Add an exercise to a routine day

You've been doing your pull day for a month and noticed your rear delts are lagging. You want face pulls in there — three sets, end of the day, where you can do them tired without burning your back. You tell the agent and it slots them in.

What the agent needs to hear

Behind your sentence, the agent works backwards to four pieces: which routine day, the exercise to add, the target sets and reps, and where in the day’s queue it should go. Days come from your active routine by default — « pull day » resolves cleanly if your routine has one. If you’re editing a different routine, name it: « add face pulls to pull day in PPL v1 ».

The exercise gets matched against your library. « Face pulls » is unambiguous in most catalogs; « row » without qualifier might match several (barbell row, cable row, machine row), in which case the agent shows you the options and asks. Naming the equipment or variation upfront (« cable face pulls », « seated cable row ») skips that round-trip.

Targets and positioning

For targets, defaults exist but are conservative — the agent assumes 3 sets in a moderate rep range (8–12 for compound lifts, 12–15 for accessories like face pulls) unless you specify. « 3 sets of 15 » overrides both; « 4 of 12 » resets both. Weight target is left blank by default — you’ll fill it in on the first session — but you can pre-set if you know it: « 3 sets of 15 at 20 kg ».

Positioning defaults to the end of the day’s queue, which is the right spot for accessories. If you want it elsewhere, name the anchor: « after rows » slots it right after the rows exercise; « as the second exercise » uses an ordinal. The agent shows you the new full queue on a card so you can verify the placement.

How the addition reads downstream

The exercise is added to the template, not to past sessions. Next time you run pull day, face pulls appear in the queue. Sessions you already completed don’t get retroactively updated — your history reflects what you actually trained, not the current template.

For routine adherence and weekly volume, the new exercise starts accumulating from the next session forward. The first few sessions establish your baseline weight; the system reads the curve from there. If you decide a week later that the exercise doesn’t fit, removing it is the mirror of this action — same day, same exercise, opposite direction.

When the agent gets it wrong

The queue card is the chokepoint. If the exercise got added to the wrong day (you said pull, agent put it on push), correct it: « no, pull day, not push ». The card swaps and re-renders.

If the exercise itself resolved wrong — you said « face pulls » and the agent matched « rear delt fly » — name the difference: « face pulls, the rope cable one, not the dumbbell ». And if the position is wrong (you wanted it after rows, the agent put it at the end), name the anchor: « after rows, not last ». The card updates in place.

What makes the addition worth keeping

Three things decide whether this addition reads correctly later: the right day in the right routine is the one being edited (so the next session queue includes it where expected), the exercise resolves to the one you actually meant (so the right movement gets logged, with the right muscle group attribution), and the targets and position match how you’ll train it (so the first session uses sensible defaults, not blanks). The system reads the routine template fresh each session; an exercise added to the wrong day or matched to the wrong movement quietly trains the wrong thing for weeks. Name the day, the exercise, and the spot — confirm the queue, and the next session shows the change.