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When first starting with resistance training, many people follow advice from online influencers or mimic the routines of more experienced gym friends. While there's nothing inherently wrong with either approach (provided the routine is safe), there are important considerations that can help you achieve better results in the long run.
Most traditional training programs are organized around body part splits:
There are countless ways to organize your training, and most are viable depending on your specific context—including training goals, experience level, and personal preferences. However, beginners should approach these splits with caution due to several factors.
If you're following the routine of a friend who has been training consistently for years while you're just getting started, there's a significant experience gap to consider. This difference isn't just about your skill level with exercises but also how muscles adapt over time, which affects:
Most body part splits involve multiple exercises per muscle group, typically with 3-4 sets of 10-12 repetitions per exercise at a moderately challenging weight. This training volume can be excessive for untrained muscles. Remember: more work doesn't necessarily mean better results when you are starting out. Doing more than necessary will only increase fatigue and soreness, potentially reducing your training consistency and how much effort you can put into sessions. There is also the risk of developing overuse injuries like tendonitis. Tendons adapt like any other tissue and they need gradual introduction to exercise to avoid getting inflamed too!
The more sustainable approach for many new exercisers is to expose muscles to the minimum amount of stress necessary to stimulate growth, then build on that foundation as progress slows over time using a concept called progressive overload. The minimal threshold we mentioned earlier is more easily accomplished with total body workouts as opposed to the more volume-heavy body part splits. When you're first starting out, you likely need less gym time than you might think:
Remember, this is working smarter and doing less work doesn’t mean ‘lazy’ or ‘uncommited’ like you may hear from some overzealous influencers online, it’s sustainable and it protects your quality of life outside of the gym while you are establishing your new habits surrounding exercise.
If you don't know much about what exercise works which muscle that is fine and you can learn that as you go. For now, you may want to simplify the exercise selection process to something you can picture. In this case, pick a push, pull, squat, hinge and carry. This means an exercise where you push something with your upper body (like a chest press or push-up), an exercise where you pull something (seated row, dumbbell row), a squat (any type of squatting motion), a hinge (something where the hips hinge like in a kettlebell swing), and a carry (pick up a pair of dumbbells and walk for a set distance). This can be built on further by adding in vertical pushes and pulls. A vertical push would be something like a shoulder press, and a vertical pull would be something like a lat pulldown or pull-up. This way of looking at exercises can be easier if you are completely unfamiliar with what muscles are worked by different exercises. We will be addressing this in a series of articles later as well.
Now let’s talk about how to progress from that minimum stress once you stop seeing results (always double check diet and stress levels first when this happens). Let's say you begin with three full-body resistance training sessions per week, using one exercise per muscle group at three sets of ten repetitions (with approximately three repetitions in reserve). How should you progress from there?
Adding an entire extra training day might be too drastic at first. Instead, consider a more gradual approach:
As you can see, this allows you to gradually increase the amount of work being done without spiking it. To take the example a step further, you might add a fourth day that's either shorter or focuses on a particular muscle group you want to develop (glutes, chest, arms, etc.). We could sit here and give examples all day, but we can always revisit progression in a future article.
Body part splits become more appropriate as you advance in your training. They allow experienced lifters to:
Time management is another factor for using body part splits. Imagine trying to do 3-4 exercises per muscle group in a full-body workout with uniform quality and effort across all exercises—you'd be at the gym forever! For the average person, the quality of your repetitions would decline as fatigue accumulated before even reaching the half-way point. Too much work beyond your current capacity takes a much longer time to fully recover from between sessions which could undermine your progress for the entire week.
Muscle responds primarily to mechanical tension, with total training volume being a key proxy in estimating that tension. Training volume refers to the total sets and repetitions performed, often further quantified by total tonnage which includes the weight (weight × reps × sets) across all exercises in the session.
For example:
When viewed this way, imagine several exercises with their tonnage calculated applied to a specific muscle. When quantifying how much work is being done, it gives a clear picture of how much work is actually being done and why beginners might want to limit themselves to one or two exercises per muscle group per session when first starting out. Spreading this volume across multiple full-body sessions offers several advantages for the beginner:
Full-body sessions offer another significant advantage for beginners: flexibility. When you're first establishing an exercise routine, you're more likely to miss occasional sessions. With full-body workouts:
This prevents the accumulated fatigue that can lead to burnout and reduced performance across multiple sessions.
Just because experienced lifters and influencers have been training with consistent body part splits for years doesn't mean that's where you should start. If you can start that way and find it sustainable, great! For everyone else, begin with full-body training to build a foundation, then gradually progress toward more specialized splits as your experience, recovery capacity, and goals evolve.
Remember that sustainable progress is a much better idea than training too hard, getting burnt out and quitting. Start where you are, not where others are. Exercise does not have a bottom threshold of effectiveness, meaning anything you do to start will yield benefit so long as you progress over time as your body adapts.
Looking for a place to start? Our course has a whole chapter on the basics of program design
