The 4 Day Workout Split: Upper/Lower, and Why It Beats the Alternatives

Four days a week is the most underrated training schedule there is. It gets ignored because it sounds like a compromise, the number you settle for when you cannot manage five or six. That reputation is backwards.

Four days is where the arithmetic works out perfectly. Split the body into an upper half and a lower half, train each twice, and every muscle you own gets exactly two sessions a week, which is the frequency the pooled research points at. No orphan session, no muscle group left waiting nine days for its turn, no ninety minute marathons. Just four clean sessions that fit around a job.

This guide gives you the full four day week: the layout, the exercises, the sets and reps, and what to do when one of the four days disappears.

Build your 4 day split in Pocket Fit. It writes the sessions around your equipment and handles the weight progression session to session. Free on the App Store and Google Play.

Why upper/lower is the right split for four days

At four days a week you have two sensible options, and one of them is clearly better.

The good option is upper/lower: Upper A, Lower A, Upper B, Lower B. The body divides into two halves and you train each half twice. Every muscle gets two sessions a week. This is the answer.

The tempting option is push/pull/legs, and it does not fit. Three days do not divide into four. You either repeat one day, which unbalances the week, or you run a rolling cycle where Monday's session changes every week and each muscle drifts to about 1.5 sessions. Rolling cycles work fine for people who train by feel and never look at a calendar. For everyone else they are a slow route to losing track.

The other four day option worth knowing is the upper duo split: Chest and Triceps, Back and Biceps, Shoulders, Legs. It divides neatly into four, but look at the frequency. Every muscle gets one session a week. That is the frequency the evidence is least keen on, and it is why this layout is better treated as a specialist tool than a default.

The frequency maths, spelled out

Upper/lower is the only one of the three that puts every entry in that table at two. That is the whole argument, and it is why this guide only gives you one week to run.

Schoenfeld, Ogborn and Krieger, pooling ten studies for Sports Medicine, found training a muscle twice a week produced a larger effect on muscle size than once a week, 0.49 against 0.30, with total work held equal. Four days on upper/lower is the shortest schedule that gets every muscle to two without any cleverness.

How to lay the four days out across the week

Two rules. Do not put the two upper days back to back, and leave at least one full rest day before you repeat a session type.

The layout that works for most people:

• Monday: Upper A
• Tuesday: Lower A
• Wednesday: rest
• Thursday: Upper B
• Friday: Lower B
• Saturday and Sunday: rest

If your weekend is the only time you can train properly, flip it: Upper A and Lower A on Saturday and Sunday, Upper B and Lower B on Tuesday and Thursday. The pattern matters more than the specific days.

The full four day week

Compound lifts first while you are fresh, isolation work after. Rest 90 seconds to two minutes on the heavy sets, around a minute on the isolation moves. Everything here should finish inside an hour.

Upper A

• Flat Bench Press: 4 sets of 6 to 8
• Bent-Over Barbell Row: 4 sets of 6 to 8
• Seated dumbbell shoulder press: 3 sets of 8 to 10
• Lat Pulldown: 3 sets of 10 to 12
• Cable lateral raise: 3 sets of 12 to 15
• Rope Pushdown: 3 sets of 12 to 15
• Standing Barbell Curl: 3 sets of 10 to 12

Lower A

• Back Squat: 4 sets of 6 to 8
• Romanian Deadlift: 3 sets of 8 to 10
• Leg press: 3 sets of 10 to 12
• Seated leg curl: 3 sets of 12 to 15
• Standing calf raise: 4 sets of 12 to 15

Upper B

• Overhead Press: 4 sets of 6 to 8
• Pull-Ups or assisted pull-up: 4 sets to near failure
• Incline dumbbell press: 3 sets of 8 to 10
• Chest-supported row: 3 sets of 10 to 12
• Rear delt fly: 3 sets of 15
• Triceps Dips: 3 sets of 8 to 12
• Incline dumbbell curl: 3 sets of 10 to 12

Lower B

• Deadlift: 3 sets of 5
• Bulgarian Split Squat: 3 sets of 8 to 10 each leg
• Barbell Hip Thrust: 3 sets of 8 to 10
• Lying leg curl: 3 sets of 12 to 15
• Seated calf raise: 4 sets of 15 to 20

Notice the A and B days are not clones. A leads with a horizontal press and a horizontal pull, B leads with a vertical press and a vertical pull. Lower A leads with a squat, Lower B with a hinge. Same muscles twice a week, different movement patterns, which spreads the joint stress and keeps the sessions from feeling repetitive.

The weekly set count this adds up to

Count the sets and the week lands roughly here: chest 10, back 14, shoulders 12, quads 10, hamstrings 9, glutes 6, biceps 6 plus the pulling work, triceps 6 plus the pressing work, calves 8.

Ten to twenty hard sets per muscle per week is a sane operating range. Schoenfeld, Ogborn and Krieger found in the Journal of Sports Sciences that higher weekly volume beat lower by about 3.9% more growth, with each extra set adding a little more, so there is room to grow into the upper half of that range. Add sets slowly, and add them to the muscles you actually care about rather than everywhere at once.

Let Pocket Fit run the progression. It tracks every set you log, tells you when to add weight and when to hold, and adjusts the plan from what you actually did rather than what the template said.

When one of the four days disappears

This is the real test of a split, and it is where four days quietly beats six.

Lose one session out of four and you still have three, which means one half of your body gets trained twice and the other once. Not ideal, but nothing collapses. The fix is simple: do not try to cram the missed session in. Just push the sequence along. If you miss Upper B on Thursday, do it Friday and let Lower B move to Saturday or roll into next week. The cycle continues in order rather than resetting.

What you should not do is skip a lower day twice in a row because upper body is more fun. That is how a four day split quietly turns into an upper duo split with one leg session a fortnight.

Where the evidence runs thin

The twice a week figure gets quoted with more certainty than it has earned. When Schoenfeld, Grgic and Krieger looked again in the Journal of Sports Sciences with weekly volume held equal, frequency stopped being the driver and total work took over. Grgic and colleagues found the same for strength in Sports Medicine. So the honest case for upper/lower at four days is not that two sessions flip a biological switch. It is that two sessions is a practical way to fit a decent weekly set count into sessions short enough that you finish them.

The studies also pool trained and untrained subjects, mostly younger and mostly male, over weeks and months. They do not know your sleep, your job or your joints, and no split overrides those.

Where Pocket Fit fits

Four days is easy to design and easy to lose track of, because the A and B distinction only exists in your memory. Which upper day am I on. Did I squat or hinge last time. Was that 60 kg for eight or 62.5 for six.

Pocket Fit keeps that thread. It builds the upper/lower structure around your equipment, remembers where you are in the cycle, and tells you the weight to use based on what you actually lifted rather than what a template guessed. When a day goes missing the scheduler moves the rest along instead of dropping a session, so your frequency survives a bad week.

Put it together

Four days a week is not the compromise option. Upper A, Lower A, Upper B, Lower B gets every muscle in your body two sessions a week, which is what the pooled evidence points at, in four sessions that finish inside an hour. Vary the movement patterns between A and B, keep your weekly sets somewhere between ten and twenty per muscle, and push the cycle along rather than resetting it when life interferes.

If four is genuinely too many, the 3 day push pull legs version is the honest step down. If you want more, read the 5 day and 6 day guides before adding a session, because more days only helps if you recover from them. The workout split pillar covers how to make that call.

Start with Pocket Fit, free. Four days in, and it handles the rest. On iOS and Android.

References

1. Schoenfeld, B. J., Ogborn, D., & Krieger, J. W. (2016). Effects of Resistance Training Frequency on Measures of Muscle Hypertrophy: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Sports Medicine, 46(11), 1689-1697. DOI: 10.1007/s40279-016-0543-8
2. Schoenfeld, B. J., Ogborn, D., & Krieger, J. W. (2017). Dose-response relationship between weekly resistance training volume and increases in muscle mass: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Sports Sciences, 35(11), 1073-1082. DOI: 10.1080/02640414.2016.1210197
3. Schoenfeld, B. J., Grgic, J., & Krieger, J. (2019). How many times per week should a muscle be trained to maximize muscle hypertrophy? A systematic review and meta-analysis of studies examining the effects of resistance training frequency. Journal of Sports Sciences, 37(11), 1286-1295.
4. Grgic, J., Schoenfeld, B. J., Davies, T. B., Lazinica, B., Krieger, J. W., & Pedisic, Z. (2018). Effect of Resistance Training Frequency on Gains in Muscular Strength: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Sports Medicine, 48(5), 1207-1220.

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Pocket Fit is a fitness and wellbeing app, not a medical device. It does not diagnose, treat or prevent any condition. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before starting or changing a training or nutrition programme.

Georgi, founder of Pocket Fit. He went from 122 kg to competing at The Yard Games, having lost 38 kg along the way.