The 5 Day Workout Split: Two Layouts That Are Not the Bro Split

Five days a week is the most commonly recommended schedule and the most commonly botched one. The reason is arithmetic. The human body does not divide neatly into five, so every five day split has to solve an awkwardness that four and six days do not have.

Most people solve it badly, by reaching for the bro split. One muscle group per day, five days, Monday is chest and Friday is legs. It divides perfectly into five, which is exactly why it is so tempting, and it hands every muscle a single session a week. That is the frequency the pooled evidence is least enthusiastic about.

There is a better way to spend five days. This guide gives you two layouts that keep every muscle at two sessions a week, plus an honest account of when the bro split is actually the right call.

Build your 5 day split in Pocket Fit. It sizes the sessions to your equipment and runs the weight progression for you. Free on the App Store and Google Play.

The problem with five days

Two days divides the body cleanly in half. Three divides it into push, pull and legs. Six is three doubled. Five divides into nothing, so you have three choices: give one muscle group its own day and accept an imbalance, run a rolling cycle that ignores the calendar, or add a fifth session that is not a fifth of anything.

The third option is the good one. Take a structure that already works and bolt an extra session onto it, rather than inventing a five way division of the body.

Layout one: upper/lower plus a full body day

This is the cleanest answer. Run the four day upper/lower week, then add a fifth session that touches everything lightly.

• Monday: Upper A
• Tuesday: Lower A
• Wednesday: rest
• Thursday: Upper B
• Friday: Lower B
• Saturday: Full body, or a weak point session
• Sunday: rest

Every muscle gets two sessions from the upper/lower core, and the Saturday session pushes some of them to three without lengthening any single workout. It also gives you an obvious thing to cut in a bad week: drop Saturday and you are back to a complete 4 day upper/lower week rather than a broken five day one.

That last property is worth more than it sounds. A five day split that degrades gracefully into a four day split is a five day split you will still be running in March.

Layout two: push, pull, legs, upper, lower

The other good five day answer. Run push/pull/legs, then add an upper and a lower day.

• Monday: Push
• Tuesday: Pull
• Wednesday: Legs
• Thursday: rest
• Friday: Upper
• Saturday: Lower
• Sunday: rest

Chest, shoulders, triceps, back and biceps all get two sessions, one from their PPL day and one from the Friday upper day. Legs get two, Wednesday and Saturday. The frequency lands where you want it and the sessions stay reasonably short because the work is spread across five days rather than four.

Pick this one if you like the movement-pattern logic of push/pull/legs. Pick layout one if you would rather keep the week simple.

The frequency maths, spelled out

Schoenfeld, Ogborn and Krieger, pooling ten studies for Sports Medicine, found that 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. Both good layouts clear that bar comfortably. The bro split does not, which is the whole reason it is not the default recommendation here despite dividing so neatly into five.

The full five day week, layout two

Compounds first, isolation after. Rest 90 seconds to two minutes on the heavy work, around a minute on the small stuff.

Push

• Flat Bench Press: 4 sets of 6 to 8
• Overhead Press: 3 sets of 8 to 10
• Incline dumbbell press: 3 sets of 10 to 12
• Cable lateral raise: 3 sets of 12 to 15
• Rope Pushdown: 3 sets of 12 to 15

Pull

• Pull-Ups or Lat Pulldown: 4 sets of 6 to 10
• Bent-Over Barbell Row: 4 sets of 6 to 8
• Seated cable row: 3 sets of 10 to 12
• Face pull: 3 sets of 15
• Standing Barbell Curl: 3 sets of 10 to 12

Legs

• 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

• Incline barbell press: 3 sets of 8 to 10
• Chest-supported row: 3 sets of 8 to 10
• Seated dumbbell shoulder press: 3 sets of 10 to 12
• Single-arm dumbbell 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

• 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

The second pass at each muscle deliberately uses different angles. Flat pressing on Push, incline on Upper. Vertical pulling on Pull, horizontal on Upper. Squat pattern on Legs, hinge and unilateral work on Lower. Two sessions a week for each muscle without two identical workouts.

When the bro split is actually right

It has a legitimate use, and dismissing it entirely is dishonest.

If you have trained consistently for years, your chest is visibly behind everything else, and you want to throw twenty sets at it in one session with total focus, a bro split does that better than anything. High volume in a single session is what it is built for. Advanced lifters with a specific weak point are the population it suits.

What it does not suit is a beginner or an early intermediate spending a year training every muscle once a week when the same five days could have delivered two. If you are choosing your first five day split, that is the whole argument.

Let Pocket Fit pick the layout. Tell it five days and your goal and it builds the structure, then adjusts it from what you log rather than what a template assumed.

Where the evidence runs thin

The twice a week figure is quoted with more certainty than it deserves. When Schoenfeld, Grgic and Krieger revisited it in the Journal of Sports Sciences with weekly volume held equal, frequency stopped being the driver and total work took over, and Grgic and colleagues found the same for strength in Sports Medicine. So the argument against the bro split is not that once a week is biologically doomed. It is that once a week forces all of a muscle's weekly volume into a single session, and there is a limit to how many useful sets you can do in one go before quality drops.

Add the usual limits: these reviews pool trained and untrained subjects, mostly younger and mostly male, over weeks and months, and none of them know your recovery. Five days is a real commitment, and five mediocre sessions are worth less than four good ones. If your sleep is short, our piece on training on poor sleep is the more useful read.

Where Pocket Fit fits

Five days has more moving parts than four, which means more to keep track of and more to go wrong when a day vanishes. Pocket Fit builds the split around your goal, your equipment and your five days, remembers where you are in the sequence, and tells you what weight to use from what you actually lifted. When a session goes missing it reshuffles the rest of the week instead of dropping it, which is what protects your frequency.

For the full picture of how the app assembles a programme and every split it offers, the walkthrough is here.

Put it together

Five days is awkward because the body does not divide into five. Solve it by adding to a structure that already works rather than inventing a five way split. Upper/lower plus a full body day, or push/pull/legs plus an upper and a lower day, both get every muscle to at least two sessions a week. The bro split divides neatly and gives you one, which is why it belongs to advanced lifters chasing a weak point rather than to anyone building a base.

Then vary the angles between a muscle's two sessions, keep weekly sets somewhere between ten and twenty per muscle, and choose the layout that still makes sense on the week you only manage four days. The workout split pillar covers how to make that judgement, and the 6 day guide covers what changes if you add one more.

Start with Pocket Fit, free. Five days in, and it handles the structure. 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.