“Which workouts are meant for skinny guys? Or ectomorphs? And hardgainers?”

“Is 6 days a week too much? Should I only go 5?”

“Push/Pull/Legs? Arnold Split? Upper/Lower?”

 

Finding A Training Split

During my first-year working out, for almost every month I would try another training split.

Any split will build muscle when you use it long enough to focus on increasing the strength and volume in each of your exercises. Trial and error helped me find what split I would prefer most, but I’d also be met with a lot of wasted time–could I have bench pressed 225 sooner if I used one consistent routine vs. different training splits?

• Wasted time —> Slower progress
• Try maintaining one split for atleast 2-3 months
• If you see steady growth, no need to change anything just yet

There are many commonly used workout splits responsible for a lot of the physiques you might see. I focus on only one of them in here, but you can use any other split there is. Here’s a few:

• Full-Body Splits
• Arnold Splits
• Push/Pull/Legs
• Upper/Lower (what I’ll focus on)

Upper/Lower is what I personally run right now–and would’ve ran as a beginner. I think it’s convenient going only 4-days per week, while still fully targeting important muscle-groups.

With my focus being on the 4-day split, I lean towards this one because of the 3 days of full recovery it gives. It has enough exercises during each gym session to not make me so fatigued to the point I lose out on having stronger lifts–a.k.a. progressive overload.

Run it for 2-3 months, then assess what progress you’ve made afterwards. From there you could decide to keep using it and make any changes if needed, or swap it out for a different program.

 

Upper/Lower Split (4-Days Per Week)