In the halcyon days of my PhD I wrote a short history of the ‘bro split’ for Barbend and it was largely fine, which is arguably the worst description you can give. Was it good? Was it bad? No no… it was fine.

Basically, I did what everyone online tends to say. Lifters did full body in the first half of the twentieth-century and then body part splits emerged before finally the days of the week aligned to bodyparts (Monday Chest, Tuesday Back etc.). Now with less time on my hands but a need to distract myself from the crushing reality of working in higher education, I spent some time going back into the archives. When you read the magazines, wall charts and books lifters left behind, the story becomes a smidge trickier to explain.

What became clear was the ‘bro split’ was not invented. It came about over decades, as physique sports and standards slowly became more specialised. So rather than a story of ‘Joe Weider and Arnold invented everything’, it is a story of what happens when changes in equipment, aesthetics and sports, not to mention steroids, influence how we train.

What Did Lifters do in the ‘Olden Days’?

I wrote a whole book about fitness in the nineteenth-century (cheap plug!), so I’ll keep it short. During the 1800s, most people trained in gymnastic and calisthenic movements. This meant lots of bodyweight exercises done in whole body workouts i.e. training the lower and upper body in the same workout.

From c. the 1860s and 1870s some form of weight training became more popular in Europe and the United States, but for a very small number of trainees. This changed massively in the 1890s when a wonderfully moustachioed Prussian strongman, Eugen Sandow kickstarted the ‘physical culture’ movement. For us today ‘physical culture’ was our modern gym culture in utero.

Sandow, and the first generation of fitness entrepreneurs in the early 1900s largely promoted full-body workouts because that’s what people before them had done. Fitness follows traditions and the early groundwork laid by Sandow and others lasted into the 1940s and even 1950s.

Sandow, as I’ve noted a LOT, was fairly cute as an entrepreneur. He sold a lightweight dumbbell system as the key to his success, despite using heavy weight training privately. His Strength and How to Obtain It (1897) was a breakout success, and sold around the world. In it, he promoted whole body workouts using his dumbbells alongside a vaguely written heavy weight system encompassing snatches, presses, and the bent press.

A quick survey of his workout is below

SANDOW · 1897
Progress by adding reps.

• Alternating curl, start 50 per arm, add 5 each session
• Reverse curl, start 25, add 2
• Raises and fly-style moves, 10 to 15, add 1 every few days
• Push-ups, start very low, add 1 every three days
• Separate from the beginner course, one-hand snatch, slow press from the shoulder, two-hand lift to the shoulder, bent press

By the 1930s lifters no longer relied on Sandow’s light dumbbells. By this point progressive resistance training using dumbbells and barbells was now the norm. It is here we turn to Mark Berry, a US weightlifting coach in the 1930s and the man who largely created the 20 rep squat workout. Like others Berry sold a mail-order workout course. These courses in 2026 seem quaint but were actually pretty awesome.

You’d get a course on month one, follow it for the next four weeks and not do a thing until the next letter from Berry came. Given that an algorithm will feed you multiple workouts in a single doomscroll, I much prefer this ‘slow cooking’ approach. But back to Berry’s workouts. Stage one of his 1930s charts, showing the legendary John Grimek, encompassed one circuit of 15 lifts. Three sets of five reps to start. Each week you added a rep until you hit 3 x 10. Then you’d add more weight and go back to 3 x 5.

By stage three you got the Olympic lifts as that was the primary sport of the day. What’s cool about Berry’s course was that he also used a specialization subtext. You’d spend ten weeks doing arms, rest a week, then work the abs or the back etc.

MARK BERRY · c. 1930
Mail-order course. Stage 1 is whole-body. Specialisation appears as multi-week blocks, not a weekly split.

• Stage 1 lifts. Two-arm curl, lying press, bent-over row, press behind neck, pullover, full squat, shrug, straddle squat, leg raises, one-arm press, kettlebell swing, forearm wind-up, wrestler’s bridge, reverse curl, two-arm press
• Loading. 3 × 5, build to 3 × 10, then add weight
• Stage 3. Clean and press, snatch, clean and jerk, plus one-hand lifts and bent press
• Specialisation. 8–10 weeks on one region (arms, waist, neck, back/shoulders), rest a week, rotate

Bob Hoffman, despite his poor relationship with Berry (Hoffman once attacked him on a bus), followed a similar approach. Surviving York Barbell charts from 1938 have the same idea. Course 1 was one set of ten lifts after some power snatches. Upper body work started at 6 reps and legs at 8 reps. Over time you increased the reps, and then the weight. Over the course of a week, you’d cycle through four Hoffman courses.

That meant Monday was course 1, Tuesday course 2, Wednesday course 3 etc.

YORK BARBELL COURSE NO. 1 · c. 1938
Hoffman / York wall charts. One set after a light power snatch. Double progression.

• Two-arm curl
• Two-arm press
• Deep knee bend on toes
• Two-arm pullover
• Stiff-legged deadlift
• Supine press
• Side bend
• Straddle or Jefferson lift
• 9. Calf raise or straddle hop
• Shrug
• Upper body start at 6 reps, legs 8–12. Add a rep every other session until you roughly double the start, then add weight.

Okay Okay but What did the Aesthetic Stars Do?

People will usually read the above and then ask me about what the champions did. The question is obviously, what champions? The US Weightlifter Louis Abele did specialisation programs during the 1940s where he’d hammer legs for 2-3 months exclusively before doing a block of back work etc. But most people don’t care anymore about their Olympic totals like Abele did. They care about their abs.

But we cannot separate one from the other. As John Fair showed in his amazing book, Mr. America, 1940s and ‘50s bodybuilding was effectively handcuffed to Olympic weightlifting. Bodybuilding shows took place after weightlifting contests, and some shows, like the Mr. America contest, stipulated that you had to be an Olympic weightlifter. This explains why many famous bodybuilders from this era, like John Grimek, were weightlifters.

So the physique structure was linked to weightlifting. But so too were the mindsets. Most people relied on power movements first, and bodybuilding movements second. As any strength athlete will tell you, big movements (be they Olympic or powerlifting movements), suck. They tire you out when done properly and limit how much work you can do in the gym. Open with a compound movement and heavy weights and chances are you aren’t going to spend lots of time on accessories after. In this system, full body workouts made sense as you could spread fatigue across a week.

Reg Park, the man who inspired Arnold, published, and used, a 5×5 full body system around the compound movements, done three times a week. In May 1951, Steve Reeves’ published one long-full body workout done three times a week in Weider’s Your Physique. You did 3 sets of 8 to 12 reps and, like Grimek was fond of saying, you just trained everything.

REG PARK BEGINNER 5×5 · early 1950s

• Workout. Squat 5×5 · bench press 5×5 · deadlifts 5×5

STEVE REEVES · May 1951
Three days a week. One long full-body session, about 3 × 8–12.

• Incline dumbbell press · breathing front squat supersetted with laterals
• Seated barbell curl · front raise · bent-over row · one-arm row
• Split or lunge · good morning · French press · high-rep calves · bench press

JOHN GRIMEK · published templates and his own description
Three days a week, typically 3 × 10, lifts rotating.

• Monday / Wednesday / Friday full body
• Pressing rotates. Bench one day, incline or dips another
• Squatting rotates. Back squat one day, front squat and stiff-leg another
• Extra isolation only after the main session if a body part lagged

Hoffman printed the occasional specialisation week too, but his focus was always full-body.

The Weider Effect

Now we come to Joe and Ben Weider, the Canadian brothers who transformed bodybuilding. They were the ones who looked at existing bodybuilding shows, and asked why weightlifting was there in the first place? During the 1940s and 1950s, bodybuilders began to gripe about how restrictive physique sports were. You had to do some form of Olympic weightlifting, compete in the early hours of the morning after weightlifting was finished and, in some high profile contests like the Mr. America, win on the muscularity rounds but lose on the personality round (yes really).

The Weiders saw their chance and took it. Their bodybuilding shows would be about the physique. Nothing more, nothing less. With weightlifting no longer a consideration, the compound movements were no longer as important and specialisation was. So, seeking to distinguish himself, Weider focused on body parts over bodies.

From the late 1940s Joe and Ben Weider came after Hoffman with supplements, magazines and their own contests. Part of the pitch was a set of named methods Hoffman was quieter about. Flushing, cheating on certain lifts, multiple sets for one muscle, and the claim that Joe trained the champions. Standing apart from Hoffman meant selling a different week.

His 1954 course, The Muscle Building Courses of the Champions, was a clear example. Beginners did full-body workouts three days a week but intermediates shifted to upper and lower days (Upper on Monday/Thurs and lower on Tues/Friday). Now the same course also included a Power & Bulk workout that was full-body done three days a week but the split workout was there.

WEIDER BEGINNER · 1954 / Chart I family
3–4 × 8–12.

• Bench press · bent-arm lying lateral · stiff-arm pullover
• Strict curl · lying triceps extension
• Bent row · bent-over lateral · side lateral · front lateral
• Neck-resistance press-down · wrist curl
• Flat-footed squat · standing calf raise · leg raise

WEIDER INTERMEDIATE · 1954
Mostly 2 × 9.

• Monday upper. Wrestler’s bridge 2×10 · cheat curl SS lying triceps curl 2×9 · peak-contraction knee dumbbell curl SS seated dumbbell triceps 2×9 · wide-grip bench SS combination laterals 2×9 · bent-arm laterals SS upright row 2×9 · bent-over row 2×9 · deadlift 2×9
• Tuesday lower. Side-bend and sit-up supersets · squat supersetted with toe raise · iron-boot extensions and curls · straddle lift · goose step
• Wednesday rest
• Thursday / Friday. Different upper and lower menus, good mornings, shrugs, shoulder squat, forearm curls
• Weekend off

WEIDER POWER & BULK · 1954
Same catalogue. Full body again. Three days a week, 2 × 6 heavy, about two minutes’ rest. Run for three months.

• Shoulder bridge · cheating barbell curl · deadlift off boxes · cheating standing lateral
• Bench squat · cheating standing triceps extension · cheating bent-over row · power prone press (lockout)

Steroids, isometrics and the magazine body

Body part splits made sense for bodybuilding. People could add more volume to individual body parts and, critically, could do so in a new gym environment. Three years before Joe and Ben created the Mr. Olympia, which they stressed was just about physiques, the Universal gym machines hit the market.

Prior to 1962 equipment in fitness tended to be pretty simple. You used barbells, dumbbells and iron boots alongside some very basic rope and pulley set ups. After 1962 machines became more and more popular. They allowed people to train intensely and safely while isolating the muscle. A simple example is go all out in a squat. If you’ve done it right, your workout is close to done. Now go all out on the leg press. Chances are you can rest, and then move to the leg extension machine, then the leg curl, then the calf raise etc.

I recently chatted with Eric Helms (who is the man) and he raised this point. When you no longer push compound movements to excess, you can really add more volume using machines. And annoyingly, Eric’s point changed my perspective. You see usually I would say that body part splits came about because anabolic steroids hit bodybuilding in the 1950s and early 1960s. Steroids made people recover quicker (true), add more volume (jury’s out) and thus train harder. The reality is probably a combination of the two.

On steroids, everyone has an opinion as to when they first hit the fitness industry. What I can tell you, based on research by fitness historians far smarter than I, is that Soviet lifters were definitely using them in the mid-1950s, and a pathway opened between a US doctor, John Ziegler and York Barbell for steroid use by 1958. People liked to pretend they got bigger thanks to isometrics and supplements. The reality was steroids BUT also a shift in bodybuilding standards which allowed athletes to just train for aesthetics.

This is the background context for body-part splits. We also need a healthy dose of scepticism about how people actually trained. Looking at Sergio Oliva, The Myth, and his training articles, I found his supposed workouts in 1968 and 1969 that directly contradicted each other. To Oliva’s credit, he later called Weider out for crediting him with workouts that he never did. While Weider’s magazines may have published suspect articles during the 1960s, they were publishing predominantly body-part splits.

Of course, there were holdouts but even they reinforced the importance of machines. After Universal hit fitness, through Vic Tanny’s gym franchises, Arthur Jones created his Nautilus machines. Jones was a smart dude. He created a new way of working out, ‘high intensity training’ that could only be done with his machines. In “The Ideal Workout” (Muscular Development, June 1970) he promoted whole-body workouts done with absolute intensity.

One of the things that genuinely grinds my gears atm is how many people misrepresent Jones or Mike Mentzer’s workouts online. It is incredibly difficult to do HIT with dumbbells or barbells. Between forced reps, slow concentrics and pushing to all out muscular failure, it is a system made for machines. But I digress…

ARTHUR JONES · June 1970
Full body, two or three days a week, one or two all-out sets, about an hour.

• Squat · calf raise · press · chins · bench · dips · curls · triceps work · wrist curls · stiff-leg deadlift
• Machine versions of the same idea chain pullover, row, pulldown, chin and dip

Jones, and his followers like Ray and Mike Mentzer, rallied against the body part splits used in the 1970s and 1980s. Name a Mr. Olympia winner from this time and chances are they did a body part split. This included Arnold Schwarzenegger whose 1985 Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding is occasionally seen as the quintessential bro split.

Book Two, Chapter 3, Level I is the week people now call the Arnold split. Six days training, with Sunday off and abs every training day. Default work is four sets of eight to twelve unless a power pyramid is listed. Chest, back and thighs each get trained twice. A Level I week runs something like twenty-four working sets for chest, as much again for thighs, and a big arm day done twice. Level II puts the same lifts into two longer sessions so each bodypart gets hit three times. It was the old full-body frequency wearing a split’s clothes.

The contest layer in the same book, high-set work, double-split, two sessions a day, is a different workout again. So when people say Golden Era bodybuilders ran bro splits, they are usually remembering this volume.

ARNOLD · ENCYCLOPEDIA LEVEL I · 1985
Six days, Sunday off. Default 4 × 8–12 unless noted. Each major muscle twice a week.

• Monday / Thursday, chest and back. Bench, incline, pullovers · chins to a total of 50 reps · bent-over rows · deadlifts 3 × 10/6/4 · crunches 5 × 25
• Tuesday / Friday, shoulders, arms, forearms. Clean and press, dumbbell laterals, upright rows 3 × 10/6/4, push press 3 × 6/4/2 · standing barbell curl, seated dumbbell curl, close-grip press, standing barbell extension · wrist curl and reverse wrist curl · reverse crunches 5 × 25
• Wednesday / Saturday, thighs, calves, lower back. Squat, lunge, leg curl · standing calf raise 5 × 15 · stiff-leg deadlift and good morning, each 3 × 10/6/4 · crunches 5 × 25

ARNOLD · ENCYCLOPEDIA LEVEL II · 1985
Same lifts in two longer sessions. Each region three times a week.

• Monday / Wednesday / Friday. Chest, back, thighs, calves
• Tuesday / Thursday / Saturday. Shoulders, lower back, arms

ARNOLD CONTEST / DOUBLE-SPLIT CHEST AND BACK SESSION
Same book’s contest register. Often two sessions a day, six days. No rest inside the supersets.

• Bench 1 × 30–45 plus 5 × 6, supersetted with wide-grip behind-neck chins 5 × 15–8
• Incline 5 × 10–15 supersetted with T-bar row 5 × 10–15
• Flyes 5 × 10–15 supersetted with wide-grip barbell row 5 × 10–15
• Dips 5 × 15 supersetted with close-grip chins 5 × 12 · pullovers 5 × 15–20

Arnold’s finger print remains all over modern fitness. When Tom Platz came to Gold’s Gym after Arnold’s peak, he recalled everyone doing the Arnold split. Between Arnold and, more importantly Joe Weider, body part splits, or ‘bro splits’ became the norm for aesthetics. During the 1990s and 2000s, magazines repeated it ad nauseam to the point where whole bodies for aesthetics seemed downright radical.

Does Any of This Matter?

Full body workouts are, in some quarters, making a come back but it is undeniable body-parts tend to reign supreme. Admittedly a bit dated now, but a 2013 survey in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that 127 competitive male bodybuilders, all used splits and none used whole-body sessions. Off-season, 68.8 percent trained each muscle once a week on a five-day split, and 31.2 percent used a three-day split and hit each muscle twice. Four to five exercises per muscle, three to six sets each, mostly seven to twelve reps. By 2013 the bro split was what most competitors actually do, half a century after Weider printed his first four-day upper/lower.

Things have obviously changed since then, as evidence based communicators have, in online worlds, made ‘bro splits’ (another name for the body part split) a dirty word. Others, in less viral phrases, stress the need for nuance. My stance, in all of this, is that it doesn’t matter, and here’s why.

People are relying on published workouts, in fitness magazines or books. This is like listening to The Rock during the 1990s and believing that he really is going ‘lay the smackdown’ on his opponent. Fitness workouts have, for an incredibly long time, been half-truth, half-fiction. The more complicated, the easier it sells. But, let’s drink from the milk of human kindness, and ignore that for a moment to acknowledge that people tend to train longer than 12 weeks.

What I mean by this is that there is no quintessential ‘Arnold workout’ or ‘Ronnie workout’. These men trained for decades, shifting their focus between high and low volume, peak seasons and off-seasons, power sessions and hypertrophy movements etc. They evolved as their needs and demands changed.

I completely understand why some people like to look at pre-steroid workouts and decide to follow them over body-part splits (which are rooted in steroid cultures). But, and listen closely, there is no, and has never been, a perfect system. Steve Reeves trained for close to five decades. Is there a Reeves system? Nope. There are, however, patterns.

And that is the most important thing. For over a century people have stressed regularity and progressive overload. They have also worked out for a specific reason in mind. Bodybuilders turned to body part splits because the demands of their sport changed. When the sport had a weightlifting component, they did Olympic lifts. When it didn’t, they no longer bothered. They used machines, not because they were better than free-weights, but because it suited their goals.

So, looking at a hundred years of workouts, what is the lesson? Train with purpose, train regularly and train hard. Voila!