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Workout Splits

First Published January 2026 by Emmett Borg

A "split" refers to how you divide your training sessions throughout the week.

How many days you go each week and which muscles you work each time make up the split.

What are we even trying to balance here? Well, for starters you want to make sure you are working out every muscle group for overall development. Secondly you want to maximize your muscle coverage with the time you have available. And finally you want organize it in a way that avoids muscle overlap.

Muscle Groups

I know anatomy class was a long time, but it's important to be on the same page of what cards we are working with.

For bodybuilding your muscles are generally grouped as follows:

Up for debate is lumping "legs" as a single muscle group. While most male muscle enthusiasts do this, women tend to separate the leg muscles into separate days as it pertains to their goals (and by this I mean, a huge ass) in order to isolate the leg muscles.

How many days a week to workout

The first question I want you to answer for yourself is how many days do you want to go to the gym each week?

It's a misconception that more days is better. Since this is my blog with my opinions, I will just bluntly say that I think anything more than 5 days is too much for most people. And anything less than 3 is too little. But why do I think this?

Too few: I write at length about pushing your muscles to failure in another post. Doing this requires significant time to warm up to protect yourself from injury. It also requires significant energy physically to go to failure each exercise. For this reason a split with less than 3 days, which hits all muscle groups, would take way too long in the gym and is much too taxing on your body for one day. It's the muscle equivalent of running a marathon, which shouldn't be done weekly.

Too many: On the other extreme, if you are doing bodybuilding style workouts more than 5 times a week you are either a pro (and not reading this post) or have way too much time on your hands. There are just simply not that many distinct muscle groups. As stated above, there are really 7 or 8 groups, depending how specific you get. Additionally the small muscle groups (such as Biceps, Triceps, Calves) would never require it's own day. If you are going to failure on any of these, you cannot spend more than 30 minutes. And hence they can always be lumped in with another group. If you really enjoy 6 or 7 days a week at the gym, I would recommend using those days for non-muscle-buidling goals, such as flexibility (stretching/yoga) or cardio.

Answer: 3 - 5 days a week

Minimize Overlap: The Wedding Seating Problem

You know you can't put cousin Jimmy right next to uncle Tommy at the dinner table, right? Well that concept happens as well with workout splits.

If you read my How Muscles Grow post, you'll recall that pushing to failure is the name of the game. The problem lies in the fact that even when you want to work one muscle, others are getting incorporated, and are getting fatigued.

A solid example is the bench press. Often thought of as a Chest exercise, which will likely make its way in some way into your split on the Chest day. However the bench press movement doesn't only use your chest muscles, it also incorporates your front delt (shoulder) and triceps. Therefore, how effectively you can go to failure and progressively improve on the bench press may be limited by how fatigued those other muscles are. If you did an Arm day yesterday, and today is Chest day, your triceps are significantly fatigured and will hold you back. Hence try to avoid scheduling Arms/Shoulders too close to your Chest day.

My Personal Favourite Split and Why

In my years of mediocre amateur bodybuilding I have tried any and every split. When I started I was drinking the PPL koolaid, which was great for me at the time. But over the years I have always come back to the following split popularized by Dorian Yates.

Why do I think this is the number one split for me? Well there are a few reasons.

  1. More than 4 days a week is difficult to maintain given other life commitments
  2. Squeezing all muscles groups into 3 days (or less) tends to require longer workouts
  3. Arms, while important, are boring as a standalone day
  4. Legs and Back are both the hardest days, and benefit from getting standalone treatment