look at an exercise's main movers, not every muscle it touches. Matching on secondary muscles would remove almost every compound lift and leave a plan with too little in it — and a plan you cannot follow does not help you either.

So for a knee, hip-dominant work such as deadlifts, hip thrusts and glute bridges stays in. The rule targets knee-dominant movement, not your whole lower body.

When it runs

On every plan, however it was written. Whether the AI model built it or the rule-based generator did, each exercise is checked against what you declared before the plan reaches you.

The model is told the same thing up front. Its instructions treat every injury and medical condition you list as a hard constraint: avoid or modify anything that would aggravate it. The rules are the check that runs afterwards, in case it did not.

When an exercise is removed, the plan says so — you will see a note that it was substituted because it may aggravate a reported injury or condition. The replacement is a bodyweight exercise working the same muscles wherever one passes the same check.

Where it stops

This is a filter, and it has edges. You should know them.

The rules work on body parts, not conditions. Hypertension, diabetes, asthma, a heart condition and pregnancy all reach the model as hard constraints, but no rule removes specific exercises for them. For a condition, the model's judgement is the only filter, which is one more reason to get medical clearance first.
It cannot judge severity, or how you feel on the day. It acts on what you declared. An exercise that passes the check is not thereby safe for you in particular.
It checks the plan, not you. Anything you do outside the plan is yours to judge.
Injuries are set during setup. The app does not yet let you edit them afterwards, so the plan cannot yet follow an injury that heals or a new one that appears.

If anything in your plan hurts, skip it, and talk to someone who can actually examine you.