When you’re working out four times a week, it’s weirdly easy to slip into routines that don’t deliver the results you want. Repeating the same exercises every single session—like living on bench press and bicep curls, week after week—means you’re short-changing your progress. If you’re only working a few muscle groups, don’t be surprised if your gains hit a wall. Training splits are a way of dividing up exercises to work your muscles hard enough, often enough.
It also works really well as a 4-days-a-week workout plan to build muscle, particularly if you’re looking for something realistic and sustainable in the long term. Researchers have found that training frequency doesn’t matter as much as total weekly volume. In other words, someone who trains four days a week with focus and structure can build just as much muscle as someone who trains six or even seven days a week as long as the workload is balanced. Your hands will get a break, so will your traps, so will your back, and so will your connective tissues. Our abs recover quite quickly and can handle quite a lot of training volume, meaning that we can train them a few times per week without any issues. And since our abs are active during most of our lifts, we often train them every workout—even if we never do any ab isolation exercises.
Ryan Terry’s Olympia Leg Day Workout: 22 Sets for Lower-Body Growth
If you do add in ab work, we recommend doing so at the end of your program so that you aren’t tiring out those muscles before doing your other big, compound lifts. Both compound and isolation exercises have a time and place in your training program. Isolation exercises, on the other hand, focus on single-joint movements targeting one specific muscle group, like the biceps curl above. First of all, to grow muscles you have to challenge these with enough weight and repetitions for your current strength level.
Week 2: Split Decision
Cover all your bases with a workout routine that includes cardio, strength, and recovery in just 20 minutes. You also can use resistance paddles in the water or do activities such as rock climbing. When I started, running for a few minutes at a time was a real challenge for me. Following this plan, I was completely ready for race day and my body was prepared for the miles. What it wasn’t prepared for was stepping on a massive rock with the arch of my left foot in the dark.
Sample 4-Day Upper/Lower Workout Plan
Muscles like the biceps, triceps, and calves often recover within hours, while larger muscle groups like the quadriceps, back, and chest may require hours for complete recovery. A 4-day training split provides more than adequate stimulus for significant muscle growth when properly designed. If you have a chronic condition, or if you’re older than age 40 and you haven’t been active recently, check with your doctor before beginning a strength training or aerobic fitness program. The more hours you sit each day, the higher your risk of metabolic problems. Sitting too much can negatively affect your health and longevity, even if you get the minimum suggested amount of daily physical activity. And some research has found that people who’ve lost weight may be more likely to keep off the lost weight by sitting less during the day.
How to Use Workout Templates for 4-Day Workout Split Routines?
In the fourth and final week of the program, you’ll train four days in a four-way split that hits each bodypart just once (except for calves and abs, which are each trained twice). As you’ll see, chest and triceps are paired up, as are back with biceps and quads with hamstrings, each a very common pairing among novice and advanced bodybuilders. Shoulders are trained more or less on their own, and you’ll alternate hitting calves and abs—which respond well to being trained multiple times per week—every other workout. No new exercises are unimeal scam introduced in Week 4 so that you can focus on intensity in your workouts instead of learning new movements.
FAQs About 4 Day Workout Splits
It pays off to split things up wisely instead of just hammering the same area once a week. Metabolic Stress accumulates when muscles work under fatigue, creating the “burn” sensation during training. The moderate-to-high rep ranges typical in 4-day splits generate optimal metabolic stress without excessive systemic fatigue. Lastly, consider if you actually need to work out four times per week.
- The problem with working out just twice per week is that it’s easy for the workouts to become long and draining.
- Pick one exercise from each category above for your workout, and you’ll work almost every single muscle in your body.
- You can dedicate entire sessions to perfecting your squat or increasing your pull-up volume.
- Again this will shift based on your fitness level and how your HR responds.
- When you see your numbers going up, your motivation follows.
- It allows for adequate recovery and is flexible in that you can prioritize training frequency vs training volume, or find a happy-medium between the two.
Tailoring Gym Frequency to Your Goals
On the other hand, if you don’t up the intensity and put the time in, your muscle gains will be minimal. “It’s totally possible to get a good workout in, or enough of a workout, to elicit the goals you want” without exercising for hours at a time, Fagin says. Of course, some people, like marathon runners, may actually need to spend multiple hours exercising at a time as part of their super-specific training programs. But for the general population, logging two hours at the gym isn’t necessary—and, in some cases, could even be counterproductive if you push yourself too far and overwork your muscles. Additionally, setting a doable goal for how many times you’ll work out each week can be helpful to make sure you don’t get burned out, Fagan says. Setting realistic fitness goals can be a good way to help you stay motivated, enjoy your workouts, and stay on track with a consistent plan.
What happens if I workout 4 times a week?
We have a variation of that called the 5-Day Outlift Split. Both of those routines can work quite well, but they aren’t necessarily better than training 3–4 days per week. By adding more workouts, we give ourselves more time and energy to do more exercises.
How Often Should You Work Out Per Week to Build Muscle?
Even though you have two upper and two lower workouts, they feel distinct, making for a more engaging workout experience. One advantage is that you train each muscle with less volume per workout, so no body part ever feels excessively sore or exhausted. Choose a weight or resistance level heavy enough to tire your muscles after about 12 to 15 repetitions. When you can easily do more repetitions of a certain exercise, gradually increase the weight or resistance.
Can I Get Ripped Working Out 4 Days A Week?
Other people enjoy going to the gym or find it easy to dip into short home workouts. If you want to lift weights more often, this is a good way to do it. The most popular 6-day workout program is the 6-day Push/Pull/Legs Workout Split. It’s an intense but effective workout routine that trains every muscle at least twice per week.