Every coach can name the splits. Far fewer can say what a push day actually contains, how long it runs, or what breaks when the client misses it. That gap shows up in the program document: a week labelled "upper/lower" that is really two chest sessions and a bit of leg work, or a push/pull/legs block where the third session never gets trained because it was always going to be the one that got dropped.
This is a description of each split as it is actually written and run — what goes in a session, how the week is laid out, how many days it needs, who it genuinely suits and what it costs. Choosing between them for a particular client is a separate job, covered in how to choose a workout split for a client.
What a split actually is
A split is how you divide the body's training across the days of a week. That is the whole definition. It is a scheduling decision, not a training philosophy, and the arguments about which one is best are mostly arguments about scheduling dressed up as physiology.
Two numbers sit underneath every split and matter more than its name:
- Frequency — how many times a week each muscle group gets trained. Most splits are built to land at two, which is the coaching convention for general clients.
- Weekly sets per muscle group — the total across the week. The split decides how those sets are distributed, not how many there are. How much volume clients actually need covers the ranges.
Once those two are fixed, the split is the arrangement. Different arrangements suit different calendars, different recovery and different personalities, and that is a real difference worth getting right — it is just not the difference most people think they are arguing about.
Every client misses days. The splits below differ enormously in what a missed day does to the week, and that is often the deciding factor in practice.
Full body
Every session trains the whole body. In practice that means one lower-body push, one lower-body pull or hinge, one upper push, one upper pull, and whatever is left over for arms, calves and core.
A session is typically five or six exercises and runs 45 to 70 minutes depending on how honest the rest periods are. Because the same patterns come round two or three times a week, the load and rep scheme usually vary between sessions rather than repeating — a heavy squat day and a lighter, higher-rep squat day, so the client is not grinding the same session three times.
A sample three-day week
| Day | Session |
|---|---|
| Monday | Squat, bench, row, Romanian deadlift, curls |
| Wednesday | Deadlift, overhead press, chin-up, leg press, triceps |
| Friday | Front squat, incline press, cable row, hip thrust, calves |
Rest days between sessions, so Monday/Wednesday/Friday or Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday. Two-day versions run the same shape with more work per session.
Who it suits. Beginners, who progress on low volume per session and need movement patterns repeated often to build technique. Anyone training two or three days a week, because there is no other way to hit each muscle group twice. Busy clients whose training days move around, since it does not matter which days of the week the sessions land on.
What it costs. There is almost no room for isolation work. Weak points get one set at the end or nothing, and a client who wants direct arm and shoulder volume will not get much of it. Sessions are long and dense, and the last two exercises are always done tired, which caps how much quality work you can put there.
Upper/lower
The body splits in two. Upper days cover chest, back, shoulders and arms; lower days cover quads, hamstrings, glutes and calves. Run four days a week, everything gets trained twice.
An upper session is usually two presses, two pulls and two or three arm and shoulder exercises. A lower session is a squat pattern, a hinge pattern, one or two single-leg or machine exercises, plus calves and core. Sessions run 50 to 75 minutes.
A sample four-day week
| Day | Session |
|---|---|
| Monday | Upper — bench, row, incline dumbbell press, lat pulldown, lateral raise, curls |
| Tuesday | Lower — squat, Romanian deadlift, leg press, leg curl, calves |
| Thursday | Upper — overhead press, chin-up, dumbbell bench, cable row, rear delt, triceps |
| Friday | Lower — deadlift, front squat, split squat, leg extension, calves |
The two upper days are not copies of each other. One leads with a horizontal press, the other with a vertical press, so the same muscles get worked through different patterns.
Who it suits. The default for most intermediate clients training four days a week. It gives each muscle group two sessions with enough room for accessory work, and it is symmetric enough that clients understand it without much explanation. It also handles a fifth day cleanly — add an extra upper or lower session depending on what the client needs.
What it costs. A missed day drops a whole half of the body to once a week, and the half that gets missed is nearly always lower. Upper sessions can also get long, because chest, back, shoulders and arms is a lot of muscle to cover in one sitting without either rushing or running to 90 minutes.
Push/pull/legs
Three session types. Push is chest, shoulders and triceps. Pull is back and biceps. Legs is everything below the waist. Run once through, it is a three-day week with each muscle group trained once. Run twice through, it is six days with everything trained twice — and that second version is what most people mean by PPL.
A push day is two or three pressing movements, then lateral raises and triceps. A pull day is a vertical pull, a horizontal pull, a rear delt movement and biceps. Leg day is a squat pattern, a hinge, an accessory or two and calves. Sessions are shorter than upper/lower days, usually 45 to 60 minutes, because each one covers less.
A sample six-day week
| Day | Session |
|---|---|
| Monday | Push — bench, overhead press, incline dumbbell, lateral raise, triceps |
| Tuesday | Pull — chin-up, barbell row, cable row, rear delt, curls |
| Wednesday | Legs — squat, Romanian deadlift, leg press, leg curl, calves |
| Thursday | Push — overhead press, dumbbell bench, cable fly, lateral raise, triceps |
| Friday | Pull — pulldown, chest-supported row, shrug, face pull, curls |
| Saturday | Legs — deadlift, front squat, split squat, leg extension, calves |
Who it suits. Clients with five or six genuine training days who enjoy being in the gym and whose sleep and food already support the workload. The grouping is intuitive — everything in a session works together, so the muscles you fatigue early are the ones you need later anyway. It also gives the most room for direct arm and shoulder work of any split here.
What it costs. Six days is a lot of days, and recovery rather than time becomes the limit. At three days, each muscle group is trained once a week, which is the weakest version of PPL and still the most commonly written. Leg day is the session clients skip, and skipping it in a six-day rotation means the whole sequence shifts, so the following week no longer matches the program.
The body-part split
One or two muscle groups per session, each trained once a week. Chest day, back day, shoulder day, leg day, arm day. This is the split bodybuilding ran on for decades and it is unfashionable now, which does not make it useless.
A session is four to six exercises for one or two muscle groups — a chest day might be flat bench, incline dumbbell press, dip, cable fly and a machine press. The work per muscle group in a single session is high, and the whole session is done in one sitting rather than spread across the week.
A sample five-day week
| Day | Session |
|---|---|
| Monday | Chest |
| Tuesday | Back |
| Wednesday | Shoulders and traps |
| Thursday | Legs |
| Friday | Arms |
Who it suits. Clients who like it. That is not a throwaway answer — a client who looks forward to arm day and turns up five times a week will get further than the same client on a theoretically better split they find boring and train three times. It also suits advanced lifters who can put in enough productive work for one muscle group in a session, people training around a fixed gym routine with friends, and anyone whose schedule genuinely runs five weekday sessions.
What it costs. Once-a-week frequency is the honest downside. Most of the coaching convention now favours training a muscle group twice a week for general clients, and the once-weekly version needs a lot of sets in one session to make up the difference — sets that are done increasingly fatigued. A missed chest day means no chest work for a fortnight. And it is a poor fit for beginners, who need repetition of the movement to learn it.
If a client wants this split and trains consistently on it, run it and manage the frequency issue by pairing muscle groups rather than isolating them. Adherence beats theoretical optimality, and it is not close.
The hybrids worth knowing
Two hybrids appear often enough in real programs to describe properly.
Upper/lower/full is a three-day week: an upper day, a lower day, and a full-body day that mops up whatever the first two under-served. It gets each muscle group close to twice a week on three sessions, which straight upper/lower cannot do. The full-body day is usually the lightest, built from patterns rather than a fixed list, which makes it the easiest session to move when the week goes sideways. It suits intermediate clients stuck at three days who have outgrown pure full body.
PPL with an arms day takes a five-day week — push, pull, legs, upper, arms — or splits a six-day rotation so the arm work lives in its own session rather than being tacked onto the end of push and pull days when the client is already cooked. It suits clients whose priority is genuinely arms and shoulders, and its cost is that the arm day is easy to treat as optional, at which point the arms have gone from partly trained to untrained.
Both hybrids exist because the pure splits do not divide neatly into every calendar. That is a legitimate reason to build one, and a poor reason to invent a new split for each client.
The splits side by side
| Split | Days | Frequency per muscle | Session length | Main cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Full body | 2–3 | 2–3× | 45–70 min | Almost no isolation work |
| Upper/lower | 4 | 2× | 50–75 min | A missed day halves one region's week |
| Upper/lower/full | 3 | ~2× | 50–70 min | The full-body day is hard to write well |
| PPL (once through) | 3 | 1× | 45–60 min | Lowest frequency of any three-day option |
| PPL (twice through) | 6 | 2× | 45–60 min | Six days of recovery demand |
| PPL plus arms | 5 | 1–2× | 40–60 min | Arm day is the first one dropped |
| Body part | 5 | 1× | 50–70 min | Once-weekly frequency, long gaps if missed |
Read the cost column first. Every split above works when it is trained; they differ mainly in what happens when it is not.
Sessions per week beats which split
The splits differ less than the table suggests once each muscle group is trained roughly twice a week and the weekly set count is in range. A client doing 12 sets for back across two upper days and a client doing 12 sets across a pull day and a full-body day end up in a similar place.
What actually changes the outcome sits elsewhere: whether the client turns up, whether the sets are taken close enough to failure to matter, and whether something goes up over the block. Progressive overload is the mechanism the split merely houses, and hypertrophy programming covers what goes inside the sessions once the shape of the week is settled.
The one thing the split does control is fatigue distribution. A six-day PPL accumulates fatigue faster than three days of full body at the same weekly volume, which means the harder splits need deloads scheduled rather than waited for.
Practically, this is also why splits are worth writing once and reusing. In Fitsly you build a program and deliver a per-client copy, so an upper/lower layout you have already written can go to a new client and be adjusted for them without touching anyone else's version — how programs work has the detail.
What to write in the program document
Whatever split you run, the document a client opens should name the session by what is in it, not by its position in a rotation. "Lower A" tells a client nothing. "Lower — squat focus" tells them what they are walking into and makes it obvious which session they missed.
Three habits that make any split hold up:
- Write each session so it stands alone. If session three does not depend on session two, a missed day is a missed day rather than a derailment.
- Put the priority work first. Whatever the client most needs to progress goes at the start of the session, while they are fresh, regardless of what the split's convention says.
- Name a swap for anything equipment-dependent. A session that hinges on one busy rack becomes a skipped session at 6pm.
