Select the Muscles Quiz: Which Muscles Each Exercise Trains
The game names a gym exercise and tells you how many muscles to select. You click muscles the exercise trains on a muscle diagram of the body. The diagram shows a front view and a back view.
Every muscle the exercise trains counts. A primary muscle moves the load. A secondary muscle helps or holds the body still, such as the abs in a deadlift.
After each exercise, the game shows every muscle the exercise trains and marks which are primary and which are secondary. You learn the full picture, not only the muscles you picked.
The diagram is "Muscles front and back" by OpenStax, redrawn by Tomáš Kebert and umimeto.org, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. The Credits page has the full attribution.
How to play
Read the exercise at the top. The card says how many muscles to select.
Click a muscle on the body. A muscle the exercise trains turns green, on both sides at once.
A wrong click flashes red and costs one miss. You have three misses for each exercise.
The exercise ends when you have selected enough muscles, or at the third miss.
Then the drawing paints the other trained muscles: primary muscles in amber, secondary muscles in blue. A label beside the body names each trained muscle, with a line to it. Your picks have a check mark.
Press Next at the top when you are ready. The next exercise starts with three misses again.
A click on a muscle you already found does nothing.
Hover over a muscle to read its name.
Zoom and pan to reach the smaller muscles.
Your score is the number of muscles you found. The run deals all 20 exercises.
The timer counts up. Give up logs your score as it stands.
The game saves your progress. You can close the page and continue within one hour.
What counts in this quiz
20 exercises, from the bench press and the back squat to the face pull and the shrug.
Most exercises ask for 3 muscles. The calf raise, the lateral raise, the crunch, the hip abduction and the shrug ask for 2. The maximum score is 55.
Primary muscles: the target muscle and the main helpers. Secondary muscles: the other helpers and the stabilisers. The split follows the ExRx.net exercise directory.
The muscles are the 62 surface muscles of the Name the Muscle quiz. A muscle on both sides of the body is one answer.
The hamstrings are three answers: the biceps femoris, the semitendinosus and the semimembranosus.
The quadriceps are three visible answers: the rectus femoris, the vastus lateralis and the vastus medialis.
What's not included, and why
No deep muscles. The erector spinae, the hip flexors, the serratus anterior and the rotator cuff under the deltoid are not drawn, so no exercise asks for them.
Left and right are never separate answers.
Good to know
The gluteus maximus is the largest muscle in the body. The back squat, the deadlift, the hip thrust and the lunge all train it.
The deadlift trains more of the drawn muscles than any other exercise in the quiz: 17 of them.
The soleus works hardest in a seated calf raise, because a bent knee takes the gastrocnemius out of the lift.
The latissimus dorsi is the widest muscle of the body. Its name is Latin for "broadest of the back".
The brachioradialis is a forearm muscle, but it bends the elbow. A hammer curl loads it most.