Most Popular Training Splits to Build Muscle (Including the Best)

Most popular training splits to build muscle(including the best)Show more

How we choose to train will dictate the amount of success we have in the gym. If you just go to the gym and look for the first available workout station and start pumping out some reps, then off to the next one with no consistency from one workout to the next. This will result in limited to no progress.

This is why we need to choose a training split. It provides us with some structure and a plan we can build on and progress with.

The one that is best for you will depend on a few variables, including the amount of time you have available to train, your training experience, how stressful your life is and how physical of a job you have.

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All of these things combined with your goal will dictate which training split is best for you.

Full body training two or three times a week is an excellent place to start for most people. Now you might not think training two times a week could ever be best for muscle growth, but those with physical or high-stress jobs need more time to recover, and those with limited time are going to make much better progress training twice a week than not training at all.

For most, though, I would encourage training three times a week as it allows for a lot of recovery with at least a day in between each training session. Also providing greater training frequency and volume over the course of the week, which has been shown to increase the rate of muscle growth.

While in this video, we are focusing on building muscle as the primary goal, we quite often have multiple goals like increasing strength. If our focus is more toward strength, we might want to do a program like a 5x5, or if fat loss is a goal, we might want to do a full-body circuit.

As with everything, full-body workouts does have their drawbacks. One being as time goes on, you will need to increase the training volume to continue progressing. With full-body training, the workouts will have to get longer, and you won’t have the energy to give 100% by the end of the training session.

This brings us to a 4 day a week training split, with the most popular one being an upper-lower body split. You do your upper body on one day and lower on the next. Then take at least one rest day before repeating. This style of training and full-body workouts are the ways I've trained the most.

Splitting up your body into two parts and adding in a training day allows for a greater variety of exercises per workout. You can use these additional exercises to get more complete muscle development and to bring up any lagging body parts.

Because there are more muscle groups on the upper body than the lower, what I do to even off the volume of the workouts is I put my core exercises with my lower body.

Four-day training splits are great for intermediate lifters and provide a bit more recovery time between body parts. However, some might find the back-to-back training days challenging.

You could also split your body up into a push-pull training program with chest, shoulders, triceps and quads being worked on one day and back, biceps and hamstrings being performed on the next day. This style of training is better for a more advanced lifter.

I briefly want to talk about bro splits. This is when you train a different muscle group every day of the week. A lot of people say they don't work. Yet every successful bodybuilder in the world uses them. Which is a sure sign they do work. You hit one muscle group with a high volume of exercises, giving you a crazy pump, but for it to be effective, you have to be able to train past the pain of the pump to reach technical failure and most stop when it starts to hurt.

When I did a bro split, I had good success, except my shoulders couldn't handle the volume of work. They just got too beat up.

This is the biggest problem with a bro split. You just annihilate the one body part, and it's beaten up and sore the next day. I found much more success with a push, pull, legs split.

This is a natural progression from an upper, lower body program. If you only have five days a week to train and you’re ready for the increased volume. Blending the two training splits is an excellent option.

Push, pull, legs can be done on their own as a six-day-a-week program. Both the five-day and the six-day-a-week splits provide high weekly training volumes, allowing time for more isolation exercises to better target specific muscle groups, with the bonus of hitting each body part twice a week.