Which programme is best?
Push Pull Legs? Upper Lower? Body Part Split? Full Body? The choices are endless and often time this can lead to analysis paralysis, or just sticking with what you know, what your comfortable with.
We aim to shed some light on what might be the best course of action for your goals whether it is strength, hypertrophy or functional fitness.
What you'll get below ⬇️
Broken down and Easy to understand evidence based information to help you make an informed choice.
Practical real life recommendations of how to incorporate any training programme around your life.
The reasoning behind why each might suit you.
Focusing on certain muscle groups to grow or movements you want to get stronger at.
What you need to consider 🤔
If you’ve spent any time in the the gym, spent hours watching youtube or tiktok videos you will have seen influencers or personal trainers claiming one over the other. And you have probably gotten yourself questioning who is correct?
Adhere to your plan!
Sticking to a plan is the only way to make real progress, programme hoping doesn’t work and neither does the old school “Shock the muscle” as this doesn’t allow for measurable progressive overload. Below are the two main factors you need to take into consideration
Time frame / Lifestyle - Can you stick to your time commitment, be realistic. Don’t train 2 days one week and 5 the next week. However life does sometimes get in the way and you must be flexible. Life doesn’t stop for the gym. But train and remain 80% consistent.
Enjoyability - If you don’t enjoy your training, you wont try as hard. It’s that simple. Any training programme requires effort to work. You also need to stick to it to allow the adaptations of training to really start to show.
The truth is, each have their own merits (which we will detail below) and will suit people differently and the bottom line is, the programme is only as good as your effort. You could have the world’s best written and planned out programme but with poor effort and intensity you will get sub optimal results, likewise someone could have a cookie cutter generic programme but puts their best effort in and get brilliant results.
Frequency, personal circumstance and lifestyle matters and should be taken into consideration. Are you a parent or have a time demanding job? Say you can only make the gym 2-3 days per week? Then I would say the Body part split is ruled out as this you wouldn’t have enough sessions in the week to hit your whole body, it would be every two weeks which just wouldn’t be enough stimulus. Not everyone is a full time athlete or has the luxury to train as often and as long as they want, so everyone’s optimal “Split” will be different.
What the Evidence has to say? 🤓
This meta analysis by (Schoenfeld et al., 2016) [1] compared 10 studies that looked at the effects of training a muscle group 1-3 days per week where weekly volume was the same, and concluded that the evidence points to training a muscle twice per week to be more beneficial for hypertrophy.
The general scientific evidence points towards, training each muscle 2 days per week for the best results. Or every 3-4 days. To put this simply, say you do 10 sets of bicep work on a monday, and by thursday you are recovered, your biceps feel good and feel strong enough to do another session, why wait until the following monday to train them again if bicep growth is a goal of yours?
Also try doing 20 sets of bicep work in a single session, if you are training hard enough (1-3 reps from failure on each set) they will get much weaker after generally 10-12 sets for most people. Meaning the work after that amount of volume isn’t as productive and is often referred to as junk volume. A better approach for most would be to do 20 sets per week but split over 2 training session of 10 each session, often this will lead to higher quality volume.
Essentially the perfect programme for you is one that allows you to train each muscle group or strength specific movement 2 times per week with adequate recovery between sessions and this could be ANYTHING you decide.
The Merits of each programme ✍️
The Programmes, mentioned at the start are all popular for a reason. All of these splits have been used with great success for many people since, well a long long long long time. Each coach or training programme having a different spin on each.
PPL (Push Pull Legs)
Which doesn’t need to be done in that order, it could be Legs, Pull, Push. Provided this is done 6 days per week your hitting every muscle twice per week with adequate recovery between sessions per muscle group. Just make sure your able to recover from six sessions a week.
This can also allow one push day dedicated to horizontal pressing and the other for vertical (Likewise for Pull) and one lower day focusing on squatting and the other your posterior chain.
Or have one push day strength focused and the other hypertrophy focused and repeat for Pull and Legs.
Upper / Lower
This Programme can work well for 4 or 6 days per week training sessions. Just watch the accumulating fatigue training lower hard three times per week, maybe have one as a lighter day. Again training each muscle group 2-3 times per week.
You can priorities similar to PPL, where each upper day starts with a different lift. Meaning you train that movement fresh with less fatigue and can push that lift or muscle group harder. For Example: Upper 1 - Bench Prioritization / Upper 2 - Pulling Prioritization / Upper 3 - Overhead Press Prioritization.
Full Body
You can use full body training for any amount of training days you have available.
You should plan your volume per session adequately to allow for recovery between sessions, so 15 sets of lower work, 3 days in a row will beat you up. Example ( Day 1 - Squats x 4 sets / Day 2 - Lunge x 4 sets / Day 3 - RDL x 4 sets / Day 4 - Leg Press x 3 Sets)
Same amount of training days equated, full body allows more practice in certain movements. So Ideal for skill acquisition.
Body Part Split
This idea here is to train your muscle so hard it takes a week to recover from
Many very successful bodybuilders, despite the evidence stating twice per week being optimal, swear by it.
Allows you to focus on each muscle fully per session
Definitely recovered between sessions, it’s been a full week!
Combine them? Examples:
You can combine the above programmes to make your own depending on your schedule and what works for you! Bellow are some examples of this based on how many training days you have available but you can mix and match to find what suits your lifestyle the best!
3 Days - Upper / Lower / Full Body
4 Days - Full Body / Push / Pull / Lower
5 Days - Upper / Lower / Push / Pull / Lower
6 Days - Upper / Lower / Push / Pull / Lower / Arms**
(** = Using the 6th day to add in a body part session on something you really want to improve on)
Specificity - What are your goals? 🥅
Everyone has different fitness goals. Some might want to get competitive in powerlifting, some go hybrid and combine strength and conditioning, some may want to get swooooole as possible, others might want that chris hemsworth look while juggling a full time job and being a parent.
As stated above the best programme is the one that suits you the best with your time schedule, lifestyle and goals.
This is where prioritisation comes in, if you want to get better at squatting, you need to squat. Not only do you need to become stronger, you may need to add more muscle in order to create more muscle fibres to recruit to lift the weight, squatting is also a skill. Strength in a certain movement is a skill. A recent meta analysis by (Haugen et al., 2023) [2] found that strength in the free weight movements increased in the free weight strength group and strength in the machine based movements increased more in the machine based group. Showing you get good at what you practice.
Therefore you may want to practice this movement twice or even three times per week to hone your skill and strength in a specific movement. There is no reason why you can’t squat three times per week, plenty of powerlifting specific and squat specialisation programmes prescribe this.
You may want to become Hybrid in your training, where you want to pursue strength and to become a better runner. The balancing act here would be time management and recovery. You wouldn’t want to run a 10K race then try and train lower in the gym right after, that just wouldn’t be optimal.
