Weekend Warrior Workout Plan

3 Day Modified Upper/Lower Split for Friday-Sunday

For whatever reason, maybe the weekend is the only time you have to workout. You have a busy work schedule, family, whatever the reason.

This is fine, we can make this work. There is nothing stopping us from making gains on the weekends.

At the end of the day, muscle growth is very scientific and explainable - there is no magic or secrets here. We have certain criteria we must meet and it happens—this is a guaranteed biological fact.

When it comes to muscle growth, all the same principles apply even though we are on a shorter time frame. We can still hit, on average (will explain later), a muscle group close to 2x a week, we can still apply progressive overload and add weight to our lifts - basically, we can do it all, we are just on a shorter time frame.

Setting Up Your Weekend Training

There is not entirely a whole lot of options because we are limited to 3 days. The key focus is going to be on recovery between subsequent sessions during the weekend.

Getting enough training volume won’t really be an issue, anyone can simply have a longer workout with more volume and reach the amount of stimulus we need to grow.

The goal here is to find a balancing act to maximize our growth, which ideally is going to look something like an Upper Lower Upper-type split. The issue here is if we destroy ourselves on Friday’s Upper session, then for Sunday we could easily be too sore and not recovered enough, in turn - do more harm than good.

So as you can see, we have to structure this in a way that’s going to ensure we can actually workout and not need to rest—this is where intelligent programming comes into place.

Another thing to consider - maybe you’re not really trying to make progress, maybe you’re just simply training to maintain while life/our schedules are limiting the days we can lift temporarily.

This issue wouldn’t be nearly as hard, you could essentially do any type of program that hits every muscle group in 3 days, something like a Push Pull Legs plan comes to mind.

While we will be giving up frequency, we will still be doing more (likely even more) than enough to maintain as the body truly only needs a few sets once a week to maintain muscle.

You could also do a single Upper and Lower session—this too would allow you to hit everything once a week and maintain, and if you’re lucky, see progress.

As you can see, really tons of ways we could skin the cat if we are simply looking to maintain muscle.

BUT that’s simple, we’re going to assume you want to make the maximum amount of progress and make good gains on this schedule.

How I Would Set Up Training

So our goal here is maximizing growth and progress, so we’re going to break this down into the best ways I would set up this training.

I have previously done a similar program and had dozens of clients run something very similar and still make progress even with 3 days on in a row and 4 days off in a row.

Do not fret the fact we have 4 days off in a row. This is fine, this is really a non factor - as long as the body is getting enough volume and stimulus during these 3 days, it doesn’t matter.

This throws off a lot of guys mentally, but your muscles do not have emotions or watches and do not care. They just know they are being trained hard 3 days in a row—the extra rest could even be beneficial in terms of reducing CNS fatigue over the long run.

3 Day Modified Upper/Lower