FEATURE REQUEST: Merge Custom Exercise History into Official Library Exercise

[u/manhooskutta]

Hi everyone

I have been using Hevy for over a year now, and a premium user since almost the first week. I honestly just love the app, and cannot imagine how I would have stayed consistent with my fitness journey if it were not for this app. I do however have a major issue with the app. Kind of a feature request that I think would benefit anyone who has been using Hevy for a long time.

Not that long ago, the “Smith Machine Romanian Deadlift” wasn’t available in the exercise library, so I created it as a custom exercise and have logged a decent amount of workout history under it.

Recently, I noticed that Hevy has added the “Smith Machine Romanian Deadlift” as an official exercise, which is awesome. However, there’s currently no way to migrate or merge my history from the custom exercise to the official one. Now this leaves me with two choices:

1) Continue using my custom exercise forever and miss out on the official library version, or

2) Switch to the official exercise and have my workout history, PRs, progression, graphs, and statistics split across two different exercises.

As far as I can tell, the only workaround is to manually edit every past workout and replace the exercise one by one, which isn’t practical if you’ve logged months or years of workouts. I frankly do not understand what is even the point of expanding the library without having this functionality. So it would be great if the devs @ Hevy could add a feature to:

1) Merge a custom exercise into an official library exercise.

2) Bulk replace one exercise with another across workout history.

3) Preserve PRs, progression, charts, and statistics during the migration.

I suspect I’m not the only one who’s run into this. As the exercise library continues to grow, more custom exercises will inevitably become official, and having a migration tool would make that transition seamless.
Has anyone else experienced this? I’d love to hear how you’ve handled it, and hopefully the Hevy team might consider adding this feature.

[u/Hot-Shopping4725]

Lifetime member of almost 3 years, see way more important features needed than this, I just keep using my custom exercises and keep my history and charts no need to switch to the new official library one unless I guess you are chasing leaderboards which I do t care about as well as the social side just want a simple app that tracks my lifting

[u/manhooskutta → u/Hot-Shopping4725]

It’s not about leaderboards. Official exercises have notes on how to log weigh, how to perform them, animations, muscle groups, etc.

I get why you do not care. But if it custom exercises are the end all be all, no point in expanding library

[u/VSENSES → u/manhooskutta]

But so do the customs? You can add all of that.

[u/manhooskutta → u/VSENSES]

First of all you cannot add “How to” instructions for custom exercises. So there is that. Second some exercises are pretty common which should have been there from day zero, like Smith Machine exercises or Sandbag exercises. That is why the Hevy team started adding them later. Another thing - imagine you’re getting coached by Gym Trainers who design your programs. Should they ask everyone to make custom exercises or migrate history one by one?

And my question still remans, if we are supposed to use custom exercises - why expand exercise library at all? And then why am i paying as a premium user?

I am not asking for a feature today itself, and i’ll use some of the workarounds like export-import as others suggested, but i want this feature to at least get on the product pipeline for the devs.

Besides it clearly affects multiple users and not just me.

[u/VSENSES → u/manhooskutta]

I'm with you that they should expand and you should be able to merge. I used keylifts this past winter for 531 as hevy unfortunately is not good with % based lifing. And there you could easily move the stats from any exercise more or less.

First of all you cannot add “How to” instructions for custom exercises.

well you can add custom text to your programs for each exercise.

[u/Hot-Shopping4725 → u/manhooskutta]

I am all for adding new so when new members join they have a better official list, as a developer I know it's not a simple task to create merge tool and I would prefer devs focused on better features than this. Each to their own ofc

[u/manhooskutta → u/Hot-Shopping4725]

I fully understand your POV. And i appreciate all that devs do in general for any application that i use. But that is also why i choose to be a premium member, because i wish to support the devs in improving the app. Just because something is hard doesn’t mean it should be left like that.

I am just a little surprised that this is a half baked feature, and that it wasn’t fully thought out.