The strength secret: Why a full-body workout split is perfect for your muscles

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Gym splits—the method that helps you train different muscle groups on different days—can either be personally tailored, or one can just follow a popular split like the push-pull-legs system. However, it is not necessary to follow any one split religiously.

You could choose a single muscle split once you have mastered enough exercise variations and built strength. You could drop a cardio routine at the start or the end or in between your split, or you could follow something more advanced like the French contrast method, where one explosive exercise is followed by a mirroring hypertrophy version of the same exercise. One thing that goes under the radar a little bit is the full body split—where you train your full body every day.

A video by fitness trainer Jeremy Ethier, in which he speaks of new research on the efficacy of doing a full body workout every gym day is quite compelling. Ethier ranks all the splits with the help of Eric Trexler, a researcher in human movement science. Trexler’s Instagram page is devoted to busting fitness myths with science.

“Unlike the 3-day push-pull-legs workout split, which hits each muscle just once per week, the full-body split trains every muscle 3 times per week," Ethier writes in his blog. A paper titled, The Resistance Training Dose-Response: Meta-Regressions Exploring The Effects Of Weekly Volume and Frequency On Muscle Hypertrophy And Strength Gain, published in October 2024, states that resistance training can boost muscle strength by an additional 50%. Ethier makes it simpler to understand.