Bro Splits: Are They Right For You?

You've probably heard of "bro splits", a method for training that targets one muscle group at a time. Bro splits are also called body-split exercises.

Bodybuilders such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Frank Zane used body-part focused workouts to build muscle mass in the 1960s. Joe Weider popularized bro splits with the average Joe by publishing body-split workouts in his fitness magazine. In the second half 20th century, the bro splits were the standard way bodybuilders would train. The idea was that if you dedicated the entire workout to one body part, it would be possible to blast your muscles with tons of stimuli and give them plenty of recovery time before you train them again.

In the early 2000s you started to see some pushback on the bro split. Body-split exercises are often criticized for not stimulating muscles enough. The effectiveness of the bro-split can cause a lot of debate these days.

What's up with the bro splits? Are they still effective or just a thing of the past for bodybuilders? Greg Nukols, a writer for Stronger By Science (an online publication that dissects the scientific literature about training and nutrition) helped me clear up the confusion surrounding the bro split.

What Is A Bro Split?

Bro splits is a classic definition of programming that focuses on one area of the body during a single exercise.

This is a typical example of a bro split program.

Friday: ArmsSaturday and Sunday: Rest

Greg noted that there is some debate over what constitutes a "bro split". You could think of a bro-split as any program where you do not perform full-body exercises. He told me that a push, pull and legs program, for example, could be considered a bro-split because it doesn't train the entire body in one workout.

Arnold Schwarzenegger's physique is often portrayed as one that was molded by using bro splits. If you look at the programming of his daily workouts, he did not focus on one body part. The split was as follows:

Thursday: Chest and Back. Friday: Shoulders.

Many consider this a "bro split" because he worked multiple body parts at once.

In this article we will use the classic definition of bro splits: a training program that targets a specific muscle group during a weekly workout.

Are Bro Splits Effective for Building Muscle and Strength?

Bro splits, as mentioned above were very popular with bodybuilders during the second half 20th century. Bro splits were criticized at the beginning of the 21st Century because studies showed that more frequent muscle training than one per week led to greater strength and muscular gains.

Greg, for example, mentioned that a meta-analysis from 2016 suggested that working muscles twice a week or more was better at driving muscle growth. Researchers have also found that exercising muscles more often than once per week can increase strength.

It appears that bro splits have less effect on muscle and strength gains.

A meta-analysis from 2020 found that there was no statistically significant difference between muscle growth with training frequencies ranging from one to four days per week as long as the total volume of training was equal.

This study concluded that it did not matter whether you performed the same volume of work for each body part over the course of a week in one workout or spread it out across two or more workouts.

You could either do a leg workout with 20 sets total for the legs or split them into two workouts.