What's a good 5-day workout split?

The week, Monday to Friday

Train Monday to Friday and take the weekend off. Monday and Tuesday cover your whole body in two halves, upper and lower. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday cover it again in three parts: push, pull and legs. Every muscle gets two sessions a week, a few days apart, and each session is a different mix of exercises, so no day is the whole week for anything.

Do the big lift on each day first, while you’re fresh. In the American College of Sports Medicine’s 2026 review of the research on lifting, an exercise done at the start of a session gained more strength than the same exercise done at the end. Everything after it is there to add work to a muscle the big lift has already started.

Monday: upper body

Tuesday: lower body

Wednesday: push

Thursday: pull

Friday: legs

The numbers, and why. The big lifts run at 8 to 12 reps, the same as our 3-day full-body workout plan, because a set of 8 to 12 is heavy enough to make you stronger and long enough to build muscle, and it’s easy to log. The first lift of each day gets four sets, the rest three or two. The smaller exercises run lighter, at 10 to 15, partly because a side raise done for 8 heavy reps turns into a shrug, and partly because it makes no difference to growth: in 21 studies that compared lighter and heavier weights, muscle grew about as much with either, though every set in those studies was pushed to the last rep. Counted per muscle, the week lands most of them between 10 and 16 sets aimed directly at them, with the muscles that help in the big lifts getting more on top, and it has room for the arm and calf work the three-day plan leaves out. That’s about a third more work than the full-body plan holds, spread so that each session carries around fifteen sets, and it’s a long way short of the twenty-plus a bodybuilder’s chest day holds, which is where the research says each extra set pays less.

How hard. Stop the big lifts with two or three reps still in you, and the small exercises with one or two. It’s the College’s own advice, because pushing sets until the weight stops moving added nothing consistent in the studies behind it, and on five days a week it matters twice over: in highly trained men, sets stopped well short of failure had recovered within six hours, while the same men’s sets to failure took two days. Two days is the gap you don’t have on a Tuesday.

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 you keep, and the rule for adding weight are all on the full-body plan, and they’re the same here: how to pick your weights, and how to keep getting stronger. Plan on about an hour a session.

At home. With a pair of dumbbells and a bench with an adjustable back, the week works with a few swaps. The full-body plan’s home version already has the dumbbell versions of the big lifts: a goblet squat for the leg press, a dumbbell bench press for the chest press, a one-arm row for the cable row, a chest-supported dumbbell row for the lat pulldown. The smaller exercises are dumbbell exercises already, apart from the leg extension and the leg curl, which don’t exist without a machine: a split squat or a step-up takes the leg extension’s place, a Romanian deadlift takes the leg curl’s, and the calf raises work on a step.

Why the week is arranged this way

Start from the four-day week we’d hand someone who trains four days: upper body Monday, lower body Tuesday, a day off, upper Thursday, lower Friday. It’s a good week. Its one weak spot is the upper day, which has to hold everything above the waist, chest, back, shoulders and arms, so it either runs long or the small stuff gets left off. So when a fifth day comes along, it goes into the second half of the week: the second upper day is split in two, push on Wednesday and pull on Thursday, and the second lower day stays as it was, on Friday. That’s the whole idea. You’ll meet the same shape on other five-day plans, usually written as upper, lower, push, pull, legs.

Every muscle gets trained twice, and it’s worth being clear about why, because it isn’t the reason you’ve probably heard. A muscle doesn’t have to be trained twice a week to grow. When researchers hold the week’s work the same and only change how often each muscle is trained, growth comes out about the same, from once a week to more than five times. What twice a week buys you is everything around the growth: each lift gets practiced twice instead of once, each session holds fewer sets for any one muscle, so the last ones aren’t done exhausted, and a missed day costs that muscle a session instead of a week.

The push and pull days are sorted by which muscles work together. When you press a weight away from you, your chest, the front of your shoulders and the back of your arms share the job; when you pull one toward you, it’s your back, your biceps and the back of your shoulders. Putting a team on one day means the small muscles get their direct work on the same day they’ve already been helping, and then get left alone. The Romanian deadlift sits on the leg days for the same reason, and because in our coaching that’s where a deadlift goes: the joints that move are your hips and knees, so it’s your butt and the back of your thighs doing the lifting, however much your lower back has to hold on.

The order of the days is not an accident either. Upper-body work recovers quickly. In lifters with years behind them, bar speed on the bench press was back to normal within a day of four sets to failure, and chest soreness had gone by the third day. Legs take longer: the same men’s squat speed was still down three days after the same four sets. So the two leg days sit three days apart, Tuesday and Friday, while the upper-body days can sit closer together, Monday, then Wednesday and Thursday. The one overlap to notice is your lower back, which braces through Thursday’s pulling and then works properly on Friday’s Romanian deadlift. The chest-supported row is on Thursday partly to keep it out of that: your chest rests on the pad and your lower back gets the day off.

Then there’s the weekend. Two days off in a row is the plan, not a compromise. Training on back-to-back days works: in a twelve-week study, 30 men with little lifting behind them did the same full-body session either three days in a row or with days off between, and gained the same strength and the same muscle. Five days in a row is more than that study tested, but it isn’t untested either. The trials that put experienced lifters in the gym Monday to Friday for eight weeks spread each muscle’s work across the days, the way this week does, and the men kept turning up: attendance was 97 to 100 percent. What nobody has measured is what five hard days in a row costs by Friday. So if Friday’s legs feel flat in the third week, that’s information, not a character flaw: take a set off each exercise that day and see if the next Friday feels better.

Does five days build more than three?

Not by itself, and this is the part most five-day pages skip. When researchers give two groups the same week’s work and only change how many days it’s spread across, the groups end up with about the same muscle and about the same strength. That’s what fourteen trials pooled in 2024 found for a split against full body, what two trials in trained men found for three days against six, and what the College’s 2026 review of 137 reviews found for once a week against more than five. Take our 3-day full-body plan, spread the same sets over five days, and you’d expect about the same result. Our workout split page goes through that research in full, if you want to see the working.

What five days buys is room. Three things decide what your training builds: how many sets a week each muscle gets, how hard those sets are, and how often the muscle gets trained, and the first two do most of the work. A full-body session that has to cover everything can only hold so many sets for any one muscle before it runs long. Spread the week over five days and each session has room for more sets for fewer muscles, done fresh. More sets do build more muscle, up to a point: the College’s review found an advantage for plans with ten or more sets a muscle a week, with each extra set adding less than the one before, and the curve mostly flat by around twenty. The week above sits in the part of that curve that still pays.

The sessions also feel different. In a small study, young men new to lifting who trained the front of their thighs on a leg extension machine with two sets three times a week rated their sessions as much easier than the men who did six sets once a week, and grew the same. In trained men, spreading the same squat sets over four sessions instead of two took the edge off how hard each session felt, with no cost to the strength they gained. And strength does climb a little with how often you practice a lift. In an analysis of 67 studies, people who trained a lift more often in the week gained more strength, most of the gain coming from going from once to twice, and each extra day adding less. That’s the honest case for five days: more total work, done fresher, and each lift practiced twice. It’s a real case. It just isn’t a case for everyone with five free evenings.

Who five days suits, and who it doesn’t

Five days suits you if you’ve been lifting for a while, you enjoy being in the gym most days, and your weeks are steady enough that five sessions is a promise you can actually keep. Some people simply like training most days, and that’s a perfectly good reason to. If that’s you, the week above is built for you, and nothing further down is a reason to change it.

It doesn’t suit you because you happen to have five free evenings. Having time for more training doesn’t mean you need more training, and it doesn’t suit you much in your first month or two of lifting, whoever you are. At the start almost everything works, and five or six sessions a week probably buys you little extra muscle over three, and maybe a little strength from practicing the lifts more often. What you need at the start is an amount of work you can manage, the same few lifts coming round often enough to learn them, and a routine you recover from and keep doing. In our coaching, someone new to lifting starts on two or three full-body sessions a week even with six evenings free, and people with some experience mostly train three or four times a week, as full-body sessions or as upper lower. If that’s you, our 3-day full-body workout plan is the better place to start, and the week above will still be here in twelve weeks.

There’s a version of this that isn’t about experience at all, and it’s the one I’d want you to hear. The best type of exercise is the one that gets done. In a twelve-week trial, women new to lifting did the same weekly work as either four upper and lower sessions or two full-body ones, gained the same strength and muscle either way, and the only women who quit for lack of time were the four in the four-day group. Five days is the bigger promise. Make it only if you can keep it, and if you’re not sure, our page on picking a workout split is built for exactly that question: how many days can you count on in a normal week, not your best one. If you’d rather have a coach decide how many days your life has room for, and build the week to fit, that is what we do at Gains For Gamers.

The other two ways to fill five days

The body-part split is the one you came in with: back Monday, chest Tuesday, legs Wednesday, shoulders Thursday, arms Friday, twenty or so sets for that day’s muscle and then a week off for it. It works. In a trial of men with about seven years of lifting behind them, eight weeks 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. Two other small trials in trained men found a little more growth in one or two muscles when those muscles were trained more often, so the picture is untidy at the edges, but on average the arrangement isn’t where the difference comes from.

What the body-part split cost in those trials isn’t in the size numbers. The men on it rated their soreness at three to eight out of ten at the start, the middle and the end of the eight weeks, against next to nothing for the men spreading the same work over the week, and they lifted about 14 percent less total weight over the study on the same number of sets, because the last sets of a fifteen-set chest day are done with what’s left. Add the arithmetic of a missed day, which is a missed week for whatever muscle was on that day, and you have the two reasons this page doesn’t hand you one. If you love it 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.

The other honest five-day answer is the rotation, if you’re already on push pull legs and like it: push, pull, legs, push, pull this week, then legs, push, pull, legs, push the next, so every muscle comes round five times in three weeks. Our push pull legs page explains it. Its price is the calendar. Monday stops being push day, and you have to remember where you left off. The week on this page is for the person who wants Monday to stay Monday.

When a day falls out

Skip it and carry on. Every muscle in this week has two sessions, so a missed day costs it one session, not the week. Miss Wednesday and your chest still got Monday; miss Friday and your legs still got Tuesday. Don’t do Wednesday’s session on Thursday and push everything back a day, because by Saturday you’re either training on your day off or dropping Friday anyway. And don’t fold two sessions into one to make it up. The whole point of the arrangement is that no day is a whole week, and doubling up gives that away for one evening of feeling caught up.

If the week collapses further, the first two days are a complete week on their own: Monday and Tuesday between them train everything once. So on a bad week, protect those two, and take whichever of the other three you can get. What a missed week costs, and how fast it comes back, is on our workout split page: less than the guilt suggests, and a delay rather than a reset.

Two more things. If the same day falls out most weeks, you don’t have a five-day week. You have a four-day week with a hole in it, and upper lower on four days will treat you better than this plan with a piece missing. And on the evening you have no energy for any of it, do the first two exercises of that day for two sets each. It takes twenty minutes, and it keeps the habit alive on a day that would otherwise be a zero. It’s what we tell clients: have an easier version ready, so that the choice on a flat evening is between the full session and the short one, and not between the full session and the sofa.