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How many times a week should you train if powerlifting is your focus? Is a 4-day powerlifting split sufficient and effective? 

While my personal experience (and the experience of some of my powerlifting clients) with a 4-day powerlifting split has been positive, it’s worth understanding for yourself before you make up your mind and just take my word for it.

A 4-day powerlifting split covers your squat, bench press, and deadlift training over four sessions a week. Workouts tend to be longer and more intense than other splits to get all the necessary volume done each week, but it is sustainable due to the fact that you get 3 full rest days.

There’s a lot more to understand about the 4-day split and how to structure it properly, and you should consider all the factors before deciding if it’s right for you.

At the end of this article, I’ll also provide a sample 4-day powerlifting split to help get you started. If you’re an intermediate to advanced lifter looking for a complete 4-day peaking program for powerlifting, check out our training app.

While there is nothing wrong with training to improve the way you look, a lot of exercisers are more concerned with their performance than aesthetics.

Whether it’s for sports or to develop “functional fitness,” people who want to move better utilize a wide variety of training methods to boost things like balance, coordination, mobility, speed, agility, and strength.

Interestingly, many of these methods lead to better aesthetics, even though that is not their main purpose. This is because, in fitness, form follows function. In other words, if you train like an athlete, you are more likely to end up looking like one.   

Explosive strength, also known as power, is a critical part of training for improved performance. This is your ability to generate force rapidly and is essentially the difference between something like a slow, heavy barbell squat and a dynamic squat jump.

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There are several ways to develop muscle power, including the Olympic lifts (variations of the snatch and clean & jerk) and compensatory acceleration training.

However, when it comes to convenience and effectiveness, plyometrics are hard to beat.

As a veteran personal trainer, I’ve been using and teaching plyometrics for close to 40 years and have found them to be incredibly effective for improving things like vertical jump height and sprinting speed. My experiences with plyometrics are not unusual, and numerous studies support their usefulness (1).