Best Science-Based Workout Split to Maximize Muscle Gains
One of the biggest decisions you have to make when you start hitting the gym is choosing which workout split to do. Or to put it simply, what exercises to do on different workout days of the week. For example, when I first started to gym, I used what was very popular in fitness magazines, and what my friends recommend - the “Bro Split”, meaning to do each muscle group once a week (Monday is International Chest Day!). I definitely build a significant amount of muscle over years of training, but the more important question is whether I would have progressed faster if I had used a better workout split.
After years of lifting and research, I would say that there’s a high chance that using a different workout split would have accelerated my muscle growth. Finding a workout split is also a useful way to formulate a training plan and stick to it - an essential step to optimizing results. You wouldn’t want to walk into a gym finding the first empty machine and start pumping out reps would you?
In this article, we will take a look at the different options and which one is best suited for you. Let’s dive in.
Workout splits have many advantages. But how do you choose the right one?
Different Workout Splits
Devising the most suitable training split for you revolves around many factors specific to you. This mainly includes 5 things: your training experience, goals, availability, rest and recovery needs and weakness.
Beginners require less volume and intensity than advanced lifters.
If your goal is to gain muscle, it will take more volume compared to someone who just want to maintain his/her shape.
If you cannot commit to training 5 days a week, then it would be a smarter choice to choose a 3 or 4 day workout split.
Growth takes place outside the gym when you are resting and recovering. Generally, the splits are programmed for maximum recovery between each training day. But if you’re constantly sore from the previous workout, or feeling burnt out, it is best to cut back on training.
If you have a specific body part that you want to grow, adding another training session which focuses on that might be useful.
All in all, I would say that the best training split is actually the one that you can stick to, and that is how many times you can commit to training each week. Training more usually gives more gains, but if you can’t commit to it, then it is unrealistic.
Nevertheless, here are some of the most common workout splits to start from, beginning with the easiest and then progressing to the more advanced. This is because as you gain experience and become more advanced, you will need more volume to gain more mass.
The best split is the one you can stick to!
Full Body Split (1, 2 or 3 Days / Week)
Monday: Full Body
Tuesday: Rest
Wednesday: Full Body
Thursday: Rest
Friday: Full Body
Saturday: Rest
Sunday: Rest
If you are serious about building muscle, training once or even twice a week may not be ideal. However, it is still better than not training at all. Nevertheless, you will need to increase your training frequency at some point.
A full body split is particularly good for beginners as it allows for at least 48 hours of rest in between workouts. This is important as beginners tend to experience high muscle soreness which can affect the next day’s workout. Focus on compound lifts like bench, deadlift and squat to hit more muscle groups simultaneously. This means ditching your bicep curls and triceps pulldowns.
A full body split also allows beginners to hit the same muscle group three times a week, which is useful at the beginning phase of training where your nervous system needs to learn how to activate and utilize muscle fibres more efficiently.
Upper-Lower Split (4 Days / Week)
Monday: Upper
Tuesday: Lower
Wednesday: Rest
Thursday: Upper
Friday: Lower
Saturday: Rest
Sunday: Rest
The next step to increase volume would be to cover the whole body over two days. This is done through an upper-lower split, where the upper consists of chest, back, shoulders and arms, while the lower consists of quads, glutes, hamstrings, calves and maybe abs.
With this increased volume, you can hit the same muscle group using different exercises and rep ranges, which can help target the different type of muscle fibres for even faster growth. Training on more days also means less time in the gym!
Sufficient rest is key to why you should use workout splits.
Push-Pull-Legs Split (5 or 6 Days / Week)
Monday: Push
Tuesday: Pull
Wednesday: Legs
Thursday: Rest
Friday: Push
Saturday: Pull
Sunday: Legs
As you progress even further, training the entire body over 3 days will allow you to do even more volume. This is done by grouping each workout day with push, pull and leg muscles. Push muscles are Chest, Triceps and Shoulders. Pull muscles are Back, Biceps, Rear Delts and Forearm. Leg muscles include Quads, Hamstrings, Glutes, Calves and Abductors.
As you hit more volume, it is important to manage recovery effectively too. Training the same muscle group 3 days in a row can create excessive fatigue. The advantage of this split is so that your push muscles can rest on pull and legs day, your pull muscles can rest on push and legs day, and your leg muscles can rest on pull and push days. This allows for maximum recovery to perform optimally.
Again, with more volume, you can target each muscle group with different exercises from different angles, together with multiple rep ranges.
Bro-Split (6 Days / Week)
Monday: Chest
Tuesday: Back
Wednesday: Shoulders
Thursday: Legs
Friday: Arms
Saturday: Legs
Sunday: Rest
Training 6 days a week can be too much volume due to diminishing recovery. The bro-split allocates each body part to each training day, allowing you to have high volume and intensity without worrying about insufficient recovery.
However, the bro-split is unlikely the most optimal way to train for beginners or intermediates as it only targets each muscle group 1x per week. In this meta-analysis, when volume is matched, training each muscle group 2x per week has shown to elicit greater muscle growth than training each muscle group 1x per week. In another meta-analysis, participants who trained at a higher frequency had a 38% faster than those who trained at a lower frequency. This is because of a few reasons:
1) Better protein synthesis response throughout the week
2) Higher quality sets. If you have done 4 chest exercises in a row, you would know that your performance on the last exercise would be sub-optimal, but if you were to split the 4 chest exercises into two days, you will be able to better complete the exercise.
From the studies and reasons above, you can see why the Bro-Split might not be the best option for you if you would like to maximize muscle gains. Any other split is better as it targets each muscle group at least 2x per week.
The bro-split which includes “Arms Day” may not be a good option for maximum muscle growth.
Recommendation
If you are a beginner, I would recommend the 3 day Full Body Split. In this split, you will be able to incorporate compound lifts which allow you to put on mass very quickly. Compound lifts also help to build up a good base of strength and endurance. But they also cause high fatigue as they target most muscle groups at a time. However, as you are only training 3x a week, you will be able to rest on the other 4 days of the week.
A 3 day Split is also better as seen in this study where participants who split their workout into 3 days compared to 1 day per week felt their workouts were easier and recovered faster although they performed the same volume of work. This is especially important for a beginner as beginners are more prone to muscle damage and fatigue, which will greatly affect subsequent workouts.
As you progress and gain more experience, you will inevitably need to increase volume to sufficiently challenge your muscles. This is the principle of progressive overload. You can increase the duration of your workout but there will be a limit by which you can increase the volume for each day. Working out for more than 1.5 hours may be too long for maximum growth. Thus, once you see your progress plateauing for a long time, you should consider training 4x a week using the Upper-Lower body split.
And if you gain even more experience and are able to commit time to training, you should consider increasing your training to 5x or 6x a week, with Push-Pull-Legs split for example. It may actually be more enjoyable and less painful as the workout duration is shorter.
However, it is important to balance between progress and fatigue. Although there is a linear relationship between volume and muscle gains, it is only true to a certain point before it starts to plateau and can even decline. As seen in my previous article, there are many studies that show how multiple sets are superior for hypertrophy. However, you may pass a certain point where you’ll start to get diminishing returns for training, and may eventually reach a stage of overtraining. Overtraining is when the additional increase in volume gives a negative effect as it affects the recuperative ability. Thus, it is important that mindlessly increasing the weights is neither time-efficient nor advisable.
In my previous article, I mentioned the upper limit of volume before overtraining occurs is 20 sets per muscle group per week.
Conclusion
So which split is the best for you? For beginners, it might be useful to start with a 3 day split, and slowly increasing your volume with a 4 or 5 day split as you gain more experience. But if you’re going to be constantly skipping workouts, you might want to adjust your training splits accordingly. Be realistic about how much time you can commit to training, then stick to your routine religiously.
We can see that some splits have advantages over others. Each split has its pros and cons. There is no one-size-fit-all routine. You should look at the different factors involved, and use the splits as a tool to organize your volume in the most practical and enjoyable manner.
Focus on consistency and you will see positive results!
If you need a personalized split routine, drop me a message!
