CHOOSING A TRAINING SPLIT

When choosing your training split you should always consider how many days a week you’re willing to go. Whether it’s 4,5,6 – there’s a training split that will work for you. Training each muscle group at least twice a week is also very important. By doing that you don’t waste days that your muscle is already recovered on and grow faster. So, splits like PPL (push pull legs), upper/lower, full body 2-3x a week, or custom variations of them work best.

There is another big, probably the biggest, consideration for the split you will run. WEEKLY VOLUME FOR EACH MUSCLE. There is no specific amount of volume you NEED to reach, but it’s a good idea to start off with the lowest effective amount possible. That way you can increase volume to continue progressing if increasing reps and weight no longer works. A good amount of sets to shoot for weekly for each muscle group is about 6-8 at the start of a program. Then increasing the amount of sets if progress slows down too much or if you know you will recover from them on time for the next session. Sometimes you will have to experiment to find what works best for you – training isn’t an exact science and is different from person to person.

One important thing for muscle growth is hitting enough volume that isn’t junk volume. Junk volume is sets done at a low intensity OR once your muscle is so toast that all more work does is impair recovery. This is the reason why training the same muscle twice a week will, for natural lifters especially, help build muscle faster. Junk volume is the reason you can’t do all of your weekly volume in one day . The quality of each set is much higher if you split 6 sets of the same exercise over 2 separate training sessions. For example, split those 6 sets into 2 sessions in which you do 3 sets each.  You will be able to lift heavier for the same amount of reps in each set, which will lead to more growth. Also natural lifters only have heightened muscle protein synthesis for ~48 hours, enhanced lifters will continue recovering and adapting from a session for longer and they will also recover faster. Another reason to train a muscle, if it’s recovered, every 2-3 days or so. Muscles still recover for longer than that initial muscle protein synthesis spike, just not as fast. This is why legs can take a longer time to recover and still grow.

Each muscle group recovers at a different rate and that will affect what split you choose and how you customize it. Arms and delts tend to recover the fastest, with chest and back being second. Legs tend to take a lot longer to recover, and the lower back can take up an entire week to recover after deadlifts. Lower back fatigue is often mixed up with CNS fatigue, which is often what people blame for crappy lifts or feeling tired on leg day. Actual CNS fatigue is much more complicated than muscular fatigue (will go in depth on recovery later). Usually lifting heavy will not be the main cause of really high fatigue unless you’re lifting loads far exceeding your own bodyweight.

You must learn how to brace if you want to do any lower body compound lift safely and effectively. Alex Bromley is a very good resource for bracing, a link to his channel will be on the resources page. When you brace properly you limit spinal loading and flexion as much as possible. By doing so you reduce risk of injury and increase force output throughout the body. This is because the body produces a lot more force when it is stable.

Lower back fatigue is a key thing to account for when making a program. It’s the reason heavy deadlifts are usually only done once a week. If you want to stay injury free, you will have to train your lower back while also not overtraining it. Let it rest enough and do not train it to failure in any way. You should only train it once you’ve learned how to brace. Various deadlift variations are one of the best ways to train it.

Sometimes you will have to modify a training split to make it suit your recovery needs. Other times you will need to change it so it suits your priority muscle group. In other words, a specialization program.

An arm focused specialization program i found a couple years ago is based on a UPPER-LOWER split. Geoffrey Verity Schofield is the person I first saw it from (link to his youtube channel will be on the resources page). Essentially you split shoulders and arms from the rest of the upper day and dedicate an entire workout to them. There are two ways to run this program. If you want to run it without rest days, it’s best to run it as LOWER-UPPER-ARMS to make sure the arm day doesn’t interfere with the upper day. Compound movements for the upper body use arms, however not so much that it would affect an arm day. The inverse isn’t true, as training arms the day before an upper body day will affect your upper body lifts negatively. If you do want rest days, run it as UPPER-LOWER-ARMS-REST and then repeat the mini-cycle. This way your arms are for sure getting enough rest and not affecting the upper body day.

SPLIT TEMPLATES/EXAMPLES

LOWER-UPPER-ARMS-LOWER-UPPER-ARMS-REST

UPPER-LOWER-ARMS-REST-UPPER-LOWER-ARMS-REST

PUSH-PULL-LEGS-PUSH-PULL-LEGS-REST

FULL BODY-REST-FULL BODY-REST-FULL BODY-REST-REST

UPPER-LOWER-REST-PUSH-PULL-LEGS-REST

There will be a link to coach Bald Omni-Man on the resources page. His channel has a lot of free training templates as well as further resources to design your own program.

SPLIT CUSTOMIZATION

Every training split you run you will end up customizing eventually. I have never talked to anyone who runs a basic template split and has made gains for a long time in a row. They all customize their training split to suit their own frequency and recovery needs.

To customize a split to suit your training or schedule needs you may remove or add rest days. It is usually a good idea to rest 1-3 days a week to let your body and mind recover. If you don’t rest enough – joint health, fatigue, muscular recovery and progression will be impaired. You can also add in rest days if your schedule doesn’t allow you to train on those days, then move the training session to a free day.

A non-weekly indefinite training split is also an option if you don’t care about training on the same day each week. For example an 8 or 9 day split. Running a non-weekly split allows you more freedom to rest when you need to and to push a training day one day head if you feel you haven’t recovered. An example of such a split would be UPPER-LOWER-REST which you would repeat forever. Pushing the entire cycle a day forward if you need to has no consequences to your training in this type of training split.

You may also take certain exercises/muscle groups out of a certain training day and put it onto another. For example, taking arms out of PUSH/PULL and putting them onto LEGS. Usually you will do that to prioritize arm growth to avoid the fatigue of chest and back exercises. With that as the goal, it’s a good idea to train your arms BEFORE you train your legs on that day to maximize arm growth. If you run a UPPER/LOWER split, you may also decide, that you cannot do deadlifts on the same day as squats. That way on one of your lower days you first train hamstrings and glutes with quads as a secondary muscle group. The other day quads come first with hamstrings and glutes second.

You can customize your training split how you see fit, but it’s best not to make big changes too often. Making big changes to your program too often will lead to far less gains. Doing that is usually called program hopping. Small changes over time, however, are necessary. You will adapt to whatever program you run and certain exercises may stop producing results. In that case, swapping out that exercise will lead to more results than leaving it in. An exercise will often produce less results and more fatigue as your body adapts to it. You will learn intuitively what to change and what to keep in as you train and become more advanced.

Another thing, when training on any split, it’s a good idea to have 2 different versions of the same training day to avoid joint overuse. For example, an A and a B variant of the upper day on an upper lower split, and a C and D for the lower. You would train in a A-C-REST-B-D-REST-REST and then repeat. A and B would train the same muscle groups in the same movement pattern, just with different exercises for it. For example, one day you do bench press, the other you do incline bench press. That way you avoid overuse and don’t stop progressing too fast on each movement.