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All right, let’s talk about training splits, options, why someone would choose a certain training split and the simple possibilities that you have within training splits as well as the logic behind those options.
To start off, a training split is simply what days you do certain categories of exercises on. And of course, how many days per week you lift is a huge factor within what you are going to do, or what you need to get done in the way of training on the days allotted to training.
So, let’s go ahead and break this down. But before that, I am talking about strictly lifts. We are not adding cardio or conditioning to the mix here. That’s a whole other ball game. For now, we stick to strength or hypertrophy based splits.
With training splits we have elements to consider:
How many days per week you can or want to train
Periodization you can use
Goals of training - body building and/or strength
Daily and weekly volume
I just want you to remember those as I cover these examples. I won’t be diving into them, but rather covering the training splits themselves.
A pretty traditional training split is
4 or 5 days per week with upper body focus 2 days per week and lower body 2 days per week, plus a fifth day of full body.
Within that, you’d likely have a knee dominant lower body day, hip dominant lower body day, and an overhead or vertical press pull day, and horizontal press pull day for upper body.
The upper body days are lower intensity by nature. Generally speaking our body demands less energy to work upper body due to smaller muscles and the muscles being closer to the heart.
Lower body days tend to be higher intensity by nature due to the large muscle groups and higher demand for total energy.
Thus, this split works well for a lot of people simply because it hits the whole body on a weekly basis, allows for adequate rest between muscle groups, and has variation in intensity built in.
This split, however, is not the only split you can choose from.
Body part specific training is another split option
I am sure you’re familiar with chest and back, bis and tris, quads and calves, glute/ham. This style of training split can be trained six days per week, hitting muscle groups twice per week instead of just once.
An example:
Chest/backQuads/calvesBis/trisRestChest/backBis/trisGlute/ham
You could of course just use it in four day/week spread as well and hit everything once. Also note that you can split up the same volume of 4 days per week over 6 days per week. So more days doesn’t always = more volume necessarily.
This muscle group specific training split works really well with protagonist and antagonist training methods. Meaning you train chest and back, bis and tris. I separated quads and posterior chain in my example, but you could do quads and hamstrings on the same day as antagonist/protagonist twice per week, or just once per week and then dedicate another day to glutes.
I will note, this traditionally body-building centric training split is not the most efficient. Thus, I literally NEVER use it with my programming. But did use it early in my training years to put on mass. And I can attest to that season being the only time in my life that my biceps actually grew. Go figure. Body building works.
So we covered upper/lower split (consisting of more large, compound efficient movements), and body part, antagonist/protagonist split. Likely over more days per week.
Next up is a classic push-pull split
You might notice that there could be carryover between these training splits. ABSOLUTELY.
