A Recovery-Led Training Week Built Around Hard Compound Work

Andrew Huberman describes six workouts in a typical week, but not a rigid Monday-through-Sunday prescription. Legs begin on Monday or Tuesday specifically because, he says, a workable routine needs flexibility around the rest of a person’s schedule. The governing question after a demanding session is whether he is sufficiently “systematically exhausted” to require more recovery before the next resistance workout.

1. Monday or Tuesday
   Hard leg training, followed by a full rest day.
2. After the rest day
   If leg training was especially intense, Huberman may add 20–30 minutes of moderate-hard cardio before a torso session.
3. The day after torso work
   Near-maximal conditioning: currently fan-bike intervals, though sprinting, rowing, or track work can fill the role.
4. The following days
   Shoulders and arms, then long, slow outdoor movement such as walking, hiking, rucking, jogging, or cycling.

If the leg session was very intense, Huberman may take two days after it. In that case, he does 20 to 30 minutes of cardio, typically a run harder than a jog but short of an all-out effort—what he roughly calls zone three-ish to zone four—before returning to resistance work.

His leg day is short but deliberately hard: calves, hamstrings, quads, and sometimes direct glute work. After warmups, he generally performs two hard working sets to failure, occasionally with assisted repetitions from a training partner. The session combines leg extensions and lying hamstring curls with compound lower-body work: belt squats and, at times, hack squats.

The belt squat is Huberman’s preferred compound movement because it loads the legs without loading the shoulders. He uses a Pit Shark machine, though he notes that other manufacturers make comparable versions. He also points to belt-squat marching—lifting the knees while loaded—as a demanding stabilizing and cardio exercise. Those are his selections, rather than requirements of the overall structure.

For Huberman, a short session is not necessarily an easy one. Properly trained legs, he says, should create enough fatigue that the next day requires rest.

Huberman’s routine uses relatively few working sets, but he explicitly rejects the idea that this makes it an isolation-only programme. Leg extensions and hamstring curls taken to failure once a week are not sufficient on their own, he says; they are paired with hard compound work such as belt squats and hack squats, or hack squats and front squats.

He makes the same distinction in the torso session. Andrew Huberman groups chest, back, rear delts, neck, core, and lower-back work together because he is pursuing strength and posture rather than a bodybuilding split organized around individual muscles.

Pressing usually means a low-incline press, sometimes supplemented by a fly movement. He does two or three warmup sets and two or three work sets, reaching failure somewhere between five and 12 repetitions. Dips are another regular pushing movement. Back work includes rows and chin-ups, while rear-delt work appears either on torso day or during shoulders and arms. Huberman considers rear-delt work useful for shoulder posture and appearance, but supplemental to pressing, pulling, squatting, and other compound movements.

Core work can include hanging L-sits and pikes to L-sits. He may do five sets of five pikes, bringing the ankles toward the hands, lowering slowly, and returning to an L-sit where possible. He also uses a 45-degree hyperextension for lower-back work, though he does not take it to failure. Huberman says strengthening the spinal erectors supports better posture and greater injury resistance. The full torso session, he says, takes an hour at most.

Andrew Huberman treats neck work as strength and stability training for the upper spine. He uses a Hammer Strength four-way neck machine and may do two or three working sets per side, but does not train the neck with the same failure-oriented intensity he applies to other movements. People who have not trained it before, he says, should not rush into high-velocity work.

When he does not have access to the machine, he cites a plate-and-bench method demonstrated by Jeff Cavaliere of ATHLEAN-X, while stressing care with the setup. His practical guidance is to breathe through the nose, keep the tongue on the roof of the mouth, and avoid pushing the chin forward during side bending. He says a jutting chin can lead to jaw clicking; spinal surgeons he knows have told him it can also be a way to slip a disk in the neck.

Huberman says he has trained his neck for a long time, has had no shoulder issues despite having long arms, and does no direct rotator-cuff work. He suspects the neck training has contributed, though he presents that as his own explanation rather than a general rule.

He also distinguishes neck training from the jaw-focused exercises and advertisements associated with “looksmaxxing.” After Ferriss joked about hammering cheekbones, Huberman rejected the premise. An on-screen post from Huberman says companies had used AI dubbing to replace his words in jaw-exercise advertisements, and that he has no financial relationship with or endorsement of those products.

The day after torso work is high-intensity cardio. Andrew Huberman currently uses an Airdyne bike, but equipment is secondary to his standard: choose a modality in which you can apply near-maximal or maximal effort without getting hurt.

On a fan bike, he can manage 30 seconds on and 30 seconds off, but finds that his upper body becomes limiting before his legs. The bike gives his lats a second stimulus after chest-and-back training, though he does not regard it as a hypertrophy workout. When Tim Ferriss asked about using an assault bike for Norwegian 4x4 intervals—four hard minutes followed by three minutes of recovery—Huberman said that format on the bike “sounds like torture.”

His preferred option, when possible, is sprinting outside. Hard rowing, short running sprints, or track intervals can serve the same function: for example, a 400-meter effort, a walking lap, then another 400. The exact interval structure can change. The non-negotiable is that it permits hard effort without undue injury risk.

The following day is shoulders and arms: a shoulder press, biceps and incline curls, hammer curls, overhead triceps extensions, and bench dips. He is not especially committed to lateral raises. The week usually closes with long, slow movement outdoors—walking or hiking with his girlfriend, rucking while listening to a podcast, a bike ride, or a deliberately slow jog in sand.

That final session is not intended as another hard workout. Huberman values it for mental stimulation and for the feeling of beginning the work week after spending substantial time moving outside. Its challenge, he says, is often not going faster.