Strength Coach Reveals the Basic 7-Day Workout Split He Uses to Burn Fat and Build Muscle

11.06.2025 00:36

If you're new to the gym and trying to lose fat while building muscle, chances are you're overwhelmed by all the conflicting advice online. Should you lift heavy four days a week? Go light with high reps six days a week? Do tons of cardio—or skip it entirely? It's enough to make your head spin.

The good news: If you stick to any consistent mix of strength and cardio, you’ll likely see some progress. But if you want to optimize your training and fast-track your results, there is a right way (and a wrong way) to go about it. In a recent interview with Steven Bartlett, Jeff Cavaliere, CSCS, lays out the exact 7-day workout split he recommends for burning fat and building muscle at the same time.

"One of the best ways to train is with an upper-lower split or with a push-pull-leg split," Cavaliere says. "If you were to do a push-pull-legs split, I would then have you include your shoulders along with your chest and triceps on the push day, because it's your only shot in that week to do your shoulder work. As a pushing muscle, it would go on the same day."

Sample 7-Day Workout Split

Monday: Upper body push
Tuesday: Rest or conditioning
Wednesday: Legs
Thursday: Rest or conditioning
Friday: Upper body pull
Saturday: Full body
Sunday: Rest day

One thing Bartlett points out—Cavaliere doesn’t schedule cardio on lifting days. While he says you can combine the two, Cavaliere emphasizes that if your priority is building muscle, you need to treat it that way.

"If your priority again is to build muscle, then prioritize muscle building, put that first [and] do your cardio conditioning work at the end of that workout," he says.

Reps and Sets

According to Cavaliere, the number of sets and reps you do each day depends on how you approach that Saturday full-body day. If you're using it for cardio or light recovery work, you can go hard Monday through Friday. But if you're planning to lift on Saturday, you'll want to keep your overall training volume lower throughout the week to avoid burnout.

"Typically, you're looking for anywhere between nine and 16 sets or so for that muscle group across the week," he says. "So if you were going to do the one workout for chest and you're doing say, three sets per exercise, you're in that range of around three exercises for chest. Now the volume doesn't need to be as high for triceps because you're obviously training your triceps while you're doing bench press."