Choosing individual exercises is the easy part. The harder question — and the one that actually determines whether your training adds up to progress — is how you organise those exercises across a week. This guide walks through the main ways to structure a training split, and how to choose between them based on your schedule and recovery capacity, rather than whichever one is trending.

The Three Common Split Structures

Push/pull/legs organises training by movement pattern — pressing exercises (chest, shoulders and triceps) on one day, pulling exercises (back and biceps) on another, with legs (quads, hamstrings, glutes and calves) trained on their own separate day. The push/pull component is efficient, avoids awkward muscle-group overlap and can also work independently when training fewer days per week. Our complete push-pull upper body workout is a fully worked example of this structure.

Push/pull/legs also works well as a straightforward three-day split — one push session, one pull session and one leg session each week. For those training more frequently, the same structure can be scaled by simply repeating the rotation. A popular approach is three days on followed by one day of rest, then repeating the cycle: push, pull, legs, rest; push, pull, legs.

Upper/lower splits the body by region rather than movement pattern — one day trains everything above the waist, the next trains everything below. This works well for people training three to four times a week who want more even weekly volume across the whole body without the complexity of a push/pull/legs rotation.

Full body trains most major muscle groups in every session. It suits lower weekly frequency (two to three sessions) particularly well, since each muscle group gets hit more often per week even with fewer total sessions.

None of these is objectively “best” — the right one depends on how often you can realistically train, which is worth being honest about before picking a structure.

Match the Split to How Often You Actually Train

This is the single most important decision, and it comes before choosing exercises. How many days a week should you work out? covers how to think about this honestly — training four days on paper doesn’t help if you consistently only manage two in practice.

As a rough guide:

• Two days/week — full body suits this best, since it’s the only structure that hits everything with so few sessions.
• Three to four days/week — push/pull or upper/lower both work well; push/pull tends to suit people who enjoy training by movement pattern, upper/lower suits people who prefer clearer regional focus.
• Five or more days/week — push/pull/legs (an extension of the push/pull structure with a dedicated leg day) becomes viable, allowing genuinely higher volume per muscle group across the week.

Get the Volume Right Within Whatever Split You Choose

Once you’ve picked a structure, the next question is how much you’re doing within it. Volume vs intensity in hypertrophy training explains the trade-off between doing more sets and pushing each set harder, and how many sets do you need to build muscle? gives you a concrete weekly target per muscle group to check your split against — a common beginner mistake is choosing a good split structure, then filling it with too little (or too much) actual volume.

Exercise order within each session still matters regardless of split — the importance of exercise order explains why bigger compound lifts belong earlier in a session than isolation work, whichever structure you’re following.

Build in Progression, Not Just Repetition

A split is just a container — what you put into it week after week is what actually drives results. Our guide to progressive overload covers how to make sure each week asks slightly more of you than the last, regardless of which structure you’re training within.

Recovery Determines Whether the Split Works

The more frequently your split has you training a given muscle group, the more recovery capacity it demands. Sleep is where most of that recovery actually happens, and our complete guide to workout recovery covers the nutrition and hydration side too. If you’ve chosen a split that’s more frequent than your recovery can support, you’ll generally see it in stalled progress before you see it anywhere else.

Choosing and Sticking With One

Before committing to a structure, it’s worth setting a clear goal first — the split that suits building maximum size isn’t necessarily the one that suits general fitness or limited weekly time. And once you’ve chosen one, why consistency is the secret to muscle growth applies here more than almost anywhere else — switching structures every few weeks in search of the “optimal” split is a far more common mistake than picking a merely-good one and sticking with it.

If you’re looking for a concrete starting point, our push-pull upper body workout is a fully built-out example of the push/pull structure described above — a practical way to see one of these approaches in action rather than just in theory.