There are many advantages to breaking up weight training routines. Working all muscle groups can work for some people with great genetics, but split workouts work best for everyone and allow you to gain more muscle gain by working less time in the gym.

Normally, a person using a full-body routine would have to spend two hours in the gym training. With a split routine, you can spend 30-45 minutes in the gym. One of the biggest advantages is spending less time training, this allows you to have more intensity, more attention, concentration and more energy. Also, having a full-body routine can lead to long-term overtraining, at least much more so than a split routine. This is the purpose of using a 3 to 4 day split workout routine. You make sure that you won’t over-train and that it will allow your body to rest and recover.

Pros

• Better to shape the body – You have more control over the specific development of your physique. If you want to spend a little extra time on increasing shoulder width, then you can do that. To my knowledge, there are very few natural bodybuilders and fitness models who consistently do full body workouts, the vast majority use some kind of split routine.
• Very manageable / Easy – Lifting weights should not be easy, but if you like to lift with a lot of intensity, it is more manageable if you only focus on 2-3 muscle groups at a time, or less. “It is less metabolically demanding.”
• Change routines – Changing your exercise routine can be as easy as changing the split body part so that you will focus on different body parts on different days, or simply substituting different exercises for a given split.

Cons

• Less Total Calories Burned – If you are doing an arm workout, your calorie burn will be less than a full body workout.
• Muscle and strength imbalances – If your exercise routine is not structured properly, it is quite easy to overdevelop certain muscle groups at the expense of others and develop muscle imbalances, both from the point of view of aesthetic sight and strength.
• You can’t skip a workout – Well, you can skip a workout but it’s troublesome. With most split training routines, you will be working each muscle group once a week, so if you miss a workout, it will take two weeks to train that muscle group.

Who should use a split routine?

• Bodybuilders / Powerlifters – If you like to lift very heavy and train hard a muscle having great control over the configuration of your body, then these types of routines are very good.
• Advanced lifters – If you’ve been lifting for a long time and religiously go to the gym every day, or lift weights at home 3 to 5 times a week, keep doing split routines. I don’t see any reason to change as long as you are training your legs and core on one of those days and have your nutrition under control. If you have more than 20% body fat, you should seriously consider full body workouts to help maximize calorie burn.

Routines

When creating a routine, always try to put the muscle groups that are weaker the first days of the week and those that are more developed or strong in the rest of the week. It must also be remembered that the largest muscle groups in the body should always be trained before the smallest. For example: (if we train on a biceps / back day, we should always start from the back) The smaller muscles are used as support and stabilization in your lifts and in compound movements, so it is important that they are not tired when necessary .

This is the training routine that I personally currently use for 5 days and that is very good:
As my weakest muscle group is the legs, I put them on the first day …
Monday – Legs and abs
Tuesday – Chest and shoulders
Wednesday – Back and biceps
Thursday – Triceps
Friday – Calves / abs / hamstrings
Weekend – Rest!

Split 4 day routine:
Monday – Back and biceps
Tuesday – Chest and triceps
Wednesday – Rest
Thursday – Legs / calves / hamstrings (personally I think that if we want to do all this in one day we will spend more than 1 hour and a half in the gym)
Friday – Shoulders and abs
Weekend – Rest or 30 minutes of cardio!

3-day split routine: I personally don’t like this type of workout. We spent more than 2 hours in the gym.
Monday – Chest / shoulder / triceps
Tuesday – Rest
Wednesday – Back / biceps / abs
Thursday – Rest
Friday – Legs / Calves / Hamstrings
Weekend – Rest or 10-30 minutes of cardio!