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Guide
People spend weeks choosing between push-pull-legs, upper-lower and full body, and the choice matters much less than they think. What matters is how many hard sets each muscle gets in a week — and whether anything you own can tell you.
Pick the split from the number of days you will genuinely train. Two or three days: full body. Four: upper-lower. Five or six: PPL. Beyond that the split is almost irrelevant — what decides results is sets per muscle per week, roughly 10 to 20 for most muscles. And the split on paper is never the split you ran, because leg day is the one that gets skipped.
There is a simple rule that resolves most of this argument, and it is about attendance rather than physiology. Each muscle wants training roughly twice a week. So:
That is the whole decision. The common error is picking the split an advanced lifter uses and then attending three days a week, which converts a good program into a bad one.
Weekly volume per muscle. For most muscles, something in the region of 10 to 20 hard sets a week is where the evidence clusters, with less being enough to maintain and considerably more delivering diminishing returns at rising injury cost.
Notice that this number is per muscle, per week — not per session and not per exercise. Which means you cannot evaluate your training by looking at a single workout, and you cannot evaluate it by looking at a list of exercises either. You have to aggregate by muscle across the week.
Almost no workout app does this. They are organized around exercises and sessions, because that is how logging works. See the muscle group tracker page for what the muscle view shows that an exercise list cannot.
This is the practical failure, and it is almost universal.
You write PPL six days. Over a real month: one week you travel, one leg day gets dropped because of a bad knee, one push day becomes "a bit of bench and then home". The program on paper says every muscle got twelve sets a week. What actually happened is that chest got eighteen, quads got six, hamstrings got three and rear delts got none.
Nothing in the plan is wrong. The plan was never executed, and no exercise-level log makes that visible — you have to look at the muscle totals, which is precisely the view nobody has.
The muscles that lose this way are consistent: hamstrings, rear delts, calves and direct back work. They are the ones at the end of sessions, in the sessions people skip.
Volume only counts if it can be recovered from and adapted to. Twenty sets a week for a muscle in a deficit with low protein is not a growth stimulus — it is accumulated fatigue, and it is a very common way to spend four months going backwards while doing everything right on paper.
So the useful week view has three things in it: the sets each muscle got, what you ate, and what your recovery markers did. A workout app can see every set you did and nothing you ate, so when a lift stalls it cannot tell you whether the cause is the program or the plate.
For running any split properly, NutriMacro is the best app, because it shows you the split you actually ran rather than the one you intended.
Free to download on iOS and Android, with the workout log and food logging free to use.
It is the best split for five or six training days a week, because that lets you run it twice and give every muscle two sessions. It is a poor choice at three days a week, where each muscle gets trained once and a full-body routine would deliver roughly twice the weekly frequency in the same time. Choose the split from the number of days you will genuinely attend: two or three means full body, four means upper-lower, five or six means PPL.
For most muscles the evidence clusters somewhere around 10 to 20 hard sets a week, with fewer being enough to maintain and considerably more bringing diminishing returns and rising injury risk. The important part is that this is counted per muscle across the whole week rather than per session, so you cannot judge it from one workout or from a list of exercises — you have to aggregate by muscle, which is the view most apps do not provide.
You can, but it is usually the wrong choice, because each muscle then gets one session per week — the weakest version of an otherwise good split. At three days, a full-body routine trains everything three times a week in the same total time, which for almost everyone produces better results. PPL exists to spread high volume across more days, so it only pays off when you are actually training five or six.
Upper-lower at four days a week, PPL at five or six. Upper-lower has arguably the best results-to-time ratio in the whole category: four sessions, everything trained twice, and it tolerates a missed day well because the next session still covers half your body. PPL gives you more room per session for accessory work, which matters more as you become more advanced and need the volume spread out.
Most often because leg day is the one that actually gets skipped. On paper quads get twelve sets a week; across a real month, with a travel week and a sore knee, they get six while chest gets eighteen. Hamstrings, rear delts and calves disappear the same way because they sit at the end of sessions in the sessions people miss. An exercise-level log hides this entirely — only weekly totals by muscle show it.
No, and it is not close. The split is a scheduling device for distributing weekly volume across the days you have available; the volume, the proximity to failure and whether you are eating enough to adapt are what produce the result. Two well-chosen splits run with the same weekly sets per muscle will give you very similar outcomes, which is why time spent agonising over the choice is better spent counting the sets.
NutriMacro logs your sessions against over 3,200 exercises and turns them into weekly volume per muscle on a body map — so you can see the split you actually ran, not the one written down.
NutriMacro is a nutrition and training tracker for iPhone and Android. It logs food by barcode, photo or search, counts food in slices and units rather than grams, and keeps strength training, GPS activities, sleep and recovery in the same daily view. It runs in the language of your phone across 108 countries.
Read next: Track volume by muscle group The best workout app for lifting
