About this workout
This is a 10 week upper lower program built for a woman who already knows her way around a barbell and wants a schedule she can actually keep. Four days a week, two upper days and two lower days, with the lower days carrying more volume on purpose. That is not a gimmick. It is what most women asking for an upper lower split are actually after: glutes, hamstrings and quads that get real work, with an upper body that keeps pace instead of getting ignored. You will squat, hinge, press and pull every single week, and you will add weight to the bar as you go.
Who This Program Is For
- Intermediate lifters with at least six months to a year of consistent training who can squat, hinge and press with clean technique under load.
- Women who want a lower body bias without dropping upper body training entirely, which is what happens when people run glute-only programs for a year.
- Anyone who has run a full body plan and is ready for more volume per muscle group without jumping to a five or six day split.
- Lifters with four gym days a week and 60 to 75 minutes per session, who need a plan that fits that window instead of pretending it does not exist.
Who this is NOT for: Total beginners. If you have never loaded a barbell squat or a Romanian deadlift, the volume here will bury you before it builds you. Run a full body beginner plan for three to six months first. This is also not for anyone whose main goal is fat loss and nothing else. Training supports that, your diet drives it, and no split fixes an eating pattern that is not under control.
What You'll Need
- A barbell, plates and a squat rack with an adjustable bench. Every heavy movement in this plan runs off those.
- Dumbbells in a usable range. You need light pairs for lateral raises and heavy pairs for Romanian deadlifts and lunges, and you will outgrow the light end fast.
- A cable station with a rope, a straight bar, a lat pulldown seat and an ankle strap.
- A logbook or an app. Not optional. Progressive overload is not something you can remember, it is something you record.
The Program
Four training days: Upper A, Lower A, Upper B, Lower B. Run them Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, or any pattern that gives you at least one rest day between the two lower sessions. The lower days each carry seven movements weighted toward hips and hamstrings, and they alternate emphasis. Lower A leads with a squat, Lower B leads with a hinge. The upper days split the same way: Upper A is flat pressing and heavy rowing, Upper B is incline pressing and vertical pulling. Rest periods are listed and they are not suggestions. If you cut rest to save time you are cutting the weight on the bar, and the weight on the bar is the point.
| Day 1 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Upper A | |||
| Exercise | Sets | Reps | Rest |
| Barbell Bench Press | 4 | 6-8 | 2 min |
| One Arm Dumbbell Row | 4 | 8-10 each side | 90 sec |
| Seated Barbell Shoulder Press | 3 | 8-10 | 90 sec |
| Seated Cable Rows | 3 | 10-12 | 75 sec |
| Dumbbell Lateral Raise | 3 | 12-15 | 45 sec |
| Tricep Pushdown | 3 | 10-12 | 45 sec |
| Dumbbell Curls | 3 | 10-12 | 45 sec |
| Day 2 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Lower A | |||
| Exercise | Sets | Reps | Rest |
| Barbell Squat | 4 | 6-8 | 2-3 min |
| Hip Thrust (Weighted Hip Extension) | 4 | 8-10 | 2 min |
| Dumbbell Romanian Deadlift | 3 | 10-12, 3 sec down | 90 sec |
| Dumbbell Walking Lunges | 3 | 10-12 each leg | 90 sec |
| Cable Pull Through | 3 | 12-15 | 60 sec |
| Cable Kickbacks (One Legged Kickback) | 3 | 15 each side | 45 sec |
| Standing Barbell Calf Raise | 4 | 12-15 | 45 sec |
| Day 3 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Upper B | |||
| Exercise | Sets | Reps | Rest |
| Incline Dumbbell Bench Press | 4 | 8-10 | 2 min |
| Bent Over Row | 4 | 8-10 | 90 sec |
| Lat Pulldown | 3 | 10-12 | 90 sec |
| Arnold Press | 3 | 10-12 | 75 sec |
| Face Pulls | 3 | 15-20 | 45 sec |
| Cable Rope Overhead Tricep Extensions | 3 | 12-15 | 45 sec |
| Hammer Curls | 3 | 10-12 | 45 sec |
| Day 4 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Lower B | |||
| Exercise | Sets | Reps | Rest |
| Romanian Deadlift | 4 | 6-8 | 2-3 min |
| Barbell Glute Bridge | 4 | 10-12 | 2 min |
| Dumbbell Bulgarian Squat | 3 | 10-12 each leg | 90 sec |
| Standing Cable Leg Curl | 3 | 12-15 each leg | 60 sec |
| Dumbbell Step Ups | 3 | 10-12 each leg | 60 sec |
| Cable Hip Adduction | 3 | 15-20 each side | 45 sec |
| Seated Dumbbell Calf Raise | 4 | 15-20 | 45 sec |
How to Progress
Ten weeks breaks into three build phases and one deload, and each phase asks for something different.
Weeks 1 to 3. Learn the plan and set your baseline. Pick loads that leave you two solid reps short of failure on every working set. Yes, that feels easy in week 1. It is supposed to. Write down every weight and every rep. Add a small jump, 5 pounds on the barbell lifts and one dumbbell size on the rest, any time you hit the top of the rep range on all sets.
Weeks 4 to 6. Now you push. Take the last set of the first two exercises on every day to one rep short of failure. Keep adding weight when you hit the top of the range. On the lower days, add one set to the hip thrust in week 5 and one set to the Romanian deadlift in week 6. That is your volume increase, and it goes where the plan is biased.
Week 7, the deload. This is required, not optional, and skipping it is the most common way people wreck week 8. Keep all four sessions and every exercise, cut every set count roughly in half, and use 60 percent of the loads you handled in week 6. Nothing goes near failure. You should walk out of the gym feeling like you left something on the table, because you did, on purpose. Joints and connective tissue recover slower than muscle does, and this is the week they catch up.
Weeks 8 to 10. This is where the ten weeks pays out. Return to week 6 loads in week 8 and they will feel lighter than they did before the deload. Take the last set of every exercise except the heaviest barbell lift to one rep short of failure. Push for personal bests on the barbell squat, the Romanian deadlift and the bench press in week 10, then take a full week off hard training or restart the plan at your new week 1 numbers.
Warm-Up and Recovery Notes
Five to eight minutes of general work first, incline walking or rowing, just enough to break a light sweat. Then go specific. Before lower days, run through worlds greatest stretch, cat cow stretch and a deep squat hold, then work up to your first heavy set with an empty bar and two or three progressively heavier ramp sets. Before upper days, use band shoulder dislocate and thoracic spine rotation, then ramp the first press the same way. Ramp sets are not working sets and you do not log them. Skipping the ramp on a heavy squat or a heavy hinge is how people find out what a tweaked back feels like.
Recovery is where four days a week earns its keep. Take at least one full rest day between Lower A and Lower B, because your hamstrings and glutes are getting hit hard twice and they need the gap. Sleep seven to nine hours, and understand that if you are consistently sleeping five, no program on earth is going to work the way it should. Walk on off days. If you want extra cardio, keep it to two easy sessions a week and put them on non-lifting days or after lifting, never before a lower day. If a joint hurts sharply rather than just feeling worked, stop that exercise and see someone qualified. Soreness for two days after Lower A in week 1 is normal and it will fade by week 3.
Nutrition and Supplementation
You cannot build muscle out of nothing. Eat enough, and eat enough protein: somewhere around 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of your bodyweight per day is the range that has held up. Get most of it from real food, spread over three or four meals. Carbohydrates are not the enemy here, they are what fuels a seven-exercise lower day, so put a decent portion around your training. If you are trying to add muscle, eat at a slight surplus. If you are trying to lose fat while running this, eat at a modest deficit and expect strength to climb slower, which is a tradeoff and not a failure. Food is fuel for the work you are doing, not something you earn or pay for later.
A short list actually earns its place next to this plan: a quality protein powder to make your daily protein target realistic on busy days, creatine monohydrate at 5 grams a day for strength and training volume, which is the single most studied supplement there is and works exactly the same for women as it does for men, and a daily multivitamin to cover the gaps in a real-world diet.
FAQ
Why do the lower days have more volume than the upper days? Because that is what most women running this split are training for, and because the lower body tolerates and recovers from more volume than the shoulders and elbows do. Your upper days still get four sets on two heavy compounds and full coverage of back, chest, delts and arms. That is enough to keep building. What I will not do is pretend a plan is balanced when the goal is not.
Will four days of heavy lifting make me too big? No, and I am not going to soften that with a lecture. Building visible muscle takes years of hard training and deliberate eating, and it does not happen by accident in ten weeks. What this plan will do is add strength, add some muscle where you are training it hardest, and change the way your body looks under that. If you ever decide it is more muscle than you want, you eat differently and train differently. That is a good problem and it is a long way off.
Can I run this three days a week if my schedule breaks? Yes. Rotate the four sessions through three slots and let the week float, so week 1 is Upper A, Lower A, Upper B and week 2 picks up at Lower B. You will finish the ten sessions of each day in about thirteen weeks instead of ten. That is a better outcome than forcing four days and missing two of them. Consistency beats the perfect schedule every single time.
Questions and results
Ask a coach
Running this program? Tell us what week you are on and how the progression is going. A coach answers every question here.