The Best 5

5-day workout splits can be incredibly good for building muscle if you program them properly. When you’re training this often, it’s easy to beat up your hands, tire out your back, or accumulate nagging aches. Fortunately, there are simple methods for avoiding all those problems, which we’ll delve into in a moment.

My two favourite 5-day workout splits are the Bro Split and the Outlift Split. Both are similarly good for building muscle, but I have a soft spot for the Outlift split. We’ll break down both splits in detail.

5-day workout splits are workout routines that have you doing 5 different workouts per week. The most common is the Bro Split, where each day focuses on a different body part, like so:

The underlying idea is that rigorously training a muscle stimulates 2–3 days of growth. If you train a muscle every day, you won’t be fully recovered, hindering your performance. If you wait longer than 3–4 days before training a muscle again, that muscle will be waiting with you, not growing.

You can train your muscles more often if you train them less vigorously. This is called high-frequency training. You can find 5-day splits that train every muscle every workout. That’s rare. It doesn’t seem to yield any extra muscle growth, and overuse injuries become more common.

All the classic 5-day workout splits have a way of dividing up the body into different areas. There are tons of variations. You could alternate between training your upper body and lower body. You could cycle between pushing, pulling, and leg exercises. You could even combine both, like so:

My favourite 5-day split is a variation on the Upper/Lower Workout Split. More on that in a moment.

5-day workout splits are great for building muscle. They aren’t necessarily better than 3-day, 4-day, or 6-day routines, though. It all depends on what exercises you choose, how well you train, how much effort you put in, and how you divide up your training volume.