How to plan a workout split

Training three days a week

If you’re training three days a week you might still want to stick to full body sessions, as it’s more beneficial to hit muscle groups more than once a week. But if you have a specific goal, for example getting stronger legs, you might work with a split that prioritises leg training. That could look like one leg day and two full body days, just to ensure your lower body is getting extra volume.

Training four days a week

This is a perfect amount of training for an upper/lower split. You might structure your week as so:

Upper body push: chest, shoulders and triceps

Lower body: squat focused leg day, including quad focused isolation work

Upper body pull: back and biceps

Lower body: hinge focused leg day, including deadlifts, hip thrusts and hamstring and glute isolation work

Training five days a week

If you’re training five days a week, you might want to consider what your goals are. If you really want to work on your chest, structure your workout as above but use your extra day to do extra pushing movements. Alternatively, you might want the fifth day to focus on the things you don’t think you did so well this week: felt weak when doing shoulder presses? Throw those in. Felt your glutes weren’t firing enough in your hip thrusts? Practice those.

Training six days a week

If you’re ready to smash six days of training, try three days worth of upper and three days worth of lower body. But remember to pay attention to how well you’re recovering as you’ll only be giving your muscles one day between workouts.

What’s the point in leg day? A trainer explains why you should split your workouts