Workout split for women: a 3, 4 and 5 day gym plan

What is the best workout split for women?

A workout split is how you divide your training across the week. The research-backed rule for choosing one is the same for women and men: train each muscle about twice a week, with enough hard sets, on a schedule you will keep. What changes from person to person is the number of days available and which muscles you most want to grow. Many women put glutes, legs and shoulders first, so the split below gives the lower body two full days and keeps upper body work focused on the back and shoulders.

If you are completely new to lifting, the 3 day version is the easiest to stick with. If you already lift and can train four days, start with the 4 day plan. Only move to five days once four feels easy to recover from; more days are not better if they cost you sleep or skipped sessions.

The 4 day workout split for women

Two lower days and two upper days. Lower A leads with the hip thrust and the Romanian deadlift for the glutes and hamstrings. Lower B leads with the squat, the leg press and lunges for the quads and glutes. Upper A is built around pulldowns, rows and presses for the back and shoulders; Upper B adds chest, rear shoulders and arms. Switch to the 3 or 5 day schedule with the tabs.

No barbell squat rack, or not ready for one? Use the goblet squat for the same sets and reps and move to the barbell later. Pulldowns stand in for pull-ups so that every exercise can be loaded from the first session. The rep ranges are wide on purpose: the heavy lifts at the start of each day sit at 6 to 10 reps, isolation work at 10 to 20.

Weekly sets per muscle

Glutes, hamstrings, quads and back all land around 9 to 13 hard sets a week on the 4 day plan, a solid dose for anyone past their first few months. Chest and arms are lower by design. If you want more, add one set to the chest press and to each arm exercise on Upper B before adding anything else.

3, 4 and 5 day workout split for women: the schedule

3 days: lower, upper, lower trains the legs and glutes twice a week and the upper body once. Alternate Upper A and Upper B so every upper exercise comes round every two weeks. For a full body option on three days instead, see the 3 day workout split.

4 days: the standard plan. The rest day on Wednesday keeps the two lower sessions three days apart, so your legs are fresh for Lower B. The weekend is free. For the classic upper lower layout with heavier barbell days, see the upper lower split.

5 days: Glutes C adds a third glute session and extra side and rear shoulder work. It is shorter than the other days, about 40 minutes. Keep it on Saturday, two days after Lower B and two days before Lower A. Other ways to spread five days are in the 5 day workout split.

Do women need a different workout split than men?

No. A 2020 meta-analysis pooled studies in which men and women ran the same resistance training program. For muscle growth (10 studies), there was no significant difference between the sexes. For lower body strength (23 studies) there was no significant difference either, and for relative upper body strength (17 studies) women actually improved more (Roberts et al., 2020). Women start with less muscle and lower absolute strength, but they respond to training at the same rate or faster.

There is one real difference worth knowing. Women are usually less fatigable than men in sustained or repeated contractions at the same relative effort, although the gap depends on the task, the muscle and the speed of contraction (Hunter, 2014). It does not change the split. It is one more reason the 1 minute rests on raises, curls and abduction suit most women well, and a reminder that a set of 12 at a weight you could lift for 15 is not a hard set. Use the RPE scale to judge effort rather than a fixed weight.

What usually differs is the goal. Women more often want stronger glutes and legs and defined shoulders than a bigger chest, which is why this plan gives the lower body two full days and the chest only a few sets. If your goals look different, the same sessions work with the emphasis moved; the 4 day workout split guide shows other layouts.

Should you plan your split around your menstrual cycle?

Cycle syncing is popular, but the evidence does not support rearranging your training around it. A 2020 meta-analysis of 78 studies in women with regular cycles found that performance might be trivially lower in the early follicular phase (the days around your period) than in the rest of the cycle. The effect was so small, the studies so varied and the evidence quality so low that the authors said no general guideline could be made, and recommended a personal approach instead (McNulty et al., 2020).

The muscle-building response looks the same across the cycle too. In a controlled study, 12 young women trained one leg in their late follicular phase and the other in their mid-luteal phase. Muscle protein synthesis rose with exercise to almost the same rate in both phases (1.52 and 1.46 percent per day), with no effect of cycle phase on synthesis or breakdown (Colenso-Semple et al., 2025).

Hip thrusts or squats for glutes?

Both, which is why this plan has a hip thrust day and a squat day. In a 9 week trial with untrained young adults, one group trained only the back squat and the other only the hip thrust, with the same number of sets. Glute growth was similar in both groups. The squat group grew more in the quads and adductors, and each group got stronger mainly in its own lift (Plotkin et al., 2023). The hip thrust also lit up the glutes more on EMG in the first session, but that did not predict who grew more.

So the hip thrust is not magic and the squat is not only a leg exercise. Use the thrust to load the glutes heavily without taxing the lower back, the squat and lunges to grow the quads and glutes together, and hip abduction and kickbacks to add volume for the upper glutes at the end of the session.

How to progress

Use double progression. Pick a weight you can lift for the bottom of the rep range with one to three reps left. Keep it until you reach the top of the range on every set, then add the smallest jump and build the reps back up. Write every set down, so you know what to beat next time.

Before the first lift of each day, do two or three lighter sets; the warm-up calculator gives the weights and the plate calculator loads the bar. Every six to eight weeks, or when two lifts stall for two weeks running, take a lighter week with half the sets, then carry on from your last good numbers.

Frequency matters less than total sets. A meta-analysis of 25 studies found that, with the same weekly sets, training a muscle once or several times a week built similar muscle, and higher frequencies only came out modestly ahead when they added sets (Schoenfeld et al., 2019). Twice a week is simply the easiest way to fit 10 or more sets per muscle into sessions of under an hour, which is what this split is built to do.

Adjusting the split to your goal

For fat loss, lifting is what tells your body to keep its muscle while you eat less, so keep the sets and the weights and let the diet and walking do the rest. Put cardio on rest days or after upper sessions, not right before a lower day.

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