shoulder
A shoulder flag is a blunt instrument, and we'd rather tell you that than pretend it's a scalpel. RepRoute removes 332 of the 342 pressing and pulling movements in the catalogue and rebuilds the emptied days around your legs and core — so you keep training while the joint settles. Ten of the gentlest push and pull movements survive it, and this page names every one.
Overhead pressing, dips, and behind-the-neck work are the movements people most often can't tolerate with an angry shoulder. RepRoute doesn't diagnose that — it just stops putting those movements in front of you.
Here's precisely what happens when you flag the shoulder. Every exercise in your plan is checked against the shoulder tag in the exercise catalogue, and the ones carrying it are REMOVED. Across the four pressing and pulling patterns — bench and push-ups, overhead press, rows, pull-ups and pulldowns — that's 332 of 342 movements, 97% of your upper body. Catalogue-wide it comes to 375 exercises, which makes the shoulder the widest cut any RepRoute injury flag makes.
What it is not is literally all of your pressing and pulling — this page used to claim that, and the claim was false. Exactly ten movements survive a shoulder flag: Band Pull Apart, Band-Assisted Pull-up, Barbell Row, Chin-Up, Close Grip Push-up, Dumbbell Row, Incline Push-Up, Knee Push-up, Push-up and Wall Push-up. Those are the gentlest rungs in the catalogue, which is usually the point. But if your shoulder objects to a wall push-up, the flag will not save you from one. A push-up appearing in your plan does not mean the app cleared it for you — swap it or skip it.
Any training day left empty by the strip is then rebuilt: the generator refills it with up to three exercises drawn from the patterns still available to you — squat, hinge, lunge, core. So you don't end the week with a blank day. You end it with a legs-and-core day where a push day used to be.
If you can still press pain-free at some angles and it's only overhead work that hurts, don't flag the shoulder — the flag is close to all-or-nothing across pushing and pulling. Start the session and use Swap on the individual movement instead. That's the finer tool, and it leaves the rest of your plan intact.
332 of the 342 movements in these patterns carry the shoulder tag and are removed. Tagging is per exercise, not per pattern, so 10 survive — they are named below.
These 10 carry no shoulder tag, so the flag leaves them in your plan. Not tagged is not the same as cleared for your injury — if one of them hurts, use Swap on it or skip the set.
These carry no shoulder tag — verified against the live catalogue, not picked by hand — so they survive the strip and are what emptied days get refilled from. They are not one-for-one replacements — the engine removes and rebuilds, it does not substitute like for like.
quadriceps
hamstrings
quadriceps
glutes
That's a question for a clinician, not an app — RepRoute isn't a medical tool and won't pretend to be. What it can do is stop prescribing the movements you can't tolerate, so "keep training around it" is at least on the table instead of "stop entirely".
332 of the 342 pressing and pulling movements in the catalogue: horizontal push (bench, push-ups), overhead push, rows and vertical pulls. Overhead pressing goes in full — every one of the 82 vertical-push movements carries the shoulder tag. What's left — squats, hinges, lunges, core — stays, and is used to refill any day the strip emptied.
No, and it's worth understanding rather than assuming. Ten pressing and pulling movements aren't tagged for the shoulder and therefore survive the flag: Band Pull Apart, Band-Assisted Pull-up, Barbell Row, Chin-Up, Close Grip Push-up, Dumbbell Row, Incline Push-Up, Knee Push-up, Push-up and Wall Push-up. They're the gentlest options in the catalogue, but "gentle" isn't "safe for your shoulder" — only you and a clinician can say that. If one of them hurts, use Swap on it or skip the set.
Probably not. The flag can't tell overhead press from a chest-supported row — it removes both. If it's one movement, leave the flag off, start the workout, and hit Swap on that exercise to trade it for another in the same pattern.
Clear the flag any time in Settings → Injuries. That stops future removals — but it doesn't put the already-removed movements back into your current plan. Generate a new plan when you want your pressing and pulling back.
Free plan, no credit card. Flag the shoulder in onboarding and the conflicting movements are stripped from your plan straight away.
