You start your fitness journey and don‘t know how you should structure your training. There are too many possible workout splits you can do and don‘t know which one suits best, supports your lifestyle and brings you closer towards your fitness goals.
In this blog post we give an overview of the different workout splits and the positive and negative aspects to each. Additionally we provide you with an example week on how you could structure your workout according to the addressed workout split.
What is a training split and are they good?
A training split or a workout split is basically a term on how you structure your workout in a specific time frame. Mostly this time frame consists of a week. So what body parts you train how often in a week. The two main points are frequency and rest. A training split trains muscles with the right amount of frequency that result in muscle growth or muscle adaptation to the stress. Furthermore there are enough rest days for the muscles to recover from the individual workouts.
Why should you do a workout split
How to structure your workouts over time is corelate to the reason what your goals in fitness are. You have to ask yourself the following questions:
- How long am I doing strength training? (Just starting out, multiple years…)
- What are my goals? (Building muscle, maintaining muscle, staying healthy…)
- How often do I want to train per week? (2 times, every day…)
- What are priorities? (Mainly playing other sports)
- Do I want to help myself by incorporating strength training for playing a particular sport?
If you can answer the questions for yourself you are a step further.
Does it matter
The reason for using the right workout split is that your lifestyle shouldn’t be tapered to your fitness goals rather the opposite.
What is the best workout split
There is no overall best workout split! The answer varies from person to person depending who you are asking and what their goals are. If you ask a 25-year old pro bodybuilder this question he will definitely answer this question differently than a 40-year old housewife. The reason being is that the bodybuilder has a vastly different goal than the woman. He obviously wants to build as much muscle as humanly possible, so he might use a 6 day push pull legs or an upper lower split. The woman wants to stay relatively fit, while spending as little time as possible in the gym. She might start a 2 to 3 day full body split.
Credit: AmericanSupps
How to split up your workout
There are three main different hypertrophy workout splits: The upper lower split, the full body split, the push/pull/legs split and the bro split. Each of these workout splits are different in their structure of which part of the body will be trained in a period of one week.
| Upper / Lower split | 4 days |
| Full body split | 3 days |
| Push / Pull / Legs | 6 days |
| Bro split | 5 days |
Upper Lower
Trains upper Body (Chest, Back, Shoulders and Arms) on one day and lower body (legs) on another day.
You can choose different muscles and exercises of emphasis on different days
| Weekday | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday |
| Body part | Upper | Lower | Rest | Upper | Lower | Rest | Rest |
Positive
On the one hand Upper body and lower body workouts are simple to structure. You do 4-6 exercises to train your whole upper body and 3-4 exercises to train your lower body. Additionally it is simple to scale the workout days as you progress over the months and years. For example you might start with a 4 day upper/lower split. After 4 months you are advanced and know what you are doing, so you might level up to a 6 day upper/lower split. Furthermore your upper body day doesn‘t get toasted from the leg workout.
Negative
On the other hand the bigger muscle groups like chest or back need more time to recover from the past workout than smaller groups like arms. This argument is also appealing to the upper and lower body. As you progress and get bigger and stronger, it could potentially get harder and harder to train your whole upper body in one workout. The reason behind is that you need more stimulus so your muscles can adapt to the new stimulus.
Full Body
You always train your whole body in one workout.
If you are no beginner anymore you can up the training days and emphasize different muscles each workout.
| Weekday | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday |
| Body part | Full Body | Rest | Full Body | Rest | Full Body | Rest | Rest |
Positiv
By performing a high frequency, muscle growth is greatly stimulated.You are able to set up your training days in a way that you never have to worry about recovery of certain muscle groups. Furthermore the scaling process is very easy. You can train to any frequency you would like.
Negative
On the other hand it is very easy, if you are still learning, to train with way too much volume. This might enhance the risk of fatigue or even injury. Additionally to that, you might need much more time to complete the workout, because you use more machines and your warm up takes more time.
Push Pull Legs
| Weekday | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday |
| Body part | Push | Pull | Legs | Push | Pull | Legs | Rest |
Split up in Push (chest, shoulders and triceps), Pull (Back and biceps) and Legs.
Positive
By splitting the upper body in two seperate workout sessions you can perform way better and focus on the chosen muscle groups. Second, none of the workouts interfere with the other by fatiguing the working muscle in a previous workout. Third, by performing this split the recovery time is more than enough to heal the worked muscle group.
Negative
As well as the upper/lower split: Not every muscle recovers as fast as the other. You can‘t scale the workout, because it only works six times a week.
Bro split
| Weekday | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday |
| Body part | Chest | Back | legs | Shoulder | Arms | Rest | Rest |
For the Bro split every muscle group will be split for an individual workout (chest, shoulders, arms, back and legs). This workout was really popular in the old arnold era.
Positive
By splitting every muscle group in an individual workout the recovery time is more than enough to heal the muscle. Second, you can perform way better and focus on the chosen muscle groups. Third, none of the workouts interfere with the other by fatiguing the working muscle in a previous workout.
Negative
You only hit one muscle group per week, so you need really high volume to compensate. You can‘t scale the workout, because it only works five times a week.
What should you do?
In my opinion as a beginner you should start with a full body workout 2-3 times a week. As you get more experienced you might switch your workout to an upper/lower split or even a push-pull.legs split if you have the time. After a few years you should know your body and the different recovery time your muscles need after a hard workout. If you like structuring your workout to the ideal point you could switch back to a 5 day full body split with emphasizing different muscles every day. At last there is the pro bodybuilder, who trains multiple times a day to get every single detail right.
Now it is time to stop reading and start acting, so enjoy the ride and always look forward to the next challenge in your life.