5-Day Body-Part Split

The classic bodybuilding split — one muscle group per day, each getting a dedicated 60-75 minute session of focused work. Chest / Back / Shoulders / Legs / Arms rotated across five weekdays.

Intermediate lifters who prefer the focus of one-muscle-per-day training. Works well for people whose gym access makes 5-day weeks realistic and who respond to high-volume localised work.

Five sessions per week, one muscle group per day. Each session: 13-18 working sets spread across 4-6 exercises, mostly 8-12 reps, with 12-15 on calves and lateral raises and a 5/5/3 deadlift opening the Back day.

Every slot here prescribes a fixed rep count, and moving up is your call: when a weight starts feeling easy across all your work sets, take it up next time. This split carries no progression engine — nothing advances on its own and VALDA never changes a weight for you. It does still watch: hold the same weight on a lift for two sessions and it offers a step up, exactly the nudge it offers on any lift you log, in a programme or out of one. The offer is a prompt to think, not an instruction, and ignoring it costs nothing.

The 5-day body-part split emerged from 1970s-80s bodybuilding practice and has been continuously refined in magazine and Internet training content since. No single author — it's a community standard.