What’s the best workout split?

If you’ve ever wondered, “What’s the best workout split?” you’re asking the right kind of question, but it’s generally not the most important one to ask. The real question is: “What’s the best split for me, my goals, my schedule, and my recovery capacity, right now?”

As a coach, I can tell you from a lot of experience with both my own training and from training hundreds of people, that there’s no single magical arrangement of days that guarantees results. A split is just a way of organising training stress across the week, like putting your work into different containers. 

What really drives progress is how consistently you train, how much quality work you do, how well you recover, and whether the plan is realistic for your life. The best split is the one you can actually stick to and progress on, not the one that looks perfect on paper but collapses under the weight of your life schedule.

So, I want to walk you through how to think about splits the way a coach does. First, we’ll talk about your goals (strength, muscle growth, endurance, athletic performance, or just feeling and functioning better) and how they affect the structure that makes sense for you. We’ll also factor in training age (beginners benefit from different setups than advanced lifters), lifestyle constraints (work, family, travel, stress, sleep), and recovery capacity (because training is ultimately just stress, and adaptation only happens if you can bounce back from it).

From there, we’ll break down the physiology in plain English, and discuss why training a muscle once a week usually isn’t enough, why twice often works better, how volume should be spread across the week, and why more isn’t always better. We’ll look at the most common split structures and weigh their pros, cons, and best use cases. We’ll also cover how to fit in cardio and conditioning without sabotaging your strength or hypertrophy.

Finally, you’ll get practical tools for implementation such as weekly set targets, progression strategies, deload guidelines, and how to auto-regulate effort so training fits your readiness on a given day. We’ll finish with the big-picture coaching perspective, and how to progress and how sustainability matters far more than finding the “perfect” split.

At the end of the day, muscles don’t know what day of the week it is. They only know stress, recovery, and adaptation. If you can line those three up in a way that fits your life, you’ll make progress. 

TL;DR

There’s no single “best” workout split. The right split depends on your goals, experience, schedule, and recovery. Muscles only respond to stress, recovery, and progression, not what day it is. Aim to train each muscle group about twice per week, hit 10-20 quality sets weekly, and pick a structure you can stick to. Full-body, upper/lower, push/pull/legs, or various other splits can all work, as long as you enjoy it, recover from it, and progress on it. Consistency beats “optimal” every time.

What’s The Best Workout Split? Context & Foundations

Before we talk about different workout splits, it’s important to zoom out and set the stage. The way you organise your training only makes sense once we line it up against three big factors: your goals, your training experience, and your lifestyle. These are the levers that determine what’s realistic and what will actually move you forward.

Training Goals Matter

Every split has strengths and weaknesses depending on what you’re chasing. If your priority is strength, you’ll do best with a setup that lets you practice big lifts like the squat, deadlift, bench, and overhead press often enough to refine your technique while still leaving room for recovery. Think of it like learning a skill, where the more quality exposures you get, the faster you improve.

If your focus is hypertrophy (building muscle size), frequency still matters, but volume distribution becomes the bigger lever. You’ll want to make sure each muscle group gets hit with enough challenging sets across the week, not annihilated once and ignored for six days. That’s why body-part splits can work for advanced lifters, but full-body or upper/lower setups often make more sense for most people.

For endurance goals, the split needs to respect your other training demands. Long runs, cycling, or conditioning work take recovery resources, so strength training is usually organised to support and not compete with that primary goal. You’re layering strength on top of endurance, not the other way around.

And if you’re after athletic performance, your split has to coordinate with your sports practice. A sprinter or soccer player, for example, can’t afford a crushing leg day right before speed work. The weight room should serve the sport, not interfere with it.

Training Age & Experience

Your “training age” is simply how long you’ve been lifting with real consistency and progression. A true beginner almost always benefits from full-body or near-full-body training done several times per week. It builds coordination, reinforces good movement patterns, and provides frequent practice on the core lifts. I think of this like language learning, where repetition wires the skill.

An intermediate lifter, with a solid year or two under their belt, can start to use splits that introduce more specialisation. Upper/lower or push/pull/legs options give just enough focus without losing balance. At this stage, recovery starts to matter more, and you can’t simply “do everything, every day” the way beginners sometimes can.

For advanced lifters, training becomes much more individualised. Weak points, injury history, and recovery constraints dictate the split. Some advanced athletes thrive on body-part days to overload lagging muscles, while others use hybrid systems with targeted sessions to manage fatigue. At this level, your split is less about following a template and more about solving specific problems.

Lifestyle Constraints

Finally, and maybe most importantly, your split has to live in the real world. You can have the perfect plan on paper, but if it doesn’t fit your week, it won’t work. Start with time. How many days can you realistically train, and how long can you stay in the gym? Three 60-minute sessions? Four 45-minute sessions? Six 30-minute sessions? All of those can be effective, but they’ll steer you toward different splits. 

This is realistically where most people go wrong. They plan for their ideal, perfect week, instead of their most common week. It is perfectly fine to be an optimist, but when choosing your workout split, it is better to err on the side of pessimism.

Work, family, and stress load are just as important. If your job is high-pressure and your sleep is patchy, you don’t recover the same way as a college student with flexible time and few responsibilities. Recovery isn’t just about muscles, it’s also about your nervous system, hormones, and overall stress bucket. Overfill it, and progress stalls.

Sleep and nutrition finish the picture. If you’re routinely under-slept or eating in a way that doesn’t support your training, no split will feel good for long. On the flip side, when recovery resources are strong (good sleep, solid nutrition, low stress), you can get away with more frequency or volume without crashing.

Ultimately, the way I recommend that you think of it is that your split is like a tailored suit. The “cut” depends on your goals, your experience, and the shape of your life. Get those three aligned, and almost any split can deliver results. Ignore them, and even the fanciest program falls apart. You may be able to buy a suit off the rack, but if you really want to look good, you want a tailored suit. 

So, let’s actually dig into how to tailor the suit yourself.

Physiological Considerations

Training is, at its core, a stress-and-recovery game. I often describe it to clients as a form of hormesis: a small, controlled stress that your body responds to by getting stronger, fitter, and more resilient. 

Workout splits are simply one way of deciding how to dose that stress. When to push, when to rest, and how to balance all the moving parts.

Let’s break down the main principles that explain why different splits work (or don’t), and how to use them to your advantage.

Muscle Protein Synthesis & Training Frequency

Resistance training sessions spark a rise in muscle protein synthesis (MPS), which is the cellular machinery that repairs and builds muscle. But that spike doesn’t last forever. For most lifters, it’s elevated for about 24-48 hours. After that, your body is back to baseline, waiting for the next stimulus.

That’s why training a muscle group roughly twice per week often outperforms the old-school “once-a-week blast.” By spreading the work across two or more sessions, you get multiple MPS spikes, more practice with the lifts, and often better quality sets because you’re not trying to cram all the volume for chest, back, or legs into one marathon workout.

Volume Distribution

Volume is simply the total amount of hard work you do, usually measured in challenging sets per muscle per week. Research and coaching practice both suggest that most lifters progress well in the range of about 10-20 quality sets per muscle group weekly, depending on goals and recovery.

How you split those sets matters. A body-part split might give you 15 sets for chest in one day, leaving you sore and stiff for days. A full-body or upper/lower split might spread those same 15 sets across two or three sessions, which usually means better performance on each set, less joint stress, and more consistent progression. Splits are essentially a tool for volume and fatigue management, deciding how to distribute the weekly workload without overwhelming your recovery.

Recovery Limitations

Training is only half the equation, recovery is the other. Push too hard without enough recovery, and progress stalls. Recovery has layers:

• Muscular recovery is local (your quads or pecs repairing from a hard session).
• Central nervous system (CNS) fatigue is global (heavy compound lifts, near-max effort, or high training stress can leave you feeling mentally and physically drained).
• Joint and connective tissue health matters, too. Muscles adapt quickly, but tendons, ligaments, and cartilage adapt more slowly. High-frequency, high-volume training without enough variation can beat up your elbows, shoulders, knees, and lower back.

Your split should give your body enough breathing room between hard sessions targeting the same areas or systems.

Training Frequency & Workload

One of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming “more is better.” In reality, the minimum effective dose is where we ideally should start. Begin with the least training needed to make progress, then build gradually. That might mean two to three full-body sessions per week for a beginner, or a moderate four-day split for someone with more experience.

The principle is always the same: stimulus + recovery → adaptation → outcome. If any piece is dosed inappropriately (too much/little stimulus, not enough recovery, or too much recovery in the form of too much time between stimuli) you won’t see the desired results.  If you really want to dig into this, we discuss it at length in our exercise program design course. 

Workout splits just allow you to dose the stimulus correctly while respecting recovery.

So how many days per week are “right”? For most people:

• 2-3 days is enough for beginners or during busy life seasons.
• 3-4 days works beautifully for most intermediates.
• 5-6 days is possible for advanced lifters or those with excellent recovery, but it’s rarely necessary for the average person.

Remember that sustainability beats intensity. Five perfect weeks of training three days a week will outperform one burnt-out week of six days followed by three weeks off.

Scheduling Frameworks

Finally, let’s talk logistics. Most people default to a standard seven-day cycle of Monday through Sunday. That works fine, but it’s not the only way. 

If your schedule is unpredictable, you can use flexible scheduling or A/B rotation models. For example, you might rotate through Full-Body A, Full-Body B, and a conditioning day, simply running them in sequence whenever you have time, instead of locking into a rigid weekly calendar.

For example, I have many clients who travel a lot for work. Giving them a strict split schedule just isn’t going to work. So, with many of them, I will use something like an A/B rotation. Let’s say most weeks they can do 3 sessions per week. We just alternate between workout A and workout B. If some weeks they can only do 1-2 training sessions per week, then that is no issue. When they are able to train, we just do the next session in the rotation.

Another option is to stretch the “training week” beyond seven days. A 10-day cycle, for instance, gives you more recovery while still hitting your volume and frequency targets. This approach is especially useful for advanced lifters who need more time to recover between heavy sessions but don’t want to reduce total training quality. 

There really is no set law that says the world has to revolve around a 7-day week. The Earth rotates around the Sun at roughly a 365-day cycle, but the 7-day week is an entirely man-made invention. You can train on a different schedule if it makes sense. However, as most of you reading this will have jobs that follow the 7-day cycle, you may have to fit your workout split into it to make life easier. 

Ultimately, your workout schedule is just a framework. Muscles don’t care if it’s Monday or Thursday; they care about when they were last trained and whether they’ve recovered enough to handle the next round.

At the end of the day, physiology is what grounds our choices. Splits aren’t magic, they’re just ways of distributing stress, recovery, and volume in a way that your body can adapt to. 

Different Split Structures

Now that we’ve covered the foundations and the physiology, let’s look at how this actually plays out in the gym. Splits are just different ways of organising your training days. None are inherently superior, but each has its own strengths depending on your goals, experience, and lifestyle.

Full-Body Training

Full-body sessions are exactly what they sound like: every workout trains most of the body. A typical day might include a squat or hinge, a push, a pull, some accessory work, and maybe a core/abs movement.

Why it works: Full-body splits give you high frequency per muscle group with fewer total sessions. If you only have two or three days per week to train, this is usually the most time-efficient option. Beginners thrive with this set-up because they get frequent practice on the big lifts, and even if you miss a session, you’re not leaving any muscle neglected for long.

Challenges: Sessions can feel a little long if you’re chasing high weekly volume, and fatigue from earlier lifts (say, heavy squats) can sometimes limit performance on later ones (like deadlifts or presses). Programming needs to be thoughtful so you’re not accidentally overloading yourself.

Upper/Lower Split

This is one of the most versatile structures. With this structure, you alternate between upper-body and lower-body days. For many lifters, this strikes the sweet spot between frequency and recovery.

Why it works: It balances workload well, makes recovery predictable (legs get rest while you hit upper, and vice versa), and scales beautifully from three days a week all the way up to five or six. You can bias it toward your goal, too. Extra pulling if you want back growth, or quad emphasis if that’s your weak point.

Challenges: If you’re training three days a week, the rotation can get a little lopsided across calendar weeks, unless you do run on some sort of A/B rotation. However, this is one of the most adaptable templates out there.

Push/Pull/Legs (PPL)

This classic split organises training around movement patterns: push (chest, shoulders, triceps), pull (back, biceps), and legs (quads, hamstrings, glutes and calves). Many lifters like it because it’s easy to understand and simple to plug exercises into.

Why it works: PPL is modular, scalable, and easy to bias. If you enjoy training often, it fits well into 5-6 day routines.

Challenges: At higher frequencies (especially six days), recovery becomes a real issue, especially for areas that get overloaded more easily. For example, your lower back and shoulder girdle can easily be overloaded. It also tends to lead to more of an upper-body bias, as you get only one day to train the large lower-body muscles, but you get two days to train the smaller upper-body muscles. 

Upper/Lower/Push/Pull/Legs

This is essentially a five-day system that combines elements of both approaches. You start with upper/lower, then cycle into a push, pull, and legs block.

Why it works: It spreads the volume out, hits everything multiple times per week, and works well for hypertrophy-focused lifters who like training five days but don’t want to have to keep track of a 6-day per week PPL structure being fit in across multiple weeks.

Challenges: It’s quite a nice structure, but if your schedule is busy, you may struggle to complete the cycle consistently.

Upper/Lower/Upper/Lower/Shoulders & Arms

This one’s a twist on the classic four-day upper/lower, with an extra “pump day” dedicated to shoulders and arms. It’s great for physique-focused lifters who want to bring up the shoulders and arms without sacrificing overall balance.

Why it works: That extra day allows targeted volume for lagging delts and arms, which can otherwise get overshadowed by chest, back, and legs.

Challenges: It’s really only useful if you’re already fairly consistent with four days and have the recovery capacity to add more. Otherwise, it’s just extra fatigue without much payoff.

Push/Pull 

Another variation some lifters like is to frame splits around movement categories: one day focused on presses and quads, another on pulls and the posterior chain. It’s simple, efficient, and puts somewhat related muscle groups together.

Why it works: You’re training in patterns, which means muscles that work together in compound lifts get trained on the same day. This helps with recovery and reduces overlap fatigue.

Challenges: It can feel unbalanced if you don’t program carefully. For example, quad dominance on push days if things aren’t planned thoroughly.

Adaptive Strategies

Not every week looks the same, and your split can reflect that. One of my favourite tools for clients is what I call a floating workout. If you’ve got a week with extra time or better recovery, you can add the additional floating session into the schedule, maybe an extra pull day, a conditioning block, or a smaller accessory session (much like the shoulders and arms day discussed previously).

The key is to make it optional and not essential. That way, missing it isn’t a failure, but getting it in is a bonus. Over months, those bonus sessions add up without creating stress when life gets busy.

Ultimately, splits are just organisational systems. Full-body is efficient, upper/lower is versatile, PPL is modular, hybrids add nuance, and adaptive strategies let you work with the ebb and flow of real life. None is inherently the best workout split, they just need to match your goal, your recovery, and your week.

Cardio & Conditioning Integration

Strength training may be the backbone of most splits, but cardio and conditioning play a critical role too. Whether your goal is hypertrophy, strength, general health, or performance, some form of cardiovascular work will usually improve your fitness, recovery, and longevity. The challenge is fitting it in without letting it derail your progress in the weight room.

Unfortunately, these discussions often leave out cardio, and thus, many people simply don’t factor it into their plan. Let’s not make that mistake!

The Interference Effect

Now, depending on your background, you may be thinking, “Doesn’t cardio “kill your gains”?” Well, thankfully, the answer is no. At least not if it’s programmed intelligently.

The “interference effect” is real, and excessive cardio, especially high volumes, can blunt strength and hypertrophy adaptations. If you’re logging 50 miles a week as a runner, don’t expect maximum squat gains. The body has limited recovery capacity, and endurance and strength sometimes compete for it.

But this doesn’t mean that cardio is the enemy. When done in moderate amounts, with smart timing, it can actually support lifting by improving work capacity, improving recovery between sets and sessions, and keeping you healthier overall. 

The key is balance. You want to do enough conditioning to enhance your fitness, not so much that it robs your lifting progress.

Zone 2 Training

Zone 2 is what I call the easy, but not effortless, zone of cardio. At this level of cardio effort, you can carry on a conversation, but the other person would know you’re working out. Think steady-state cycling, brisk walking on an incline, easy jogging, or rowing at a sustainable pace.

The beauty of Zone 2 is that it’s generally low recovery demand, but the downside is that it is time-intensive. An hour on the bike won’t crush your joints or nervous system, but it does take a chunk of time. The payoff is a better aerobic base, improved recovery between sets, and improved long-term heart health and longevity.

So, where do we slot Zone 2 training into our program? You ideally want to slot Zone 2 on separate days from lifting if you have the time, or you can tack it on after strength training if the session wasn’t brutally heavy. 

Many of my clients like to jog, hike, cycle, or swim on non-lifting days. It’s quite restorative, and not overly draining. However, you do have to be able to fit it into your schedule. For some people, depending on their specific goals and schedule, they may need to allocate one of their training sessions to Zone 2 cardio. 

As a result, they will have to do less resistance training in their workout split. We do still generally want to keep at least 2 resistance training sessions in the mix each week, as that is what the general exercise guidelines suggest. But we do have to be cognisant of our actual schedule and ability to fit all the training sessions in.

Interval Training

But what about intervals? How do we factor those into our workout split?

Intervals come in different flavours. Short protocols (like 3-10 rounds of 30 seconds on, 90 seconds off) can often follow resistance training without much issue. They’re relatively brief, potent, and don’t require their own day unless you’re doing them at very high intensity or the number of sets is high.

Longer protocols (say, 10 × 400m runs or a 20+ minute intervals) are a different beast. In those cases, it’s often smarter to separate interval training onto its own day, or at least keep it far enough away from heavy lower-body lifting that you’re not sabotaging performance/recovery. 

Now, I can’t go in depth on how to integrate cardio into a program (we have a lot of other exercise content that discusses stuff like that). However, depending on your specific goals, cardio will either be a part of your resistance training days, or it will need to be programmed on separate days. So, keep that in mind as we discuss the various resistance training splits below, as we try to give you the answer to “what’s the best workout split?”

Full-Body Splits (2-4 Days/Week)

First up is full-body splits. A full-body split means exactly what it sounds like: in each workout, you train most/all of your major muscle groups. A typical session might include a handful of movements that cover the big patterns of squat, hinge, push, pull, some accessory isolation movements and maybe core. The idea is that every workout is comprehensive, so no muscle is left waiting an entire week to get attention.

Why it works: Full-body training is especially powerful for beginners and busy lifters. Each muscle group gets hit multiple times per week, which lines up nicely with how muscle protein synthesis works. Plus, practising big lifts like squats, deadlifts, or presses two or three times a week helps you groove technique faster, because just like learning any other skill, repetition accelerates learning. Another benefit is flexibility, because if life throws you off schedule and you miss a day, it’s no big deal as every workout is productive on its own. So nothing falls through the cracks.

The trade-offs: The downside is that sessions can feel long if you’re trying to pack in a lot of weekly volume. For example, doing heavy squats, then deadlifts, then bench, then rows in the same session can leave the later lifts underpowered because systemic fatigue accumulates. There’s also a temptation to keep adding “just one more” big lift per day, which can turn into overload if you’re not careful. To make full-body training sustainable, progression has to be planned thoughtfully, and volume needs to be capped and allocated appropriately, so recovery doesn’t get hammered. Training on consecutive days can also be tricky, as your shoulders, lower back, or joints may not love back-to-back loading if programming isn’t balanced.

Best uses: Full-body splits are ideal for beginners, time-crunched lifters, anyone returning from a layoff, or people in a general health and strength phase. They deliver a lot of bang for your buck without requiring you to live in the gym.

Sample structures:

• 2 days/week: Monday and Thursday, alternating two versions (A/B) of full-body sessions.
• 3 days/week: The classic Monday/Wednesday/Friday setup, rotating through different emphases (Full A, Full B, Full C). Alternatively, you can still run the A/B structure, and get more practice with each movement. 
• 4 days/week: Often run as Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday with two heavier days and two lighter days for balance (heavy/light/heavy/light is usually better than heavy/heavy/light/light, although that can also work).

Common mistakes to avoid: Loading every workout with too many heavy compound lifts, forgetting to include accessory and isolation work (which support joint health and balance), and failing to manage volume over time. Another frequent pitfall is thinking you can train full-body hard on consecutive days. Unfortunately, recovery lags behind, and joints or connective tissue usually wave the white flag of surrender before muscles do.

Upper/Lower Splits (3-6 Days/Week)

The upper/lower split is one of the most versatile and sustainable structures out there. As the name suggests, you alternate between upper-body and lower-body sessions. Upper body pushing and pulling on one day, squatting and hinging on the next. This setup can be run with as few as three weekly sessions or scaled all the way up to five or six, which makes it a favourite for intermediates and beyond.

Why it works: The upper/lower split offers a really balanced way to distribute volume. Each region of the body gets trained multiple times per week, but you still have clear recovery windows. That makes it easy to bias training toward a goal (like extra quad work if your legs are lagging, or more pulling if you want to bring up your back). Because it’s so flexible, you’ll see athletes, hypertrophy-focused lifters, and even people training primarily for strength all using variations of this structure.

The trade-offs: The biggest drawback shows up at three days per week. Since the rotation doesn’t line up perfectly with the seven-day calendar, you might hit upper twice one week and lower twice the next. It still balances out over time, but it can bother people who want every week to look tidy on paper and to know exactly what they are training on each day weeks in advance. This isn’t just a little cognitive quirk that you have to overcome, there are practical reasons to be frustrated by this. For example, leg days can be taxing, both physically and mentally. If your job or life schedule leaves you drained, planning those sessions around heavy work days/weeks can get quite tricky. There are also drawbacks if you train more frequently, as you have to think more about crossover fatigue, and recovery more broadly, as you will be training the same/similar muscles/movements across the week. 

Best uses: Upper/lower does a great job with intermediates who want a clear step up from full-body training, athletes in their off-season looking for balance, or anyone in a general strength and hypertrophy phase. It’s also an excellent split that you can run productively for years by layering in volume, intensity, and exercise variety.

Variants: One of the reasons upper/lower is so popular is that it’s easy to modify. You can run heavy/light versions (e.g., heavy upper on Monday, lighter upper on Thursday), a strength/hypertrophy blend (one day focused on load, the other on higher reps and volume), or even a “powerbuilding” style where you chase both strength and physique goals in the same week.

Sample structures:

• 3-day: Upper/Lower/Upper in week one, then Lower/Upper/Lower in week two. This keeps things balanced over two weeks.
• 4-day: The classic Mon/Tue/Thu/Fri split: Upper, Lower, Upper, Lower. Reliable, predictable, and effective.
• 5-day: U/L/U/L plus an optional “pump” or conditioning day, which can be arms, delts, or cardio depending on goals. You can also just keep alternating U/L/U/L/U, and think of things over a large time scale. 

Common pitfalls: One of the most frequent mistake is treating every session like a max-effort day. With four or more workouts per week, not every lift should be pushed to the limit. Fatigue accumulates, and it will catch up with you quickly. 

Push/Pull/Legs (PPL) Splits (3-6 Days/Week)

The push/pull/legs split is one of the most popular training structures you’ll see, and for good reason. It’s straightforward, modular, and adaptable to different weekly schedules. You break training into three categories: push (chest, shoulders, triceps), pull (back, biceps), and legs (quads, hamstrings, glutes and calves). After you complete the three, you simply repeat the cycle as many times per week as your schedule and recovery allow.

Why it works: The beauty of PPL is its simplicity. It’s easy to understand, easy to swap exercises in or out, and easy to bias toward weak points (like adding more pushing work if you want to bring up your chest). Because each day is focused on a narrower group of muscles, workouts don’t have to be long, making it a good fit for lifters who prefer shorter but more frequent sessions.

The trade-offs: The flip side is that higher-frequency PPL can be punishing. A true six-day PPL means you’re training six days in a row, which challenges recovery and adherence. Muscles that overlap (like like the low back and shoulder girdle) can fatigue faster than you expect, leading to nagging aches or stalled progress. And unlike a full-body or upper/lower plan, if you miss a day, you may throw off the balance of the cycle.

Best uses: PPL shines for hypertrophy-focused lifters who enjoy frequent training and want to rack up quality weekly volume without cramming too much into one session. It also works well for people who simply like being in the gym often and thrive on routine.

Sample structures:

• 3 days/week: Classic Push / Pull / Legs, often used by beginners or people with limited time.
• 5 days/week: Push / Pull / Legs / Push / Pull, then the following week starts with legs to keep things balanced.
• 6 days/week: Push / Pull / Legs / Push / Pull / Legs. This is a high-frequency, high-fatigue option and usually requires managing volume and planned deloads to prevent burnout.

Common pitfalls: The most common issue is not thinking about the organisation of the week, and where volume overlaps. Push/Pull/Legs is objectively one of the worst ways to organise this structure. It is the popular way to do it, because most men want to prioritise their chest, so push gets done first in the cycle. However, doing a heavy pull day before lower body generally just leads to poorer performance on lower body exercises. A much better way to organise this split would be Legs/Pull/Push, but because that de-emphasises the push muscles, most people won’t do this. 

Another mistake is not paying attention to fatigue accumulating. With high-frequency training, fatigue creeps up, whether you feel it right away or not. Smart programming means leaving room to back off before you’re forced to.

Body-Part (“Bro”) Splits (4-6 Days/Week)

The classic “bro split” is what most people picture when they think of bodybuilding training. Each day is dedicated to one or two major muscle groups. 

For example, Monday might be chest, Tuesday back, Wednesday legs, Thursday shoulders, and Friday arms, with calves or abs rotated in as accessories. Some lifters extend it to six days by doubling up on legs or having hamstring and quad specific days.

Why it works: The biggest strength of this approach is focus. When you devote a whole session to one or two muscle groups, you can really dial in exercise variety, mind-muscle connection, and training quality. For advanced hypertrophy goals, especially when trying to bring up lagging parts like shoulders or arms, this format allows enough room to accumulate targeted volume without rushing.

The trade-offs: The downside is frequency. Most body-part splits only hit each muscle group once per week unless they’re carefully designed. That can be enough for advanced lifters who are able to train with high intensity and perfect execution, but for most people, it leaves gains on the table. The structure also makes missed sessions very costly. Skip one leg day, and your lower body might go a full two weeks without proper training.

Best uses: Bro splits are best for advanced lifters who already have a strong base of strength and muscle, excellent recovery habits, and the consistency to train five or six days a week without frequent disruptions. They’re also useful for physique athletes in phases where fine-tuning specific body parts is the main goal.

Sample structures:

• 5-day: Chest / Back / Legs / Shoulders / Arms, with calves and abs rotated in.
• 6-day: Same as above, but with an added second leg day or specific quad/hamstring specific sessions.

Common pitfalls: Too many lifters make the mistake of “annihilating” a muscle with excessive junk volume (20+ sets for chest in one day) rather than spreading work more productively across the week. It is generally better to spread the volume over at least 2 days, as that leads to higher output in each session, and a more frequent muscle building stimulus. 

Two-A-Days (Advanced Only)

Two-a-day training is exactly what it sounds like, you split your work into 2 sessions a day (usually a morning and an evening session). A common setup is AM skill or conditioning work, followed by PM strength training, though some lifters flip it depending on their priorities. 

The main idea behind this workout split is to divide the workload so that no single session drags on too long. For athletes, there may simply not be enough time, or it may not make sense to try and fit everything into a single session. Between strength, conditioning, and sports-specific work, it may just make sense to do multiple sessions per day.

Why it works: The biggest advantage of two-a-days is that they allow you to handle more total weekly volume without wrecking the quality of each session. Instead of slogging through a two-hour workout where the last 45 minutes are a haze of fatigue and under-performance, you get two focused, high-quality efforts. This setup is especially useful for advanced athletes chasing very specific goals (strength plus conditioning, or strength plus skill work) where time and performance in each discipline really matter.

The trade-offs: The catch is that recovery demands really go through the roof. Two-a-days are not just “double the training”, they’re double the warm-ups, double the stress, and double the recovery needs. Unless your sleep, nutrition, and stress management are on point, it’s easy to dig yourself into a hole. This format also requires a lifestyle that actually allows for two separate training windows, which is realistic for competitive athletes, but rarely sustainable for the average lifter with work, family, and normal life responsibilities. For a lot of my adult life, I have done two-a-days, and even under optimal recovery circumstances, the logistics are just very challenging, and you do get bored quite quickly with commuting and showering etc.

In short, two-a-days are a powerful tool, but they should really be reserved for advanced trainees who already have a solid foundation, excellent recovery habits, and clear performance-driven goals. For most lifters, simply improving training quality, sleep, and consistency will deliver 95% of the results, without needing to double up your gym time.

Practical Implementation

Now, choosing a split is only the first step. The real progress comes from how you implement it. How much work you do, how you progress, how you adjust when life or recovery pushes back, and how you structure your training across months and years. 

This is the actual “nuts and bolts” that turn your split into results. So, it makes sense to actually just run through a few guidelines with this stuff, but if you do really want to learn all of the ins and outs, I would highly recommend doing the Exercise Program Design Course.

Exercise Selection

Not all exercises are created equal. Compounds (like squats, deadlifts, presses, and pulls) should generally form the backbone of most programs. They give the most “bang for your buck” by training multiple muscles and movement patterns at once. Isolation lifts (like curls, lateral raises, and calf raises) add more “precise” loading to specific muscles and serve to round out weak points and support joint health.

For beginners, compounds deserve more weight in the program because they not only build muscle but also teach coordination. You have to remember that it’s not just muscles that adapt, so too does the nervous system. Frequent practice of core lifts wires the motor patterns faster. I often tell clients, “The brain learns the squat the same way it learns a language, lots of repetition.” That’s why full-body and upper/lower splits tend to work so well early on. They give you more practice at the big lifts without overwhelming volume.

Weekly Targets

A simple and effective guideline is to aim for about 10-20 hard sets per muscle group per week, adjusted for your recovery ability and training history. Beginners often grow well on the lower end, while advanced lifters may need more. The key is that these sets are challenging, taken within 1-3 reps of technical failure, and tracked consistently.

This isn’t a rule carved in stone, and it should just be viewed as a starting range. If you’re recovering well and progressing, you might add a few sets. If you’re sore, fatigued, or stalled, you may need less. The “sweet spot” is different for everyone, but most fall somewhere in that range.

Progression 

Progression is the heartbeat of training. Without it, even the best split eventually stagnates. I like to think of progression as having multiple knobs to turn:

• Load: Add weight to the bar.
• Reps: Squeeze out more reps at the same load.
• Sets: Add an extra working set if you’re recovering well.
• Tempo: Slow down the eccentric, add pauses, or control speed for greater difficulty.
• Range of Motion: Expand to fuller ranges or add variations like deficit lifts.
• Density: Do the same work in less time by tightening rest periods or using supersets.

You don’t need to crank all these knobs at once, and some are more of a priority than others (generally load, reps and sets). Pick one or two to focus on, progress them steadily, and cycle to others over time.

Periodisation 

Good training doesn’t just look at today or this week, it considers the bigger picture. Periodisation is simply the practice of rotating your training focus across months and years, while also managing stimulus and fatigue. 

That might mean alternating between strength-oriented and hypertrophy-oriented phases, or switching from a higher-frequency split to a more specialised one as you advance. It might mean running slightly higher training volumes for a few weeks, and then doing lower volume for a few weeks. 

For example, you might run a full-body split for 3-4 months, then transition to an upper/lower split to handle more volume, then cycle back to full-body during a busy season for maintenance. Over time, rotating splits keeps training fresh, manages fatigue, and ensures long-term progress. There is, of course, a LOT more to periodisation, but it needs to be on your radar when trying to work out what the best workout split is for you, as this may change across the year.

Auto-Regulation

No plan survives contact with real life. Stress, sleep, nutrition, and mood all influence performance. That’s why tools like RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion) and RIR (Reps in Reserve) are invaluable.

Instead of blindly chasing fixed numbers, you adjust loads and effort based on how your body feels that day. For example, if a program calls for sets of 8 at RIR 2, you choose a load heavy enough that you could only manage 10 reps total. On a great day, that might be more weight, whereas on a tired day, it might be less. Either way, you’re training at the right relative intensity.

This ensures you’re always stimulating progress without burning out.

Deloads

No matter how well you recover, fatigue accumulates over time. Deloads are your pressure-release valve. These are really just a planned reduction in training stress that lets your body catch up.

Signs you may need a deload include:

• Stalled lifts across multiple sessions.
• Poor sleep or nagging irritability.
• Achy joints or chronic soreness.
• A dip in motivation to train.

A deload usually means cutting volume by about 30-50% for a week while keeping weights moderate. Think of it as active recovery where you are keeping in enough stimulus to maintain skill, but not enough to dig the recovery hole deeper. When done right, you come back fresher, stronger, and ready to build again.

There is much more that could be discussed here, and it has pained me to tighten everything down to these few points. So, please do read the content on the Exercise homepage. 

Sustainability & Adherence

Ultimately, muscles don’t know what day of the week it is, they only know stress and recovery. This one idea cuts through all the dogma about “optimal” splits. What really matters is whether your training structure fits your life in a way that you can sustain over time. A perfect plan that you can’t follow is useless, but a good-enough plan you can stick to will change your body.

So, when evaluating what the best workout split is for you, consider the following:

Enjoyment Factor

One of the most underrated variables in training is simple enjoyment. If you dread your workouts, you won’t show up consistently, and without consistency, nothing else matters. A split that feels engaging, whether that means chasing numbers on big lifts, feeling a pump from focused hypertrophy work, or mixing in conditioning to keep things fresh, is far more likely to actually stick.

The best workout split isn’t just effective, it’s enjoyable enough that you look forward to it. If you’re someone who gets bored easily, rotating between structures every few months can keep training exciting and lead to better progress.

Please don’t just gloss over this, and do try to make your training at least somewhat enjoyable, as you really will get far better results this way. Exercise does not need to be punishment!

Lifestyle Integration

The other piece of sustainability is how well your split integrates with real life. Travel, shift work, parenting, stress, and social obligations all compete for time and energy. If your program demands five 90-minute sessions per week but your life can only reliably accommodate three 45-minute sessions, the program is a bad fit for you.

This is why flexible frameworks matter. For some clients, a full-body “A/B” setup works perfectly, as you just run the next workout in the sequence whenever life allows. For others, a standard upper/lower split fits well into a predictable 4-day routine. 

The workout split should bend to fit your life, not the other way around.

Psychological Recovery

Finally, don’t underestimate the mental side of recovery. Even if your muscles and joints are adapting fine, mental fatigue can creep in. Grinding through sessions when your motivation is tanking often leads to sloppy execution or burnout.

Sustainability means paying attention not just to soreness and performance, but also to your headspace. Are you dreading the gym? Struggling to focus in sessions? Feeling like training is just another stressor on top of everything else? Those are signs you may need to adjust your split, pull back with a deload, or simplify your training for a while.

At the end of the day, the best split is the one that checks three boxes: it delivers the stimulus you need, it fits (relatively) seamlessly into your lifestyle, and you enjoy it enough to repeat it week after week. 

Nail those, and you’ll never have to worry about whether your training is “optimal”. You will be certain that it is, because you will be super consistent with it, and that is what really drives long-term results. 

Monitoring Progress & When to Change Splits

Even the best program isn’t meant to last forever. Your body adapts, your life changes, and eventually the split that worked so well might stop being the right fit. The key is knowing what to track, when to pivot, and how to transition smoothly without losing momentum.

What to Track

You don’t need a complicated spreadsheet to monitor progress, but you do need to track the right signals:

• Load and reps: Are you lifting more weight or doing more reps with the same load over time?
• Set quality: Do your reps feel crisp and controlled, or are they breaking down?
• Session RPE: How hard does each workout feel overall? A steady climb in effort without a climb in performance is a red flag.
• Recovery markers: Sleep quality, soreness, energy levels, motivation to train.
• Adherence: Are you actually making it to the gym as planned? If you’re constantly missing sessions, the split may not fit your life.

These simple indicators tell you if your split is still serving you, or if it’s potentially time for a change. Exercise for the sake of exercise is certainly a good thing, but what is even better is exercise that actually produces results. 

Ensuring your workout split is actually producing results is a vital part of this whole process. 

When to Pivot

However, there are a few clear signs that can mean it’s worth considering a new approach:

• Life schedule shifts: New job, travel, parenting, or other changes in routine. If your split doesn’t fit anymore, adjust it.
• Plateau: If lifts stall for 3-4 weeks despite solid effort and recovery, you may need a fresh structure or progression scheme.
• Persistent aches or fatigue: If nagging pains or constant tiredness creep in, your split might be overloading certain joints or not giving enough recovery.
• Boredom: Enjoyment drives consistency. If you’re dreading your workouts, switching to a new split can reignite motivation.

How to Transition

Switching splits doesn’t need to be drastic. A simple process works best:

1. Taper volume for one week. Cut total sets by ~30-40% while maintaining intensity. This acts as a mini-deload and resets recovery.
2. Keep intensity consistent. Don’t suddenly drop all weight on the bar; just scale back sets or accessories.
3. Introduce the new split gradually. Start at the lower end of recommended weekly volume (e.g., 8-10 sets per muscle group) and build up from there.

This way, your body has time to adapt to the new structure without being blindsided by a sudden spike in training stress.

Ultimately, monitoring progress keeps you honest, and changing splits is a normal, healthy part of training, and should not be seen as a failure. If you don’t monitor your training, you will never know if you need to change things. If you never change things, training can get stale and boring. The best lifters know when to hold steady, and when to pivot, and this is a skill that can be learned through practice. 

What’s the Best Workout Split? Conclusion

Ultimately, there isn’t a single “best” workout split. There are good fits for different goals, training ages, and lifestyles, and there are bad fits when the split asks more than your body or schedule can realistically give.

The split you choose should check three simple boxes:

1. You can stick to it. Consistency is everything.
2. You can recover from it. Training is stress, but progress happens in recovery. Don’t forget this!
3. You can progress on it. As long as weights, reps, or set quality move forward, the split is working.

That’s it. Full-body, upper/lower, push/pull/legs, body-part, minimalist approaches, etc., all of them can work. What matters is the match between the program and your real life.

When I’m coaching someone, I don’t start by asking, “Do you want full-body or push/pull/legs?” I start with their life. How many days can they realistically train? How long can those sessions be? What’s their stress load like at work or home? How well are they sleeping? Once we’ve mapped out those constraints, we layer in the goal(s), whether that’s hypertrophy, strength, fat loss, athletic performance, or simply general health. Only then does it make sense to pick the split.

So instead of hunting for the “optimal split” you saw online, start with your reality:

• How many days can you train?
• How much energy and recovery do you have right now?
• What do you actually enjoy doing?
• What’s the single most important goal you want to chase over the next few months?

Build from there. Fewer, higher-quality sessions will beat more, inconsistent ones every time. And remember that workout splits aren’t permanent. You can (and should) adjust them as your goals, lifestyle, and recovery capacity evolve.

The best split isn’t the one someone else swears by. The best split is the one that fits your life, supports your recovery, and allows you to progress, training block after training block, year after year. 

As with everything, there is always more to learn, and we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface with all this stuff. However, if you are interested in staying up to date with all our content, we recommend subscribing to our newsletter and bookmarking our free content page. We do have a lot of content on how to design your own exercise program on our exercise hub.

We also recommend reading our foundational nutrition article, along with our foundational articles on sleep and stress management, if you really want to learn more about how to optimise your lifestyle. If you want even more free information on exercise, you can follow us on Instagram, YouTube or listen to the podcast, where we discuss all the little intricacies of exercise.

Finally, if you want to learn how to coach nutrition, then consider our Nutrition Coach Certification course. We do also have an exercise program design course in the works, if you are a coach who wants to learn more about effective program design and how to coach it. We do have other courses available too. If you don’t understand something, or you just need clarification, you can always reach out to us on Instagram or via email.