For many people starting their fitness journey, choosing a training split can feel overwhelming. Push, pull, legs or full-body? Bro split or bodybuilder split?
The answer matters. How you train – and why you’re training, whether for fat loss or maximal strength – sets the tone for the months ahead. It’s a question Dr Mike Israetel encounters frequently, and one he addresses in his latest YouTube video. In it, the sports scientist and competitive bodybuilder outlines the thinking behind his own ‘floating split’, what it involves and how it helped him reach a lean 6% body fat.
In the video, Dr Israetel describes the floating split as a way to structure training around declining energy and mounting fatigue – two realities during intense fat-loss phases and progressive overload.
Explaining how he programmed the final ‘mesocycle’ (a three- to six-week block of training) of a wider fat-loss phase, he outlines a six-session structure built around pull, legs and push, repeated twice, with a maximum of two rest days between cycles.
Unlike traditional splits anchored to specific weekdays – chest on Monday, arms on Friday and legs when you get around to it – the floating split runs on a rolling schedule. Rest days shift depending on fatigue and external demands.
On average, this results in six training days per week, though it may flex to five or seven depending on recovery and life stress.
‘You don’t want to hate your split, because in a fat-loss phase, you hate enough stuff at that point. You get really psychologically and physiologically beat up at the end,’ says Dr Israetel. ‘A floating split completely solves that problem.’
In his example, the first pull session centres on vertical and horizontal pulling: weighted and non-weighted pull-ups, machine chest-supported rows, dumbbell seated lateral raises, cable curls and cable wrist curls.
The following leg session begins with barbell good mornings, moves to leg press and finishes with a 30-rep leg extension set.
For the push day, Dr Israetel prioritised flat bench pressing (using a cambered barbell), overhead cable extensions, dumbbell incline curls and a 75-rep set of dumbbell lateral raises. For the incline curls, he used a method designed to maximise fatigue within a fixed rep target.
‘The first [set] of 12 is close to failure, the next one’s maybe 10 and two, then nine and maybe three, then eight, and then two, and then two,’ he says. ‘All completed to make sure it’s 12 every single time. Brutal.’
The second half of the six-day cycle follows the same structure but swaps certain movements to reduce joint stress. That includes Smith machine rows and lying cable front raises on pull day, lying leg curls and belt squats on leg day, and machine chest presses and barbell skull crushers on push day.
‘Your ego is not going to like it,’ Dr Israetel says, ‘but the results will love it.’
