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If you’re a woman who’s following a fitness plan from a bodybuilding magazine or training with her boyfriend, you might be missing out on a lot of progress. The vast majority of women who engage in strength training aim to develop a tighter body with beautiful, feminine curves. So why focus on a split routine that specifically targets your arms or chest muscles?
Training with a so-called split routine is incredibly popular. But why have a ‘chest and triceps’ day if your goal isn’t to develop large triceps and chest muscles? Devoting an entire workout to these muscles isn’t logically necessary. It would be better to spend this time training your entire body.
In this article, I’ll explain why, as a woman, you’re better off training with a full-body routine rather than a split routine.
What is a split routine?
A split routine involves dividing your workouts into various muscle groups. For example, you might train your chest and biceps on Monday, legs on Tuesday, back and biceps on Thursday, and shoulders and abs on Friday. Other days are for rest and/or cardio training. When following this routine, you train each muscle group once a week, or if you’re smarter about it and split the muscle groups into three different workouts (e.g., with a push, pull, and legs day) with four workouts per week, once every 5-6 days.
What is a full-body routine?
Training with a full-body routine means that you train all (major) muscle groups or movements during each workout. Every time you hit the gym, you spend time working on exercises like squats, deadlifts, hip thrusts, pulling and pushing movements, and all their variations. Depending on your training frequency, you indirectly train each muscle group 2-5 times per week.
(There are a few other ways to structure your training routine, including dividing it into training your lower body and upper body, ideally both twice a week. These upper body/lower body workouts can be valuable for advanced trainees, but we won’t discuss them in this article.)
Women recover faster and can train more frequently
With strength training, women create less of an impact on their central nervous system than men do. As a result, they recover faster and can train each muscle group with a higher frequency [1]. Research also shows that by training a muscle group more frequently, it’s more likely to increase in size [2].
For many women, the goal is to develop tight, round glutes. It’s recommended to train these glutes more often for the reasons mentioned earlier. By giving a muscle group more frequent training stimuli, it will, thanks to its faster recovery ability, more easily increase in size.
Training more frequently means mastering technique faster
Another important reason to train each muscle group more frequently is that you’ll become more proficient in technically challenging exercises like deadlifts, squats, hip thrusts, and all their variations by doing them more often. Having only one ‘leg day’ per week means you can practice these crucial exercises only once a week. Plus, you’ll only have roughly an hour to do all those great exercises for your legs and glutes. So, you have to make choices, which may result in leaving out valuable exercises from your routine.
Less intense muscle soreness
Yes, muscle soreness can be a pain in the butt for some while others love it and see it as a reward for hard work. Opinions differ on this, but the fact is that muscle soreness isn’t an indication of a good workout, and it can be very annoying.
Training with a full-body routine generally results in less muscle soreness because you’re not working on one or two muscle groups for an entire workout. This allows you to function normally the day after your workout and even train two days in a row.
How do you go about it?
Even with a full-body routine, it’s possible to train more than 4 times a week. It’s advisable to differentiate the exercises you do and the number of repetitions you perform. If you train on 2 consecutive days, make your first training session low in repetitions, think 3 or 4 sets of 3 to 6 repetitions. For example, do a deadlift, hip thrust, push-ups, chin-ups or pull-downs, and the plank.
On your second day, do more repetitions with a relatively lighter weight. Now do split squats, pull-throughs, fire hydrants, seated pulley rows, and standing dumbbell presses. On this day, do each set for 8 to 12 repetitions. Day 3 is for rest, and then on days 4 and 5, do another full-body workout with different exercises than before, or a variation that targets your muscles from a different angle.
To avoid overtraining, make sure not to go to failure. That means stopping each set one or two repetitions before your technique starts to deteriorate.
Exceptions
Naturally, these rules don’t apply to everyone. If you’re a (competitive) bodybuilder or fitness athlete and you genuinely need mass in your biceps, for example, it might be advisable to include a dedicated biceps day in your training routine. You might choose to do this because it allows you the time and space to train the muscle from various angles and with different rep ranges.
However, if you’re like most women and want a tighter, leaner body with more volume in your glutes, it’s wise to focus on full-body training. Pay attention to all major exercises in every workout and don’t waste time on a special workout for your chest and triceps.
Do you have good experiences with full-body training or are you going to try it after reading this article? I’d love to hear in the comments what it brings you!
- Judge LW1, Burke JR. The effect of recovery time on strength performance following a high-intensity bench press workout in males and females. Int J Sports Physiol Perform. 2010 Jun;5(2):184-96.
- Calder AW1, Chilibeck PD, Webber CE, Sale DG. Comparison of whole and split weight training routines in young women. Can J Appl Physiol. 1994 Jun;19(2):185-99.
