Clearer exercise illustrations for every workout move

Reading “hip hinge” or “Pendlay row” doesn’t help much if you can’t picture the movement. So every exercise in Coax comes with a simple illustration — a small figure showing the shape of the move — sitting right next to the written steps. This week we gave those exercise illustrations a proper pass: clearer to read, better sized, and more accurate to what each move actually looks like. Here’s what changed.

Every move comes with a picture

Open “How to do it” on any exercise and you get two things: a few plain-language steps, and a flat-vector illustration of the movement — the body position, the equipment, and a dashed arrow for the direction. No stock photos of strangers in a gym, no clutter. Just the shape of the move, so you can match your body to the picture before your first rep.

Right-sized, so the steps stay front and center

The illustration used to be a big block that pushed the actual instructions down the page. We shrank it into a tidy thumbnail that sits calmly alongside the steps. You get the picture and the words together, without one shouting over the other — a small change that makes every exercise card easier to scan.

Centered and balanced

Because the figures are drawn facing one direction, a lot of them used to sit lopsided in their frame, with dead space on one side. Now every illustration is automatically centered, so the little athlete sits neatly in the middle no matter which way the movement leans — across all 280-odd moves at once, no hand-tweaking.

When the picture didn’t match the move, we fixed it

The written steps are the source of truth, and the illustration should always match them. So we worked through the moves whose figures were flagged as off and corrected them. A few favorites:

• Assault bike used to be a bare figure with no bike at all. Now it’s clearly seated on an air bike — the big front fan down in the foot area where you pedal, the tall handlebars up top.
• Ab wheel rollout looked like a plain plank. Now it’s kneeling, rolling the wheel out in front, the way you’d actually do it.
• Barbell Pendlay row now shows the torso bent parallel to the floor with the bar starting on the ground — the detail that makes a Pendlay row a Pendlay row.

We also turned a Romanian deadlift arrow the right way around, redrew a band face pull that had been showing a cable machine, and fixed an ankle-circles figure that didn’t read as an ankle move.

How we keep the pictures honest

Every illustration is checked against that move’s written steps — the body position (standing, seated, lying, kneeling), the equipment the steps name, and the direction of the movement. When we add or change an exercise, its picture gets checked too. It’s a small, unglamorous habit, but it’s what keeps “how to do it” genuinely helpful instead of decorative.

None of this is flashy. But clearer exercise illustrations mean less second-guessing, which means you spend your energy on the workout instead of decoding it — exactly the kind of friction Coax exists to take off your plate.