Comparing 3 popular Hypertrophy splits
1) Defining the splits
A good training split does two things:


1)
2)
trains muscles with enough frequency to cause good gains
lets muscles heal between each session
Upper lower, can be done 4x-6x a week
PLP, trains chest triceps and front deltoids one day, trains lower body next day, trains back , biceps
and rear and side deltoids next day
3) Full body, can be done 2x-6x a week
2) Pros and Cons of Upper/Lower
Pros: Simple, lets upper get a great session without fatigue poisoning from legs, can scale from 4x-6x a week
Cons: Not all upper body muscles heal as fast as others (e.g. biceps and forearms can take higher frequency so
you will have to regulate how hard you train each muscle, particularly training the muscles that heal much
faster much harder per session, maybe even a bit more than optimal and maybe scaling back on muscles that
may take long to heal), legs and upper may not heal at the same rate as each other(your legs might heal
enough for two sessions whereas your upper may recover enough for three sessions therefore this workout
provide different stimulation for every person), doing all upper body in one session might be a lot bigger for
strong folks this means that training quads hams and calves its hard but with 8-12 set per session you can get a
lot done however the upper body consists of a lot of muscles and doing the whole upper body in one session
can be a lot which is where splits which are more finely split more start to become more relevant for growing
upper body.
3) Pros and Cons of PLP
Pros : you can really hammer the upper body because you split it into two sessions which is essentially four
sessions a week which is great, whereas the most you can get in a week for upper body in upper lower is three
times a week because it is UL, UL, UL. And the legs are being trained twice a week which is more in line with
how fast they recover. It is also a great fit from an organisational perspective of muscles not interfering with
each other e.g. you can be very fatigued from push session without affecting your pulling session. It can
prevent people from going overboard on volume and intensity etc which you can do in other splits. IT helps
you heal adequately from hard, high volume, heavy training by limiting training to 2x a week per muscle which
is a needed thing for many overzealous people.
Cons: Not all push or pull muscles heal as fast as one another. Legs and upper might not heal at the same rate
either but that only applies to legs and the smaller body upper muscles because the upper body is technically
trained twice as often as legs, this is a problem that only affects the small growing muscles, the muscles in the
upper body that take a while to heal, this is a perfect split. Only 2x a week frequency for smaller upper muscles
(and calves) might not be enough. Cannot scale as it only works 6x a week.
4) Pros and Cons of Full Body
Pros: Pumps up the frequency which is great for gains especially in the short term. Advanced version
(e.g. the Jeff Nippard or Eric Helms version) lets you train muscles exactly in proportion to the healing
time. It can also break up hard to train muscles like quads and hams into different sessions if needed,
some people find it too hard to do a leg day where they can stimulate both hamstring and quads
equally. This is because on a leg day whatever muscle group you train first limits the second one
significantly for example if you do 6 sets of leg press and 3 sets of squats, however you train
hamstrings may have a really small stimulus compared to the muscle trained prior. So, what you can
do in this program you could do quads with some upper body stuff and next day hams with some
upper body stuff without having to do a crazy leg day. Because you can do them frequently, you can
break them up into smaller volumes instead of doing quad sessions with tons of sets, you may be able
to do 4 sessions but with a little less volume each sessions but still meeting the same total weekly
volume. Finally, this design can scale to any frequency between 2x and 6x a week. This means it is a
very flexible program meaning if a beginner does 2x frequency and love this training you could up the
scale to 3x a week when you feel ready and so on until you get to 6x a week when you can start using
the advanced techniques of not necessarily training everything every time but rather when it heals.
Cons: Can be easy to overdo volume, fatigue and injury especially to the joints. Your quads may
recover adequality, but your knees might not over the long term. This is why you start a block with
relatively low frequency and increase the frequency every block with the last block being very high
frequency and then the block after is a re-sensitization phase where you pull back and everything
heals and then you start at the low end again. It also requires you to use more machines in any single
day meaning it may be time consuming. Furthermore, you must do a lot of warming up since you
must warm up for each transition from pulling exercise to pushing exercise. This means the warmup
to working sets is not that great for training, this may be a problem for those who don’t have a lot of
time. It can make you train gnarly parts like quads, spreading out the suffering vs one and done. Some
people would rather get it over with instead of having to constantly hit different parts of the leg
throughout the week. Finally, it can be confusing to figure out which muscle to train on which day
especially with little experience. You must know how your bodies muscles recovers and how often
training them will work for you.
5) How YOU might choose
1) Fresh beginners (0-3 months of training):
 FULL body WHOLE BODY 2x-4x week is a great idea
2) More experience:
 Consider upper lower split for simplicity and if you need more time to heal and like the
structure
3) More experience (intermediate stage):
 Consider PLP if you need more volume and loading to grow especially for upper body
4) More experience (once you’ve been doing PLP for some time now):

Start to insert more faster healing muscles e.g. adding biceps on push days as well at the
end of the workout. Or calves x4 a week. This can all be done while still maintaining the
PLP training split essentially becoming “advanced full body (Helms/nippard)”
5) Most experience:
 Consider multiple daily sessions to target all muscle groups with due diligence. This is
not for anyone except those interested in super optimization and are dedicated to
growing muscle.