How to Choose a Workout Split

What each split looks like across a week

Rest days can move. The order of the sessions should not, because it is what keeps the same muscles from being trained hard two days running.

On the 3-day split, the next week starts with Full B, so A and B swap places every week. On the 5-day split, the full-body day sits between two rest days so it never lands the day after an upper or lower session. On the 6-day split, if you need a rest day mid-week, take it and carry on in order: push, pull, legs never skips a step.

What goes in each session

1. Full body4–6 exercises

   One squat or hinge, one push, one pull, then one or two extras. A and B use different exercises for the same patterns, so a hinge-heavy day follows a squat-heavy one.

2. Upper4–6 exercises

   Two pushes and two pulls, one horizontal and one vertical of each. Arms and rear shoulders at the end if there is time.

3. Lower4–5 exercises

   A squat, a hinge, a single-leg move, then calves or trunk. Alternate which of squat and hinge goes first across the two lower days.

4. Push / pull / legs5–6 exercises each

   Push is chest, shoulders and triceps. Pull is back, rear shoulders and biceps. Legs is the lower day with more volume, because it only comes round twice.

Rest 90 seconds to 2 minutes between sets, 2 to 3 minutes on heavy squats and deadlifts. Most sessions land at 45 to 75 minutes.

The best workout split for beginners

Three full-body days. Not because the other splits do not work, but because a beginner's limit is learning the lifts, and full body practises every main movement three times a week instead of twice. You also lose less when you miss a day: skip one full-body session and every muscle still got trained that week.

Two full-body days also works if three is not realistic. It is slower, not useless.

The split to avoid early on is the "bro split": chest on Monday, back on Tuesday, and so on, each muscle once a week. It can work for experienced lifters with a lot of volume per session. For a beginner it means each lift gets practised once a week, and every hard set for a muscle has to fit into one session. A 2016 review of the studies found that training a muscle twice a week grew more muscle than once; later studies that matched the total sets found the gap mostly closes. Either way, a beginner learns the lifts faster with more practice.

The same table applies to women. There is no separate women's split: the days, the sessions and the progression are the same. The beginner gym plan for women is the 3-day row, written out exercise by exercise.

Upper lower split vs push pull legs

At four days, upper/lower is the better fit. It hits every muscle twice a week with two session types to learn. Push/pull/legs on four days does not divide evenly, and one muscle group always gets trained less.

At three days, push/pull/legs trains each muscle once a week. It is a popular 3 day workout split and it does work, but full body three days a week trains every muscle three times as often, so it is the better default.

At six days, push/pull/legs is the natural fit: each session is shorter and more focused, and each muscle still comes round twice. The cost is the schedule. Miss a day and the whole week shifts, which is why it suits people whose week is already stable.

Once each muscle gets about two sessions a week, the split matters less than the total work. With the same number of hard sets, studies comparing different training frequencies have found little difference in muscle growth. Frequency is mostly a way of spreading the sets so that no single session gets too long.

How the sets add up

The split decides how the work is spread. The amount of work is set separately: roughly 10 to 20 hard sets per muscle per week, starting at the low end. How many sets and reps to do covers what counts as a hard set.

This is why people move to more days: not because a new split is better, but because 18 sets of legs does not fit in three sessions you want to finish in an hour.

When to switch splits

Switch when one of these is true:

• Progress stops across a whole cycle, with sleep, food and effort in order. On a full-body plan that usually means you need more sets than three sessions can hold. Check how progressive overload works first: most stalls are a progression problem, not a split problem.
• Sessions run past about 75 minutes because the work no longer fits. Add a day and spread it out.
• Your week changes. New job, new baby, fewer reliable days: move down the table without guilt.

Do not switch because you are bored, or because a new split went past in your feed. The usual path is full body for the first months, then upper/lower, then push/pull/legs only if you want six days. Plenty of people stay on upper/lower for years.

Where these numbers come from

The days per week follow the American College of Sports Medicine position stand Progression Models in Resistance Training for Healthy Adults (Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 2009), which recommends 2–3 days a week for novices, 3–4 for intermediates and 4–5 for advanced lifters.

Training a muscle twice a week rather than once comes from Schoenfeld and colleagues, Effects of Resistance Training Frequency on Measures of Muscle Hypertrophy (Sports Medicine, 2016). That frequency matters little once total sets are equal comes from their follow-up, How many times per week should a muscle be trained to maximize muscle hypertrophy? (Journal of Sports Sciences, 2019).

The link between weekly sets and muscle growth comes from Dose-response relationship between weekly resistance training volume and increases in muscle mass (Schoenfeld and colleagues, Journal of Sports Sciences, 2017).