by Matt Perryman

The common wisdom these days in the “orthodoxy” is that the so-called muscle-group or body-part splits used by bodybuilders – and most everyone else – aren’t so great.
This stems from some potentially serious problems with training organization – namely movement issues and physiological concerns.
What are you actually lifting for?

First things first: what are you actually lifting weights for? It may seem like an obvious thing, but you want to tailor your workouts for your specific goal. The thing is, if you look around in your gym, how many people are actually doing this?
Think about how many people are in the gym doing chest, back, legs, shoulders, and arms. Pretty much everybody, if your gym is like most every commercial gym. If you’re a bodybuilder or otherwise training to develop muscles, you get a (little) pass for doing this. However, plenty of people that don’t have that goal are doing muscle-group splits. And when I say plenty, I mean everybody. This isn’t just something I’ve noticed. If you set foot in a commercial gym, everybody is doing some version of the part-split.
The Pros and Cons

Earlier I said that bodybuilders get something of a pass for doing part splits, in the sense that at least it’s an attempt at goal-based or specific training. That’s fine, and it’s not actually a bad premise. However, there’s two big issues we have to look at with regards to the splits.
First is an issue of movement. Strength coaches will tend to create programs based around getting certain exercises stronger while ensuring that your body is moving properly. In that sense, the training schedule will be designed around those movements.
Bodybuilding doesn’t do that; bodybuilding looks at the body as individual parts to be trained independently. Now, while I think there is some rationale to having specific workouts for certain muscle groups, I also think that people take it way too far, without considering the degree of overlap in various exercises. Most people, bodybuilders included, don’t need an “arm” day. A light day for the upper body where you put some emphasis on the arms, sure I can buy that. But not a day devoted to curls and tricep extensions. If you’re at a stage where you can benefit from an arm day, then you’re already a big dude.
That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Realistically, big compound lifts are going to create the vast majority of your gains. Do you honestly think a guy that brings his bench from 135 up to 405 is going to have small triceps? Or that a guy taking his squat from 200 to 500 is going to have small legs? Of course not. Muscle-specific exercises should be brought in after the fact as added stimulus for any parts that might be lagging – or parts that you’re trying to specialize.
Most body-part splits are thrown together haphazardly. They don’t account for overlapping exercises, or exercises that are redundant (10 kinds of curls? Really?). They also don’t account for unequal development across the body. How many shoulder injuries are a result of too much benching and not enough upper-back training? How many lower-back problems are a result of imbalanced or weak hips? And so it goes.
The second problem is physiological. As I’ve pointed out in my article on muscle growth, muscle-mass gains tend to be optimal with roughly two workouts per week. Most of the body-part splits are built on the premise of hitting the muscle hard, then letting it recover for a week. This is not ideal.
Here’s the deceptive bit: even though you are still recovering, muscle protein synthesis and all the related growth-chemistry is getting back to normal about 2-3 days after the muscles are trained. What you’re recovering from is unrelated tissue trauma and neurological stress; so just when you should ideally be training that muscle group again, you’re still sitting around recovering from other stuff. As an aside, being sore is not an indicator of growth stimulus, nor does it mean that the muscle is getting larger.
Now, the issue is a bit more complex than this, and the scenario can change depending on how big/strong you are and what you’ve recently been doing. Let it suffice to say that, on average, each muscle group should be getting some kind of stimulus twice a week. Whether this means training with a regular routine, or using some kind of periodization to alternate between heavy and lighter training, I don’t think it terribly matters. But to see the best effects on muscle size gains, you need to train those muscles more often than once a week.
Of course a really heavy squat workout is going to blast you; likewise, going in and doing 10 kinds of curls is going to wreck your arm flexors. Here’s the novel thing: light workouts still count as stimulus. You don’t have to go in and wreck a muscle for it to be trained. Nothing says you can’t go in and have an easy day for a given muscle group. Growth is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon.
The biggest issues here can be summed up as a problem of organization. Frankly there’s just little thought put in to workout design, or the thought that is put in is based on dubious premises (such as the idea that a muscle needs a week to repair and recover). The good news, if you’re the type that just has to have a bodybuilder split, is that there are solutions.
Making it work

Honestly I think most people, even bodybuilders, would do best to get out of the mindset of having to train “parts” in discrete workouts. Some of the greatest successes I’ve seen personally have come from two-way upper/lower splits (something like the Westside powerlifting workouts) or even from the old 5×5 routine, which uses effectively full-body workouts.
I think you can be a little more specific to a bodybuilder, though, so I want to look at some options that can give you some options if that’s up your alley. The idea is to train muscle groups in the context of a movement-based routine. If you look at things from a movement standpoint, there’s three basic things to worry about: pressing (bench press, overhead press), pulling (barbell rows, chinups), and squatting (squats, deadlifts). Yes, there are other movements, but those are the big ones to consider.
However, what’s stopping you from training the other muscles along with those? For example, if you have a heavy squat day, you might not need any more leg work. And what says you can’t do a few sets of lunges, leg press, or even the dreaded leg extension as a lighter workout later in the week? It’s not functional, you scream? Here’s the thing: functionality, or lack thereof, is contingent on the goal. For a bodybuilder, tension-time overload on a specific muscle is the definition of functional – it stimulates muscle-mass gains. There’s nothing wrong with using specific, targeted exercises as long as it’s within the framework of a well-designed workout.
What’s left after the big lifts? Single-leg work is one, things like lunges, step-ups, and split squats. Targeting the upper-back, specifically scapular retraction and depression, is another – rowing is supposed to do this, but it’s not always sufficient. Those are mainly injury-prevention concerns, though you won’t be worse off for developing those particular areas.
As far as body-parts, we’re basically looking at the left-overs. Think in terms of what wasn’t trained (optimally) by your big lifts. If you overhead pressed as your main lift, then the chest will probably need more stimulus than the shoulders. If you deadlifted, your quads will probably need more stimulus than your hamstrings. The extremities, like the calves, shoulders, upper arms and forearms will almost always be on this list for vanity if nothing else.
So we’ve got to find a way to manage the training for these parts alongside our big lifts. This is easier than it sounds, too. The trap people fall into is thinking you can’t vary the stress across workouts, like you have to go in and spend hours training all these things. When you start to look at things in terms of heavier and lighter sessions, you’ll find that it’s not the case. Yeah you might spend 20-30 minutes on your big lifts (if you’re slow), but the little detail stuff can be done in 10 minutes if you do it right. This is actually the one place I do like to use alternating sets or super-sets, as it lets you knock out the little stuff that much faster.
So what we’re left with is finding ways to match up the organization of a movement-based workout with the specificity of a muscle-group split. We’ve got two real options there: train everything often, but vary the difficulty; or train everything less frequently, but with harder sessions. The former would boil down to a full-body workout, while the latter would be accomplished with various split routines.
The theme you’re going to notice here is that most of these options are very flexible and dependent on your choices, so I can’t cover every single permutation. You’ll actually have to think for yourself and put something together.
Option A – Rotating Full-Body Schedule

Your big three workouts would be a push, a pull, and a squat, so each would get one “hard” workout each week. The detail work would vary depending on what you’ve trained.
Here the main lift will be your big exercise for the day, preferably trained heavy (either 5-6 sets of low reps, or 2-3 harder but higher-rep sets). Secondary work is “medium” training, just a few sets of 6-10 reps, fairly hard but not as difficult as the big lift; this can be a barbell or dumbbell exercise, and it can be either compounds or isolation, depending on your preference. Accessory work is “light” training, with maybe 2-3 light sets to get some blood moving, and preferably with a compound exercise (even if it’s a machine) to work all the related parts.
Monday – Legs
Main Lift: Squat
Secondary Work: Chest, Shoulders, Triceps
Accessory Work: Pulling
Wednesday – Push
Main Lift: Bench Press
Secondary Work: Upper Back, Biceps
Accessory Work: Calves, Thighs
Friday – Pull
Main Lift: Barbell Row
Secondary Work: Thighs, Calves
Accessory Work: Pushing
Option B – Upper Body/Lower Body Split

The upper body/lower body split is the same as above, only it splits the week up. This might be a little better for you as the parts only get two workouts each week instead of three. However it makes up for that by giving you a total of four “hard” workouts in that same time frame, so you may find this is actually harder on you.
Monday – Upper Body (Chest emphasis)
Main Lift: Bench Press
Secondary Work: Shoulders, Triceps
Accessory Work: Upper Back
Tuesday – Lower Body (Leg emphasis)
Main Lift: Squat
Secondary Work: Quads, Hamstrings, Calves
Accessory Work: Biceps
Thursday – Upper Body (Shoulder/Tricep emphasis)
Main Lift: Overhead Press
Secondary Work: Triceps
Accessory Work: Upper Back, Chest
Friday – Lower Body (Back emphasis)
Main Lift: Barbell Row
Secondary Work: Chinups, Biceps
Accessory Work: Quads, Hamstrings, Calves
Obviously there’s plenty of room to play around with this particular arrangement, depending on what you want to focus on and what you prefer to do. Remember, these are just examples.
Option C – Three-way Push/Pull/Legs Split

Another popular and fairly effective method is to take the push/pull/legs workouts and train them in a rotating fashion.
If you have four workout days each week, say M-T-Th-F, or Sun-M-W-F, then you can just work through those three workouts in that order. The first week you’d get Push-Pull-Legs-Push, second week would be Pull-Legs-Push-Pull, and so on down the line. If you do the math, the frequency averages out to be just a little less than twice in any given seven-day interval.
The thing to remember is that your recovery is more determined by how many workout sessions you have, not what muscles were trained. So you do need to watch yourself for any signs of fatigue if you choose to do something like this. If you find you can’t tolerate it, then you can either take regular unloading weeks, or you can switch to three days.
I will say that I’m not a huge fan of just doing push/pull/legs on a three day schedule, unless you’re doing it as a modified full-body routine like the first example. Otherwise you start to run into some of the same movement and stimulation issues as the other splits.
Option D – Customized Splits

This is getting into tricky territory and I’m almost hesitant to suggest it, but you can come up with even more exotic arrangements. Problem is, if you’re not careful, this takes you right back to square one, in Bro-split territory. You have to make sure that you’re not just arbitrarily throwing something together.
In this instance, you’d end up spending as much as 5-6 workouts a week in the gym – which isn’t really ideal for most people; if not from a recovery standpoint, then definitely from a time-management angle.
My advice is that you don’t want to do this for very long at a time before taking a break. Maybe a short 2-4 week block, then take a rest and switch to something more balanced. The idea is get in and get out; these arrangements really aren’t ideal for long-term training.
The first option that comes to mind is a five-day schedule, M-T-Th-F-Sat. The first two days are heavy strength/power training split across upper and lower body sessions. The latter three days are more typical muscle-group training split into push/pull/legs workouts. I’ve seen this routine attributed to Layne Norton over on bodybuilding.com; I’m not sure if it’s actually his or not. If anybody reading this knows different, let me know.
At any rate, this is obviously going to be a kick to the gut, as far as recovery is concerned. You’ll need to be eating a lot of food, and ideally you’ll have built up to this kind of volume beforehand. That’s not something you just want to jump into head-first.
Again I’m not going to go through every possible combination and permutation; you should get the idea. You can create all kinds of splits and schedules, but the trick is to stick to the basics while you’re doing it.
Ultimately the problems with various workouts will boil down to a lack of foresight and, in many ways, to arguing over semantics. Muscle-group splits do have a place, and they can be designed intelligently. I still don’t think that most people should be doing them, and definitely not to the degree seen in virtually every gym on the planet, but if you’re going to do them you might as well do them right.