The Arnold Split: Full Workout Plan and Honest Verdict

Quick answer: The Arnold split is a 6-day training program built from three sessions: chest and back together, shoulders and arms together, then legs. You run the cycle twice a week, so every muscle gets trained twice. The sessions are long, the volume is high, and you get one rest day.

Most splits are named after what they train. This one is named after a bodybuilder, which tells you something about where it came from and who it was built for.

It is a real program with real logic behind it. It is also more work than most people reading about it are prepared to do.

What is the Arnold split?

The Arnold split pairs muscles that oppose each other, then trains the rest separately. Three session types, run twice through a 6-day week.

• Chest and back. Pressing and rowing in the same session, often alternated as supersets. The two sides of your torso.
• Shoulders and arms. Overhead pressing, lateral and rear delt work, biceps, triceps. Everything the first day did not directly hammer.
• Legs. Quads, hamstrings, glutes, calves. The one session that gets a body region to itself.

Pairing chest with back is the part people ask about. A bench press does almost nothing to your lats and a row does almost nothing to your pecs, so neither lift steals performance from the other. You can superset them and cut your session time.

The split is named after Arnold Schwarzenegger, and versions of it circulate with wildly different exercise lists. What stays constant is the three-way division and the six-day schedule.

Compare that to a push pull legs split, which sorts by movement pattern instead, keeping triceps with chest and biceps with back. Both reach twice-weekly frequency in six days. They just cut the week in different places.

What does an Arnold split week look like?

Six training days, one rest day, each session repeated twice.

Here is a workable Arnold split workout for each session. The second run through the week should not be a carbon copy: shift the emphasis and change the rep ranges.

Chest and back

• Barbell bench press: 4x6-8
• Barbell row: 4x6-8
• Incline dumbbell press: 3x8-10
• Lat pulldown or pull-ups: 3x8-10
• Cable fly: 3x12-15
• Chest-supported row: 3x12-15

On the second chest and back day, lead with the incline press and swap the barbell row for a single-arm dumbbell row.

Shoulders and arms

• Overhead press: 4x6-8
• Lateral raise: 4x12-15
• Rear delt fly: 3x15-20
• Barbell curl: 3x8-10
• Close-grip bench press or dips: 3x8-10
• Incline dumbbell curl: 3x10-12
• Triceps pushdown: 3x12-15

Legs

• Squat: 4x5-8
• Romanian deadlift: 3x8-10
• Leg press: 3x10-12
• Seated leg curl: 3x12-15
• Walking lunge: 2x10 per leg
• Calf raise: 4x12-15

Add up the sample week above and it is heavy. Chest lands around 18 direct sets, back around 20, side and rear delts around 22, biceps and triceps around 12 each, before counting what your presses and rows do to your arms.

If you want to see what your own version actually hits, paste the week into the workout plan optimizer and get a free private link to a muscle-by-muscle volume breakdown.

Is the Arnold split good for building muscle?

The structure is fine. The volume as usually written is the problem.

Training each muscle twice a week is well supported. A systematic review and meta-analysis in Sports Medicine by Schoenfeld, Ogborn and Krieger found twice-weekly training produced better hypertrophy than once-weekly (effect sizes of 0.49 versus 0.30), and concluded that major muscle groups should be trained at least twice a week. The Arnold split gets you that frequency. So does upper/lower, in four sessions.

More volume does keep helping, but not forever and not for free. A 2026 meta-regression in Sports Medicine by Pelland and colleagues analyzed 67 studies and found muscle size does increase as weekly volume increases, with diminishing returns as you climb. The same analysis found higher training frequency had negligible effect on hypertrophy once volume was accounted for.

Read that second finding carefully. Six days is not doing anything magic. It is a container for volume, and the volume is what matters. Our guide to how many sets per week to build muscle covers the useful range.

So the honest verdict: the split works if you can recover from it, and most people cannot recover from it as written. Twenty-two weekly sets of delt work on six days of training is a lot to absorb alongside a job and average sleep.

Cut two or three sets from every exercise list above and it becomes a genuinely good program.

Arnold split vs PPL vs upper/lower

The arms day is the real difference. In PPL, biceps and triceps get whatever energy is left after the heavy pressing and rowing. The Arnold split gives them a dedicated slot alongside shoulders, which is why people who care about arm size gravitate to it.

The catch is the back-to-back delt loading. Chest day is a lot of pressing, and the next morning brings overhead press and lateral raises. Front delts never get a break between the two.

For most people, an upper/lower split is the better call. Same twice-weekly frequency, four sessions instead of six, and it survives a missed workout. Run the Arnold split because you want the arms and shoulders emphasis and you know you will show up six times, not because six sounds better than four.

Beginners should not start here. Learning six session templates and thirty-odd exercises while your technique is still forming means everything gets a little worse.

How do you track a 6-day, high-volume split?

The Arnold split creates a memory problem no other split matches. Six sessions, roughly six exercises each, and each session runs twice with deliberate variation between the two versions. Thursday's chest day is not Monday's chest day, so you cannot copy the numbers across.

Nobody holds that in their head. People try, then default to the same weight for two months and wonder why nothing changed.

Where you keep the record decides what you get back from it:

A simple starting plan

1. Commit to six days on paper before you start. Write the six dates in your calendar for the next four weeks. If you flinch, run upper/lower instead.
2. Trim the sample sessions by about a quarter. Drop one exercise from each day, or one set from each exercise. Adding volume back later is easy; digging out of a recovery hole is not.
3. Make the two versions of each session genuinely different. Heavier and lower rep on the first, higher rep and more machine work on the second. Write both templates once and reuse them.
4. Log every set with real numbers. Incline DB 30 3x10 takes five seconds and is the entire difference between training and exercising.
5. Review at four weeks. If lifts have stalled and you feel flat, cut volume before you add anything. Frequency guidance in how often to train each muscle helps you decide what to keep.

Where does Gym Note Plus fit in?

Typing sessions into your notes app is a sound system. It is faster than any app menu and the format is yours. If that is what you do, keep doing it.

The strain shows up at six sessions a week. Finding what you inclined last Thursday means scrolling past a legs day and two other upper-body days. Do that for six exercises and you stop bothering by week three.

Gym Note Plus keeps the typing and takes over the looking back:

• Type Bench 80 4x8 and it logs four sets of eight at 80kg with no dropdowns.
• Your last numbers for an exercise surface when you start it again, whichever of the six sessions it lived in.
• Per-exercise charts build themselves from lines you were already writing.
• Weekly set counts per muscle add up on their own, which matters most on a split this heavy.

The Arnold split does not fail because the programming is wrong. It fails because six sessions of numbers will not fit in your head, and nobody notices the stall until two months have gone.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Arnold split?

The Arnold split is a six-day resistance training program that pairs chest with back, shoulders with arms, and trains legs on their own. Each of the three sessions runs twice per week, giving every muscle group two training sessions across six days with a single rest day.

Is the Arnold split good for beginners?

The Arnold split is a poor fit for beginners. Six sessions a week, thirty-odd exercises, and high weekly set counts demand recovery capacity and technical consistency that new lifters have not built yet. A three-day full body routine or a four-day upper/lower split delivers better results with far less time in the gym.

Arnold split vs PPL: which is better?

Neither the Arnold split nor push pull legs is clearly better. Both use six days and train each muscle twice weekly. Push pull legs avoids training front delts on consecutive days and produces shorter sessions. The Arnold split gives arms and shoulders a dedicated day, which suits lifters prioritizing upper-body size.

Can you do the Arnold split in 4 or 5 days?

Yes, by running the three sessions on a rolling cycle rather than fixed weekdays. Chest and back, shoulders and arms, legs, rest, then repeat. Across a five-day week each muscle gets trained roughly every fourth day, which lands between once-weekly and twice-weekly frequency and cuts total volume accordingly.

Is the Arnold split too much volume?

The Arnold split as commonly written is more volume than most lifters can recover from, with shoulders exceeding twenty weekly sets in some versions. Research shows muscle growth rises with volume but with diminishing returns, so trimming one exercise or one set per movement usually improves results rather than harming them.

Final Takeaways

• The Arnold split is chest and back, shoulders and arms, legs, run twice through a six-day week.
• The frequency is well supported; the volume is where it goes wrong. Twice-weekly training beats once-weekly, but stacking sets past your recovery buys nothing.
• Trim it before you run it. Cut one exercise or one set per movement from any version you find online.
• The shoulders and arms day is its genuine advantage over push pull legs, where arm work always goes last.
• Upper/lower reaches the same frequency in four days. Choose six because you will attend six, not because more days sound better.
• Six sessions of numbers need a written record, whether that lives in a notebook, a notes app, or Gym Note Plus.