What's Better: A Split Routine or Total Body Routine?

I manage very few days in a week when I’m not asked a question about a split routine or to critique a program. Sadly, most are just train wrecks.

Split routines, or as I like to call them, Frankenstein routines (hat-tip to Dan John…), are synonymous with bodybuilding circles. And I don't necessarily mean that in a derogatory manner; I just find the term funny.

Almost all young men (some young females) new to the gym will experiment with a split routine at first. I did! Everyone has to start somewhere.

It’s easy to see why young men in particular gravitate towards split routines:

• It's what the pros do, right? If I want to get even half as big, then I should do what they do, right?
• It's what's available! I mean, most of this is online now, but there are still magazines on this sort of thing at grocery checkouts throughout the developed world.
• They keep them in gyms for long periods of time (more is obviously better, right?), and we like hanging out in gyms for some reason.
• It feels harder, so it must be better!
• The pump feels good (even if it doesn't matter for growth, it matters before going out)
• The magazines (they are online now too) just keep you guessing and switching and spinning your wheels because the goal is to sell magazines (advertising), not help you get fit. There is minimal goal alignment.

What's not to like?

In fact, this survey of competitive bodybuilders indicated the following:

• 100% are using a split routine
• 95% use 3-6 sets per exercise
• 77% favour a 7-12 repetition range for training
• 67% use 61-120 seconds of recovery time between sets
• 77% of those who answered the question admitted to steroid use
• 100% used dietary supplementation
• Most seem to change their training just before competition in a dramatic way (less volume, less rest, higher rep range, etc.)

These people are the biggest and leanest amongst us. Shouldn't I do what they do if I want to build muscle? If they are the epitome of muscle building, then obviously we should mimic their approach, right?

Well, yes and no ...

I'm not saying there aren't insights to be learned for sure, but there is a significant self-selection for those with superior genetics, leading to survivorship bias. Oh ... and anabolic drugs, lots of anabolic drugs. 77% likely means 23% are either lying or in the less popular natural competitions.

Look, it's hard for me to dispute that how bodybuilders train is probably effective for bodybuilding, within the context of bodybuilding. If you’re a high-level competitive bodybuilder, then a split is probably useful to some degree. Not the least of which are:

• Allows you to be in a gym a lot, where you'd happily spend most of your time every day.
• Allows you to train six days a week rather than 3-4 with total body or upper/lower splits (remember you like the gym more than most)
• Allows you to more methodically ‘form’ how a muscle might look on stage in isolation (hence the mirrors and practicing posing between sets, it's an important skill for the activity).
• Allows you to do more total training volume in a week (the drugs also help)
• Allows you to more easily train to complete failure on all or most sets (this would be more taxing on the body if full-body training)
• Allows you to recover better from those highly fatiguing high training volume high-proxity-to-failure workouts (again, the anabolics also help)

And don't get me wrong, the drugs helped Mike Mentzer and Dorian Yates achieve world-class physiques with much less training, too, but they still hit failure on at least one hard set with a couple of decent warm-up sets using similar patterns.

Just goes to show you how much drugs help, but if you're not on drugs, how should you train?

When you're built for the activity and on anabolics, how you train matters much less. Oh, and we rarely talk about all the people who failed along the way, trying to mimic the training protocols.

But there are a lot of those people, and this article is for them.

Why Wouldn’t You Want to Copy?

What remains to be seen is whether or not the common training modalities of elite bodybuilders are ever particularly useful for beginners and intermediate trainees.

Some research suggests that taking the same volume of exercise — as opposed to the common bodybuilding approach of hammering a muscle group 1 day a week and then giving it a week off — and spreading it out over 3 days instead of one is almost twice as effective for gains.

Another more recent paper found that 2x12 three times a week (leg extensions) was as effective (or slightly better) as 6x12 reps once a week. They are missing the middle (3x12 twice a week), and they are using untrained subjects, still on only one exercise. Curious that more (6 vs 3 weekly sets) training volume didn't show the same effect, but it's possible the earlier study was masked by inflammation or some other noise in the data. Something researchers are more aware of these days.

And there are a slew of meta-analyses available on this topic now that seem to show similar results when frequencies are volume-matched. Again, these tend to be in beginners/untrained, often using one (maybe 2) exercises, over short durations of time (we now know that most of these studies should be at least 12 weeks in duration). And we haven't even really teased out what the optimal amount of volume might be per workout, so it's possible many of these studies aren't powered to test the theory that well.

My basic complaint with the literature is more practical.

How many exercises can you do in one session to target the same muscle group? If the max productive volume per exercise is somewhere between 4-6 (and I suspect it is, I'll do a write-up someday), and most volume research suggests the optimal volume per muscle group is 10-20 sets per week. Then, how productive are 4 exercises once a week (let's call it 5 sets each) going to be? Compared to 2 exercises, twice a week?

I think trying to hit those volumes once a week is the problem. It certainly was for me early in my lifting journey, battling tendonitis a few times very early on. At the very least, the training quality at the end of these monster 20 (or more!) single muscle group workouts was poor in hindsight.

Which isn't to say once a week training can't or doesn't work; it clearly does. I think it just works more slowly, and you have to keep the total training volumes lower (in natural lifters) to keep things moving productively.

I just keep coming back to the Wernbom meta-analysis from several years ago, which seemed to tease out that twice a week was about right for most people most of the time, and I've confirmed that in my own work.

Beginners can handle 3x a week low-volume training just fine.

But I'm not convinced that this would apply to more intermediate and advanced trainees using complete training programs.

More advanced training programs are certain to cause a higher frequency of program dropout, excessive muscle soreness, greater complications to lifestyle and in some cases, obvious injury at that high a frequency.

Last I checked, none of those things are necessarily good for consistency and adherence, which is the thing that matters most when setting up a training routine.

First and foremost, whatever you do, it has to be something you can do consistently for a long time.

If you can't train 4-6 days a week, and many more mature lifters won't be able to, then it's equally impractical to use these intense once-a-week training splits.

It’s questionable that these commonly used bodybuilding methods are the most ideal methods for most people getting started, or even many intermediate lifters, for many reasons:

• High dose, single session high volume training is often not tolerated well by beginners (more muscle soreness/fatigue…)
• Training to failure is often not tolerated well by novices (more muscle soreness/fatigue…)
• Beginners need to develop a coordination strength base before significant hypertrophy gains
• Beginners will often slack on training intensity because they simply don’t have the experience to understand it yet
• Beginners often have a lower perceived tolerance of exertion (things seem harder when they are new, than they do to the experienced), so they often won’t train as hard as they need to on a split routine.
• It's easier to adhere to a lower overall time commitment in any given week
• Beginners will often set their split routines up to ignore training days they dislike (like skipping leg day!), or do more training for days they do like (like chest day!) — which obviously hurts long-term results…
• The body adapts with neurological gains before muscle building gains, when you first start training (discouraging many, but you slow the process down with split routines for beginners)
• The decision to avoid steroids is also most likely a big reason why splits aren’t seemingly tolerated well by beginners/intermediates…

Needless to say, I come across increasingly frustrated young male trainees on a very regular basis…

For instance, this young man, or this one.

If you have little experience or strength, these methods just don’t seem to work that well.

A lot of the above applies to intermediate trainees too. People who have some training experience, but are often still facing some significant improvements.

Hypertrophy Training For the Rest of Us

Your training problem is undoubtedly not the split you're on. It's how the split meets your needs.

Up until the golden drug era of bodybuilding, plenty of old-school bodybuilders like Reg Park achieved wonderful physiques using total body training, and/or upper/lower splits.

Sure, Reg was small by modern bodybuilding physique standards, but most men would happily achieve a body like that too, and given the era is less likely to have used anabolics (they just didn't really exist as an option until later in his career), there are likely some lessons to be learned there too.

When I was 14/15, I was in a commercial gym blasting one muscle group hard, doing machine training 4-6 days a week, following some of the most ridiculous stuff (in hindsight) you could think up. Yes, I did stuff I now consider silly, I did "the arm day" and "the ab day." If you can think of a split, I probably attempted it as a teen.

Did I build some muscle? Yeah. A bit.

I'm not saying once a week can't work. I went from a gangly 150 lbs to something more like 175 lbs in a few years (I'm 6'1" tall for reference and have been since that age). I'm Canadian, so I'm making a concentrated effort to use the metric system more, that's ~68 kg ➡️ ~ 80kg in about 2-3 years at 185.5 cm tall.

How much of that was the routines I was using, and how much of that would have happened as the result of puberty already? I can't say. I was a long-time time fairly high-level competitive athlete until I was about 22, and many of the friends that joined me in the gym weren't so lucky.

If you're using a one day a week split, and you have a physique you like as a result of that, great. I'm not saying what you did or do was wrong. Most of us have to experience something to learn.

But ...

Maybe there was a better way?

There might be a benefit to using a split routine for a phase, then a total body routine for a phase.

Frequency of training is, after all, like sets or reps or rest, just another variable we can manipulate to challenge the body in new ways.

As I’ve said before, it is often just the change itself — and not necessarily the specifics of what you change — from what you’ve always done that leads to the greatest benefit.

Training needs to cycle to some degree, to prevent plateaus and maximize stimulation. The body needs unique stimulation to create adaptation, once a point of diminishing returns is reached.

Beginners can get away with changing things more often because they haven't built as much of anything yet, and their room for growth is high. As you progress through, you're going to want to string together consistent blocks of 6-8 weeks at a minimum and advanced trainees can probably only make minor improvements every 11-12 weeks before a change (deload/taper) is required.

So What’s Better?

I’m inclined to say no to split routines for beginners about 99% of the time.

If you’re new to training, or have been using a split for years and feel like you’re not getting anywhere: LOSE THE SPLIT ROUTINE!

For now ...

If your main objective is muscle hypertrophy for intermediates, or you’ve had a little success with a split routine, I suggest cycling in split routines periodically if you’d like, but I have a strong preference for upper/lower splits in this domain.

It’s good to mix things up, and while bro-routines certainly don’t make it into my repertoire very often, they do have their place (mostly for semi-serious or competitive bodybuilders or people who want to add a little more frequency to a lagging muscle group).

For athletes, the focus should always be on performance and even with very advanced athletes, I find total body or upper/lower (or similar 2-day) splits to be favourable (and quite frankly the norm anyway…).

It’s hard to do Olympic lifting and compound, complicated movement training with anything less than an upper/lower 2-day split.

The latter of which can be nice for keeping resistance training around 4x a week.

Though introducing a split if an athlete needs to gain some muscle isn’t necessarily a bad idea from time to time…

For the majority of people, full body or upper/lower 2-day splits allow for:

• Optimal frequency of training (every 48-72 hours)
• Greater recovery (get more days off)
• Easier integration into life (less time in the gym)
• In my experience, better fat loss (which is arguably most important for more people…) for multiple potential reasons
• Better integration of energy system training (and obviously some aerobic training, also these contribute to the fat loss factors mentioned above…)
• They are better for a more general or a more complete approach to training as a result (health, for instance…)
• For flexibility. They are easier to manipulate to fit intoa lifestyle if you miss a day (you’re not skipping training,, anything really ever)
• Typically better for strength or athletic objectives because they train complete movements rather than muscles…
• You can get more done in less time (more effective dose)

Again, when you look at the volume-adjusted comparison of total body training to split training in trained subjects, you still see a slight edge to total body training, but at the end of the day, it’s really about exploring your options and figuring out what works for you.

There might be some advantages to a split for you, like more volume (if you need it), a change of pace/routine, or maybe it fits better into your lifestyle.

If that’s five times a week of lifting weights, then you can only accomplish that with a split.

If you can only do resistance training on back-to-back days, then obviously you need to use a split too.

Ultimately, it comes down to you and how you can plan your routine. I have to use splits with people sometimes, and you might have to as well.

I just rarely come across a person where that 4-6 day a week body split approach fits ideally into their lifestyle.

Few people want to spend six hours a week lifting, in my experience.

What About Women?

I know a lot of this was directed at young men, not a typical demographic of this blog, but I do occasionally work with them (they also tend to be more active on the interwebz to ask me questions…).

As a final note, I think it goes without saying that I favour full-body resistance training for most women. Their typical physiology (faster recovery) also tends to support it better in the long term.

It just generally appeals to the look and approach that most women desire. That’s my experience…

As a side note, most of the women I work with avoid split routines like the plague anyway, because most don’t like the bodybuilder aesthetic. To beat a dead horse, it was likely never the split doing that work to begin with and everything to do with the drugs bodybuilders take.

They tend to be more guilty of using next to no resistance training, and just energy system training, or far too much aerobic training.

Not that great for aesthetics on its own (though wonderful when combined with resistance training at least 2 days a week).

However, in my experience, full body training works wonders for the female form, particularly undulating patterns whereby you cycle between higher reps and lower reps weekly or daily at different intensities.

When to Use Them…

All that being said, I’m always for finding a new stimulus if warranted.

My argument is mostly that they shouldn’t be the bulk of anyone’s training approach within the year until they have A) high-level aesthetics objectives similar to those of bodybuilders or B) have a certain baseline of training skill and experience under their belt.

I have periodically introduced more isolated training methods and split routines into my own training and in my training of others for some of the following reasons:

• You want to make a specific body part look a certain way

*Arguably, I’ve found better success by using an upper/lower split and then adding isolation exercises at the end of each training session, but if a person can’t tolerate that, then a split can be a way to go.

• You need to get more volume of training, particularly more training volume in to fatigue
• You have hypertrophy objectives and are doing most of your training in a 6-12 rep range anyway
• You have aesthetic objectives similar to those of bodybuilders (look good on stage), actors (look good on stage or in video…), or models (look good in print or otherwise…)
• You start to find that total body training, or 2-day splits, are too exhausting for your objectives (rare but might happen, can usually be controlled by monitoring intensity…)

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.