The Best 5 Day Workout Split (3 Templates With Full Plans)

Quick answer: A 5 day workout split trains five times a week and works best when it hits every major muscle roughly twice. The strongest template is push, pull, legs, upper, lower. An Arnold-style antagonist split and a five-way body-part split are the other two real options, and both trade frequency for focus.

Four days almost writes itself: two upper, two lower, done. Five days hands you a spare session and no obvious place to put it.

Most people spend it on chest and arms. Then they wonder why their back and hamstrings look the same in November as they did in June.

Who is a 5 day workout split actually for?

Five days suits the lifter who has already run a four-day plan for a few months and wants more room, not more intensity.

You should have the main lifts down, a rough idea of what you can recover from, and five days you can genuinely attend. Not five days you can attend in a good week.

If any of that is shaky, the 4 day workout split is the better starting point, and nothing about it caps your results. Extra days buy you volume, and volume only helps while you recover from it.

The other honest use for five days is time. Splitting the same weekly volume across five sessions instead of four makes each one shorter, which matters if 75 minutes is your ceiling.

What are the three main 5 day split templates?

Everything marketed as a 5 day split is one of these three shapes.

Template 1: Push / Pull / Legs / Upper / Lower

The default, and the only one of the three that gets every muscle close to twice a week.

Push

Pull

Legs

Upper

Lower

Legs land at two sessions, chest and back at two, delts and arms at two or three. Our push pull legs guide covers the three-day engine underneath this, and the PPL upper lower hybrid goes deeper on this exact rotation.

Template 2: The Arnold-style antagonist split

Chest with back, shoulders with arms, then legs, then repeat the first two.

Upper body gets twice-weekly frequency and legs get one session. That is the deal, and it is only worth taking if your legs are already where you want them. The full six-day version is covered in our Arnold split review.

Pairing opposing muscles has a practical upside: you can superset bench and rows without waiting for the same muscle to recover, which cuts a long chest-and-back session down considerably.

Template 3: The five-way body-part split

One muscle group per day, the classic bodybuilding layout.

Every muscle gets one dedicated session a week, which is the format's whole problem. Training a muscle once a week produced less growth than twice a week in the 2016 meta-analysis by Schoenfeld, Ogborn and Krieger in Sports Medicine, when weekly volume was equal.

It is not useless. If you have a stubborn muscle and want to hammer it with 15 sets of undivided attention, this is the shape that lets you. Just know what you paid for it.

Which 5 day split should you pick?

The table is lopsided on purpose. PPL plus upper/lower is the right answer for most people, because it is the only template here that gives every muscle two exposures without a sixth training day.

How much volume should a 5 day split carry?

Around 10 to 16 hard sets per muscle per week, split across two sessions.

The meta-regression by Schoenfeld and colleagues in the Journal of Sports Sciences found a positive dose-response between weekly sets and muscle growth, with about 10 weekly sets per muscle enough for most of the available effect. More sets kept adding, at a shrinking rate.

Here is how that lands on the PPL / Upper / Lower template:

Note what the fifth day does not do: it does not raise the ceiling on how much you can recover from. Our guide to how many sets per week to build muscle covers where extra sets stop paying.

Before you commit, you can get a free private link to the workout plan optimizer, which maps what your five days actually hit and flags the muscle sitting quietly at four sets a week.

How should you schedule five days around recovery?

Two rest days, placed so no muscle trains on consecutive days, and the heaviest session followed by a day off.

Three layouts that hold up:

• Mon / Tue / Wed / Fri / Sat. Three on, one off, two on. The default.
• Mon / Tue / Thu / Fri / Sat. Better if three consecutive days wrecks you.
• Rolling five on, two off, ignoring calendar days. Your sessions drift through the week, and a busy Tuesday costs you nothing.

Higher frequencies did not beat lower ones once weekly volume was matched, according to a 2019 meta-analysis by Schoenfeld, Grgic and Krieger in the Journal of Sports Sciences, so the fifth day earns its place only if you actually recover from it.

Sleep and food do more work here than exercise selection. If either is broken, four good days beat five mediocre ones.

Why do 5 day splits drift off plan?

Because five days gives you five chances a week to quietly change the plan.

The drift is always in the same direction. You add a pressing movement because the bench was free, skip the second lower day because Saturday got busy, and cut face pulls when you are running late. Eight weeks later chest is at 14 weekly sets and hamstrings are at 4.

You cannot see this from inside a session. It only shows up in the running total, and almost nobody keeps a running total by hand.

A notebook records Tuesday perfectly. What it cannot tell you is that Tuesday has been your only pulling session for a month.

A simple starting plan

1. Pick PPL / Upper / Lower unless you have a reason not to. The other two templates are choices, not defaults.
2. Lock the five days in your calendar first. Fix the schedule before you pick a single exercise, because the schedule is what breaks.
3. Cap each session at five or six exercises. Five days already carries the volume. Long sessions are how the fifth day turns into fatigue.
4. Set a weekly target near 12 hard sets per muscle and check your logged sessions hit it, not just your written plan.
5. Run it for eight weeks before judging it. Switching splits every month resets your data and hides whether anything worked.

If you already log your workouts as text

Most people running a five-day split keep it in a notes app or a notebook, one line per exercise, because that takes four seconds between sets.

That habit is the right one. The gap is that months of Bench 80x8, 80x8, 80x7 lines never add themselves up, so the volume drift that wrecks a five-day split stays invisible until a mirror points it out.

Gym Note Plus is built around that habit instead of against it:

• Type your sets the way you already type them. No form to fill in, no exercise picker to search.
• Weekly sets per muscle, counted automatically across all five days.
• Per-exercise charts so you can tell a stalled lift from a slow one.
• Personal records flagged as you hit them.
• Your existing notes import, so the history you already wrote comes with you.

Want to see it first? Paste one of your sessions into the free notes to workout translator and watch the text turn into tracked sets.

Five days buys you volume. Only your log tells you which muscles actually received it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best 5 day workout split?

The best 5 day workout split for most lifters is push, pull, legs, upper, lower. It is the only common five-day template that trains every major muscle group roughly twice per week, which is the frequency the research supports, while keeping each session to about an hour. Arnold-style and body-part splits trade that frequency for focus on one area.

Is a 5 day split better than a 4 day split?

A 5 day split is not automatically better than a 4 day split. Both can train every muscle twice a week, and total weekly hard sets per muscle drives growth more than the number of days. Five days suits lifters who want more volume in shorter sessions and can reliably attend five times. Four days is more forgiving of a busy week.

Can a beginner do a 5 day workout split?

A beginner can run a 5 day workout split, but most progress faster on three full-body days or a four-day upper/lower plan. Newer lifters gain from practising the main lifts often, and five sessions add scheduling pressure without adding results. Move to five days once four stops feeling like enough work.

How many rest days should a 5 day split have?

A 5 day split leaves two rest days, and where you place them matters more than which days they are. Put one after your heaviest lower-body session and use the second to break up any run of three or more consecutive training days. Never train the same muscle group on back-to-back days.

Is a 5 day bro split good for building muscle?

A five-way body-part split builds muscle, but less efficiently than a split with twice-weekly frequency. The 2016 Schoenfeld meta-analysis in Sports Medicine found training a muscle twice a week beat once a week at matched volume. A body-part split is worth running only when you want to concentrate a large amount of volume on one lagging muscle.

How many exercises per day on a 5 day split?

Five or six exercises per session works well on a 5 day split: two compound lifts and three or four accessories. Five training days already spread enough total volume across the week, so long sessions mostly add fatigue. Keep each session near an hour and let the weekly total, not any single day, carry the workload.

Final Takeaways

• Push, pull, legs, upper, lower is the default 5 day split. Everything else is a trade.
• The fifth day buys volume, not recovery. It only helps if you recover from it.
• Legs are the first thing a five-day plan shortchanges. Check them before anything else.
• Aim for 10 to 16 hard sets per muscle per week, split across two sessions.
• Fix your five days in the calendar before picking exercises. The schedule breaks long before the exercise selection does.
• Track weekly sets per muscle. The plan says what you meant to do. Only the log says what you did.