How to Build a Split-Body Workout

"Leg day" allows for increased focus and intensity when working leg muscles.

Splitting your workout routine into upper- and lower-body days has its benefits. You'll be able to do more sets with more intensity and increase focus on individual muscle groups. When building a split-body workout, you should incorporate one or two exercises per muscle group and schedule your routine so that you're working two days on and one day off to give your muscles enough rest between workouts. Vary the order in which you perform the exercises each time and change the exercises altogether every three to four months to keep your muscles from adapting and to optimize your results.

Instructions

1. Determine which exercises to include in your lower-body workout. These will obviously all be leg exercises. Remember to incorporate at least one exercise for all major leg muscles: hip flexors, abductors, adductors, hamstrings, quadriceps and calf muscles.

2. Choose upper-body exercises to perform on the second day of your split-body workout. There's a lot of territory to cover, so depending on the amount of time you have, initially you may only want to include one exercise per body part: shoulders, back, chest and upper arms.

3. Divide up ab exercises and add them to your lower- or upper-body workouts. Assign two ab exercises to each day. Lower abs can be worked on leg day; they'll get a bit of a workout during hip flexor moves anyway, but you can also include exercises like hanging leg raises and seated leg tucks to target the lower abdominal muscles. For upper abs, you can add them to your upper-body day and perform variations of crunches, like incline or kneeling-cable crunches, but add in some oblique work, too. Side bends and twisting exercises will target your oblique muscles effectively.

4. You can increase your routine an additional day by splitting your upper-body muscles in half. Your leg day will remain the same but do back and bicep exercises on the second day and chest, shoulder and triceps exercises on the third day. Use the fourth day for rest and start over with legs on the fifth day. This increased number of splits will allow for even more focused attention and intensity.

Tips & Warnings

• Start each exercise with a warm-up set. This is one set of 12 to 15 repetitions done with half of the weight you'll use for the actual sets.

• After your warm-up set, perform two sets of 10 to 12 reps of each exercise at full weight.

References

• Body Results: Workout Splits: Making Sense of Conflicting Information
• ExRx.net: Low Volume, Progressive Intensity Weight Training
• Body Results: Workout Splits
• ExRx.net: 2 Day Split Workout
• The Encyclopaedia of Sports Medicine; Edited by Martin P. Schwellnus
• Fudamental Weight Training; David Sandler
• 101 Body-Sculpting Workouts and Nutrition Plans: for Women; Editors of Muscle and Fitness Hers