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Asked: 2026-05-26T10:29:53+00:00

So I have 2 tables in my database, they are ‘workouts’ and ‘exercises’. Workouts

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So I have 2 tables in my database, they are ‘workouts’ and ‘exercises’. Workouts contains a row called exercises which is a comma-separated list of exercise IDs – from the ‘exercises’ table e.g. ‘1,2,3’.

My question is, can I write a single query to allow me to select a row from the workouts table, say one with an id of 1, and have MySQL fetch each of the exercises from the list in that row, returning them within the ‘workout’ row?

At the moment I’m using PHP to select the workout row, and then making individual requests for each of the exercises, resulting in serious inefficiency.

I took a look at Joining rows as array from another table for each row and also did some research into the group_concat() function, but I’m not sure that’s what I’m after.

Update
Here are the 2 tables:
enter image description here

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    IMO, the best approach is to redesign your schema to have a cross-reference table called exercises_workouts (or something similar). Remove the CSV field.

    Here’s page that goes into more detail on implementing a many-to-many relationship:

    http://www.tonymarston.net/php-mysql/many-to-many.html

    Note: The linked page uses the mysql_* functions, but the general explanation of the approach stands. You’ll want to look into PDO for database access.

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