Free exercise data for your fitness app (JSON + images, EN/DE/ES)

sergei-argutin — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 14:43:40 +0000

For all vibecoders in here! If you've ever started building a fitness app, you hit the same wall I did: where do I get the exercise data? Names, target muscles, equipment, instructions, and — the hard part — consistent images.

I ended up building a curated dataset for this, and I've put a free slice of it on GitHub so you can drop it straight into a prototype.

What's in it

A free, ready-to-use sample — 21 exercises, each with:

Two image styles: classic (3D-render look on a transparent background, drops onto any UI) and flat (solid background). Start + peak pose for each.
Target muscles, equipment, MET, difficulty, force type, mechanic, tags.
Step-by-step instructions in English, German, and Spanish.
Delivered as plain JSON + CSV + WebP — no API, no key, no rate limit.

🔗 Repo: https://github.com/sergei-argutin/exercise-dataset
🔍 Browse it: https://sergei-argutin.github.io/exercise-dataset/

Use it in 5 lines

const data = await fetch(
  "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sergei-argutin/exercise-dataset/main/exercises.json"
).then(r => r.json());

const ex = data.exercises[0];
console.log(ex.name_en, ex.body_part, ex.equipment);   // "Arnold Press" chest dumbbell
console.log(ex.images.classic.peak);                   // images/classic/arnold-press-peak.webp

import json, urllib.request
url = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sergei-argutin/exercise-dataset/main/exercises.json"
data = json.load(urllib.request.urlopen(url))
for ex in data["exercises"]:
    print(ex["id"], "→", ex["primary_muscles"])

One thing worth checking before you ship: the license

This is the part most people skip. A few popular exercise datasets are genuinely public domain (e.g. free-exercise-db) and you can ship them commercially with a clear conscience. But two traps catch teams:

Commercial APIs with a free tier often restrict redistributing/bundling the data offline — exactly what you do in an app. Read the ToS for "redistribute" and "cache".
Scraped datasets can be "free" while the images inside were never licensed. The data being free ≠ the images being cleared.

So: verify the image license specifically, not just the dataset's. I wrote up the full breakdown here → Can you use a free exercise dataset commercially?

Disclosure

I'm the creator. The dataset above is a free 21-exercise sample under CC BY-NC 4.0 — use it for prototyping and non-commercial projects. There's also a full 400+ exercise version with a commercial license at repdb.co if you end up shipping something that earns money. Either way, the licensing checklist above applies — hopefully it saves you a headache.

Happy building 💪

DEV Community: sergei-argutin

Free exercise data for your fitness app (JSON + images, EN/DE/ES)

What's in it

Use it in 5 lines

One thing worth checking before you ship: the license

Disclosure