If you can train four days a week, here’s the week we’d hand you: your upper body on Monday and Thursday, your lower body on Tuesday and Friday. In gym language that’s an “upper lower” split. Everything for your chest, back, shoulders and arms goes on the two upper days, and everything for your legs on the two lower days. Every muscle gets trained twice a week, and the days stay the same from one week to the next.
Four days isn’t a level you have to reach first. It suits someone starting out who has four reliable evenings and would rather train more often for less time each visit, and it suits someone with years of lifting behind them who wants more room than three sessions give. The arrangement is the same for both. What changes is how much work each session holds, and the plan below sets that, including how to ease in if you’re new to lifting. The whole week is below, every exercise with its sets and reps and the reason behind each number.
The week, day by day
Train Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, and take Wednesday and the weekend off. The two upper days aren’t the same session twice: the big pressing and pulling is on both, and the smaller exercises are split between them so that neither day runs long. The two lower days work the same way.
Each day opens with its biggest lift, while you have the most to give it: an exercise done at the start of a session gains more strength than the same exercise done at the end. The smaller exercises after it add work to muscles the big lift has already started.
Monday: upper body
Exercise | Sets and reps | What it trains |
|---|---|---|
Chest press, machine or dumbbells | 4 × 8 to 12 | Chest, front of the shoulders, back of the arms |
Chest-supported row, machine or dumbbells | 3 × 8 to 12 | Upper back, back of the shoulders |
Shoulder press, machine or dumbbells | 3 × 8 to 12 | Shoulders, back of the arms |
Lat pulldown | 3 × 8 to 12 | The sides of your back, biceps |
Biceps curl | 2 × 10 to 15 | Biceps |
Triceps pushdown | 2 × 10 to 15 | Back of the arms |
Tuesday: lower body
Exercise | Sets and reps | What it trains |
|---|---|---|
Leg press | 4 × 8 to 12 | Front of the thighs, butt |
Romanian deadlift, dumbbells or barbell | 3 × 8 to 12 | Back of the thighs, butt, lower back |
Leg extension | 2 × 10 to 15 | Front of the thighs |
Leg curl | 2 × 10 to 15 | Back of the thighs |
Standing calf raise | 3 × 10 to 15 | Calves |
Thursday: upper body
Exercise | Sets and reps | What it trains |
|---|---|---|
Incline dumbbell press | 4 × 8 to 12 | Upper chest, front of the shoulders, back of the arms |
Seated cable row | 3 × 8 to 12 | Upper back, biceps |
Lat pulldown with a different grip from Monday, or chin-ups | 3 × 8 to 12 | The sides of your back, biceps |
Chest fly, cable or machine | 2 × 12 to 15 | Chest |
Side raises with dumbbells | 3 × 12 to 15 | The sides of your shoulders |
Face pull or rear-delt fly | 2 × 12 to 15 | Back of the shoulders, upper back |
Friday: lower body
Exercise | Sets and reps | What it trains |
|---|---|---|
Squat: barbell, goblet or hack squat | 4 × 8 to 12 | Front of the thighs, butt |
Leg curl | 3 × 10 to 15 | Back of the thighs |
Split squat or walking lunge | 2 × 8 to 12 each side | Front of the thighs, butt |
Leg extension | 2 × 10 to 15 | Front of the thighs |
Standing calf raise | 3 × 10 to 15 | Calves |
Missing a machine? Take the nearest thing that moves the same way: a hack squat for the leg press, a machine row for the cable row, dumbbells for most of the rest. The muscles get the same job either way.
Reps. The big lifts run at 8 to 12, the same as our 3-day full-body workout plan: heavy enough to make you stronger, long enough to build muscle, and easy to log. The smaller exercises run lighter, at 10 to 15 or 12 to 15. Partly that’s practical, because a heavy side raise turns into a shrug. Partly it’s that lighter weights build muscle about as well as heavier ones when you take the set close to your limit, which is what 21 studies comparing the two found.
Sets. The first lift of each day gets four sets and the others three or two. That’s a choice, not a finding, and the reasoning is short: more sets build more muscle up to a point, and the lift you do first is the one you’ll do best, so it gets the most. Counted per muscle, the week gives your chest 10 sets of its own, your back 12, the front of your thighs 14, the back of your thighs 8 and your calves 6, with your arms and shoulders getting a few direct sets each on top of all the pressing and pulling they help with. That’s 62 sets a week against the full-body plan’s 54: about 17 on an upper day and 14 on a lower day. Extra sets stop adding much somewhere around twenty a muscle a week, so there’s room to add a set here and there as you get stronger.
How hard. Stop the big lifts with two or three reps still in you, and the small exercises with one or two. Grinding every set until the weight stops moving made no consistent difference to muscle or strength in the reviews the College went through, and it costs you recovery: in highly trained men, sets stopped well short of failure had recovered within six hours, while sets taken to failure kept the bar moving slower for two days. You train again tomorrow.
Rest, weights, warm-ups, progress. Rest about a minute and a half to two minutes after the big lifts and about a minute after the small ones. Finding your starting weights, the one warm-up set that’s enough, the log, and the rule for adding weight are the same as on the full-body plan, so I won’t repeat them here: how to pick your weights, and how to keep getting stronger. Plan on 45 minutes to an hour a session.
At home. A pair of dumbbells and a bench with an adjustable back covers the week with a few swaps, most of them already on the full-body plan’s home version: a goblet squat where the leg press is, a dumbbell bench press for the chest press, and a dumbbell row, one-arm or chest-supported, for every pulldown and cable row. Of the smaller exercises, only the leg extension and the leg curl need a machine. A split squat or a step-up does the leg extension’s job, a Romanian deadlift does the leg curl’s, and the calf raises work on a step.
Where it bends. The days are the ones most weeks have free, not a rule. Any four work as long as an upper day and a lower day keep taking turns, so your legs never train two days running: Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday does it, and so does Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. If you’d rather open the week with legs, swap the pairs round. If you’re new to lifting, do two sets of every exercise for the first two weeks and bring the sets up from week three: the first sessions are the ones that make you sore, and two sets are plenty while you learn the movements. If there’s one lift you most want to get strong at, do it on both of its days: the squat on Tuesday as well as Friday, in place of the leg press. Strength is partly skill, and a lift you do twice a week gets practiced twice. And on an evening that runs long, drop the last small exercise rather than a set of the big lift.
Why the week is arranged this way
Two sessions for every muscle is simply what four days and two halves of a body give you, and the second session’s job isn’t faster growth. It’s that each session stays manageable, holding about half of a muscle’s weekly work instead of all of it.
The hard part of any upper lower week is the upper day. Above the waist there’s a lot to cover: chest, back, shoulders and both sides of your arms. An upper day that tries to give every one of them a big lift and a small exercise every time either runs to ninety minutes or quietly loses the small stuff by week three, starting with whatever was last on the list. This week gets round it by making Monday and Thursday different days. Both hold the pressing and pulling that do most of the work. Monday adds the shoulder press and the direct arm work; Thursday adds the chest fly, the side raises and the face pulls. Your biceps and triceps get sets of their own once a week and work hard in every row, pulldown and press on both days, and your shoulders get the same deal the other way round. The lower days are built the same way: the Romanian deadlift on Tuesday, the squat leading Friday, and the machines filling in behind them.
The Romanian deadlift is on a leg day because that’s where a deadlift goes in our coaching. The joints that move are your hips and your knees, so it’s your butt and the back of your thighs doing the lifting, however hard your lower back has to hold on. Some people count it as a back exercise and train it with their rows, and that’s fine if it suits you. Just notice what it does to the day after.
The order of the days follows how fast things recover. You’ll often read that a muscle needs 48 to 72 hours before it’s trained again, and it’s less tidy than that: it depends on the muscle and on how hard you pushed. In lifters with years behind them, the bench press was back to normal within a day of four sets to failure, while the squat was still down three days later. So the two leg days sit three days apart and then four, Tuesday to Friday and Friday to Tuesday, and the upper days run one day ahead of them.
Training two days in a row is fine. In a twelve-week study, men new to lifting who did the same full-body session three days in a row gained the same strength and muscle as men who took days off in between, and upper lower is easier than that, because Tuesday doesn’t ask Monday’s muscles to work again. The one overlap is your lower back, which braces through your rows on Monday and then works for real in Tuesday’s Romanian deadlift. That’s why Monday’s row is the chest-supported one: with your chest on the pad, your lower back gets a quieter day before the deadlift.
Then Wednesday, and the weekend. A day off in the middle means you’re never more than two days from a rest day, and the weekend stays yours. If Wednesday is the evening you keep for something else, a game, a class, a date, the plan doesn’t need to know.
The other ways to fill four days
You’ll meet three other arrangements for a four-day week, and knowing what each asks of you is most of the choice.
The body-part week is the one most people picture: a chest day, a back day, a leg day and a shoulder day, each muscle trained hard once and then left alone for a week. It builds muscle. In a trial of men with about seven years of lifting behind them, eight weeks of training each muscle once a week on a body-part split built the same strength and the same lean mass as training everything five days a week with the same sets. The costs were elsewhere. The men on the body-part split were sore all eight weeks, four to eight out of ten against next to nothing for the men spreading the same work over the week, and they lifted about 14 percent less total weight on the same number of sets, because the last sets of a twenty-set chest day are done tired. That trial was five days a week, so it isn’t a test of a four-day body-part week, but it’s the pattern to expect from a day that puts all of a muscle’s sets in one place.
On four days there’s also the question of where the arms go. A muscle a day gives them no day, so they get squeezed onto the end of chest day and back day, which is where the hour goes. And a missed Wednesday is a missed week for whichever muscle Wednesday belonged to. If you love training this way and rarely miss, carry on; it will build muscle like the others. If your weeks change shape, it’s the arrangement that punishes you most for it.
Push pull legs on four days works by rotation. The three workouts take turns, so one week runs push, pull, legs, push and the next runs pull, legs, push, pull, and every muscle is trained four times in three weeks. It spreads the work well. Its price is the calendar: Monday stops meaning anything in particular, and you have to remember where you left off. If that trade suits you, our push pull legs page writes the whole rotation out.
Full body four times a week is the one most plans mention last, and the research has nothing against it. In an eight-week trial, 67 men new to lifting all trained Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday: half did two different sessions twice each, one for the chest, shoulders and arms and one for the back, biceps and legs, and the other half trained everything every time, with the same weekly sets for each muscle. They gained the same strength and the same muscle. Four sessions can hold more work than three however you fill them; what full body doesn’t give you is room inside a session. Every session still has to cover everything, so each muscle gets a lift or two each time with little room for the smaller exercises, and your legs work on all four days. If you’d rather give each session half the body and fit the smaller exercises in, that’s what upper lower is for.
Most of the four-day plans you’ll find are a version of upper lower, with the smaller exercises arranged differently, and the differences between them matter far less than whether you keep going.
Does four days build more than three?
Not by itself, and this is the part most four-day pages skip. When two groups do the same week’s work and only the number of days changes, they end up with about the same muscle and about the same strength. That’s what fourteen trials pooled in 2024 found for splits against full body, and the two trials closest to this week found the same. Women new to lifting who trained four upper and lower days a week gained the same strength and muscle over twelve weeks as women who did the same exercises and sets in two full-body sessions. People with a few years of lifting behind them who spread 32 weekly sets over four sessions finished nine weeks level with the group that did them in two. Take our three-day plan, spread its 54 sets over four days, and you’d expect about the same result.
What four days buys is room, and a shorter session. Three things decide what your training builds: how many sets each muscle gets in a week, how hard those sets are, and how often each muscle gets trained. The first two carry most of the weight, and a split only touches the third directly. What it changes indirectly is the first. A full-body session that has to cover everything can hold only so many sets for any one muscle before it runs long or the last sets get sloppy. Split the week in two and each session has room for more sets for fewer muscles, done fresh, and that room is where the arm, shoulder and calf work the three-day plan leaves out fits in. So this week adds about eight sets to the full-body plan’s week and spreads the whole lot over four shorter sessions instead of three longer ones. In a trial of 18 trained men who did the same 36 weekly sets as two sessions or four, the two-session group was in the gym for about 105 minutes at a time and the four-session group for about 45, and they came out the same. The difference was how long each evening took.
It’s a small gain, and smallest at the start. Each extra hour in the gym does less for you than the one before it, and in your first months it does very little, because at the start almost everything works. If you’re in your first couple of months of lifting, a fourth day probably buys you little extra muscle over three, and maybe a little strength from practicing the lifts more often. That’s a reason not to expect more from four days than from three at the start, not a reason to avoid them. Shorter visits, and a week that matches the days you actually have, are reasons enough.
Who four days suits, and who it doesn’t
Four days suits you if the extra evening buys you something three didn’t: room for the smaller exercises, shorter visits, or simply more time in a place you like being. In our coaching, people with some experience train three or four times a week, as full-body sessions or as a two-way split, and upper lower is a two-way split.
It doesn’t suit you just because the calendar has four gaps in it. Having time for more training doesn’t create a need for more training. And being new to lifting doesn’t rule it out. In our coaching we usually start someone new on two or three full-body sessions, because it’s the smallest routine that covers everything and teaches the lifts quickly, and our 3-day full-body workout plan is built for exactly that. But the four-day format works for beginners too: in the twelve-week trial above, the women on four upper and lower days were new to lifting, and they gained the same strength and muscle as the women on two. What a beginner needs is the workload set right, not a different calendar, and the plan above says how to ease in.
The strongest reason not to pick four days has nothing to do with muscle. In the twelve-week trial of women new to lifting, the four-day group and the two-day group did the same work and got the same results, and six of the fifty who started didn’t finish: five of them were in the four-day group, and four of those left because they couldn’t find the time. In a 2026 study of more than 100,000 beginners on a training app, the number of days people trained in their first month was the best single sign of whether they were still training a year later, and the researchers’ advice was a weekly routine you can sustain over an ambitious one. We’ve been telling clients the same thing for years: the best type of exercise is the one that gets done. Four days is a bigger promise than three. Make it if you can keep it. If you’re not sure your week has four days in it, our page on picking a workout split starts from exactly that question, and if you know you want a fifth day, our 5-day workout split is the next step up. And if you’d rather have a coach work out how many days your life has room for and build the week to fit, that is what we do at Gains For Gamers.
When a day falls out
Move the session to the next free day and let the rest of the week slide along behind it, so the order stays upper, lower, upper, lower. Miss Monday and the week becomes Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Miss Tuesday and the lower day moves to Wednesday, with Thursday and Friday as planned. Miss Thursday or Friday and the weekend picks it up. If sliding runs you out of week, let the session go. Every muscle in this week has two sessions, so skipping one means that half of you goes a week between sessions once, instead of the usual three or four days, and the schedule carries on from the next one.
Don’t double up to catch up. Two sessions folded into one is a full-body session with twice the sets, and the second half of it is done tired, which is the thing the arrangement exists to avoid. If what you want is everything trained once in a bad week, Monday and Tuesday already do that between them, so protect those two and take whichever of the other two you can get.
What a missed session costs is less than it feels like, a delay rather than a reset, and our workout split page goes through the research on breaks if you want the numbers. Two more things. If the same day falls out most weeks, you don’t have a four-day week. You have a three-day week with a hole in it, and three full-body sessions will treat you better than this plan with a piece missing. And on the evening you’ve got nothing, don’t skip it, shrink it. The first two exercises of the day, two sets each, is twenty minutes, and it still counts as having gone. We tell clients to keep an easier version of every session ready, so that the decision on a flat evening is small enough to make.
If you remember one line: train your upper body twice and your lower body twice, on days that don’t move. Then a missed day costs you one session, not a muscle’s whole week.
Questions we get asked
Is four days a week enough to build muscle?
Comfortably. The World Health Organization’s guideline for adults is strength work for every major muscle group on two or more days a week, and in the research the number of days matters far less than the work done on them: with the same weekly sets, four days built the same muscle as two, in women new to lifting and in people with a few years behind them. What decides the result is whether the sets are hard, whether the weights or the reps go up over the months, and whether you keep showing up.
Is a 4-day split better than a 5-day split?
Not for building muscle: with the same weekly work, four days and five come out about the same. Five days is for the person who wants more work in the week than four sessions hold well, and who will actually be there five times a week. Our 5-day workout split lays that week out. If you’re choosing between them, choose by the week you can count on, not the one you’d like to have.
Which four days should I train on?
Any four, as long as an upper day and a lower day take turns and your legs get a couple of days before they’re trained again. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday is the default because it leaves Wednesday and the weekend free, and Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday works the same way. Two days in a row is fine: in a twelve-week study, three full-body sessions on consecutive days built the same strength and muscle as three with days off between.
Do I have to change the exercises every few weeks?
No. The exercises stay the same and the numbers in your log change, and that’s what makes it a plan rather than a workout. In a ten-week trial, young women who did the same two leg exercises in every session grew and got stronger just as much as women who rotated through three different pairs. In our coaching we refresh a program at around twelve weeks, with new exercises and new sets and reps, and sometimes a day added or taken away depending on how the three months went. Twelve weeks is a good first target for this one too.
Should I add cardio or ab work to this week?
Cardio, yes, for your health rather than to burn off food: the World Health Organization’s guideline is 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity a week, and walking counts, so put it on the days between sessions. The week has no ab exercise because your core already braces in every squat, deadlift and standing press. If you want one anyway, two sets of a cable crunch or a plank at the end of a lower day is plenty.
Next up
More on full-body training, one question at a time.
Learn
The 3-day full-body workout plan
Learn
Push pull legs: what it is, and who it's really for
Learn
How long does it take to build muscle?
Learn
Which workout split should you do?
Learn
What's a good 5-day workout split?
Thanks for reading. I’m Daniel, and I wrote this. I’m a certified personal trainer with more than 10,000 hours on the gym floor with clients, and as founder and head coach of Gains For Gamers, I get to combine the best of my two favorite worlds: gaming and fitness.
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This page is general information from coaches, not medical advice. If you have a medical condition or an injury, or take medication, talk to your doctor before you change your training or diet.