Skip a planned exercise (no substitute)

Leg curls were next, the machine has been broken for a week, and you don't have anything that hits hamstrings well today. You're not swapping — you're just skipping. The session moves to the next exercise without one.

What the agent needs to hear

Behind your sentence, the agent works backwards to two pieces: which planned exercise to skip and whether to expect a substitute. The default on a skip is no substitute — skip means skip. If you wanted alternative work, you’d say swap.

The first piece is usually implicit. Mid-flow, the active or next-queued exercise is the one you mean, so « skip it » lands. Skipping something further down the queue, name it: « skip the third one, leg curls ».

An optional reason rides along — « broken machine », « shoulder feels off ». The agent logs it against the skip so it shows up next to the tag later, and confirms on a small preview card.

Skip vs swap — the deciding question

The deciding question is whether you’re doing alternative work for that muscle group today. No alternative → skip. Yes alternative → swap.

A skip leaves the slot tagged « skipped », nothing replaces it, and the session moves on with one fewer exercise. A swap tags the slot as substituted and attaches the work you actually did to the substitute exercise. Both are honest tags — they just describe different things, and the weekly review reads them differently.

If you find yourself skipping and then doing « something else for legs » freeform mid-session, that was a swap pretending to be a skip. Logging it as a swap from the start reads cleaner downstream — the work attaches to a tracked line instead of floating.

How a skip reads downstream

Skipped exercises are tagged on the session record and counted in three readings. Routine adherence shows « 4 of 5 exercises completed, 1 skipped » rather than burying the gap. Weekly review surfaces which exercises got skipped most often. Progression detection on that lift pauses the curve rather than reading the gap as a missed PR.

A skip is not a failure — it’s a tagged absence. What corrupts both adherence and progression history is hiding the skip with a fake zero-volume log to keep the streak alive.

When the agent gets it wrong

Three failure modes show up often. The agent skipped the wrong exercise — it pulled the one after the one you meant — and you correct on the card: « no, leg curls — the next one queued, not the one after ». The agent tried to suggest a substitute when you don’t want one: « no sub today, just skip it ».

The third is the agent treating « skip » as « cancel » and closing the whole session. Push back: « only that one exercise, not the whole session ». The card backs off and the session stays open with the one slot tagged skipped.

What makes a clean skip

Three things decide whether this skip reads cleanly later: the right exercise is the one being skipped (mis-skipping the next one breaks the routine queue), the reason is logged when it’s a recurring pattern (« machine broken » three weeks running is a routine problem; one skip is just one skip), and skip is the honest tag, not a fake zero-volume log (logging 0×0 to keep the streak corrupts the progression curve for that lift). When skipped patterns build up — same exercise, same reason — the weekly review surfaces them as routine adjustments worth making.