When it comes to training, everybody is different in terms of their schedule and how often they can get into the gym, and everybody differs on how their body responds to resistance training.
And a topic that often comes up is those saying “well if I only have x days to train, how am I supposed to fit everything I need to be doing into that time frame?"
So I’m going to give you three of the best training splits for three different training schedules.
Three Sessions Per Week
Most people falsely assume that if they’re only training 3 days a week, they aren’t going to make any considerable progress, and this just isn’t true, especially for beginners.
In fact, I always recommend those new to resistance training adopt this 3-day split, which is a push, pull, legs setup.
The reason why I recommend this split to beginners is because we’re placing a heavy emphasis on compound movements, the way a new lifter should be training.
So on day 1, we have our push day. This is the day we’d put our bench press, our shoulder press, and any other exercise where we’re pushing against force horizontally or vertically.
On day 2, we have our pull day. This is the day where we’re putting a lot of emphasis on the back of our body. This is our deadlifts, our pull-ups, our rows etc.
And on day 3 we have legs where we’re doing things like squats, lunges, Romanian deadlifts and calf raises.
Now because we’re going to be focusing on big compound moves primarily with this split, I recommend a day in between training sessions for recovery.
Four Sessions Per Week
So now we’re looking at a trainee who is maybe a little more intermediate and wants to move their training to four days a week.
For this instance, I recommend an Upper/Lower split. Here’s what this will look like:
On day 1 we have upper body with an emphasis on pushing. Just like with push, pull, legs, this will be your bench presses, shoulder presses and dips.
On day 2, we’re moving to lower body with a squat emphasis where we’re picking exercises that involve a great deal of hip and knee flexion. This is your squats, your split squats, your lunges and your step-ups.
On day 3 we’re back to the upper body with an emphasis on pulling. This will be our pull-ups and our rows. You could put deadlifts on this day if you wanted to, but typically I’d save that for our fourth day.
Our fourth training day is lower body again with an emphasis on the hamstrings and the glutes. Since we’ll be working more hinge-type movements, the deadlift fits really well into this day. We’ll also be performing other hinge exercises like the Romanian deadlift and good mornings.
Five Sessions Per Week
Now I said that I recommend push-pull-legs to beginners, but really a new trainee can start on any of these training splits.
The reason I recommend 3 days of training a week for new lifters is because it’s really easy to adopt and stay consistent with, and usually new trainees don’t need five days of lifting per week.
It’s really easy as a new lifter to adopt a five-day training schedule and say they'll be consistent, but much harder to follow-through on.
So this five day split will look fairly similar to push-pull-legs where on our first day we have our pushing exercises, on day 3 we have our pulling exercises, and day 5 we have our leg day.
These days should consistent primarily of heavy compound movements, because on the days in-between, we’ll have our higher volume accessory exercise days.
One of those will be our upper body accessory day. We’re going to push & pull on this day. We can do things like close-grip bench press, rear delt raises, lat pulldowns, bicep curls, tricep extensions and any other movement that’s working our upper body.
And the other day will be our lower body accessory day, where we’re going to perform exercises like single-leg RDLs, lateral step ups, box squats, hamstring curls etc.
So for all three of the training splits I just listed out, I want to give you a program for each one so you can get right into the gym.
Click HERE to download your free programs.
And if you want to watch our full-length video on this subject, click here.
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