Push Pull Legs: The Complete Guide to the PPL Split

Push Pull Legs (PPL) is easy to explain and surprisingly easy to place wrongly.

The split itself is only a distribution: pressing exercises on one day, pulling on another, lower body on the third. It says nothing yet about how many sets you need, how often you have to train, or whether PPL beats a full-body or upper/lower plan.

That distinction matters. A good split organises training. It does not automatically produce better results.

What is Push Pull Legs?

PPL sorts your exercises into three categories:

Push: Exercises for mainly chest, front and side delts, and triceps. Typical movements are bench press and overhead press.

Pull: Exercises for back, rear delts and biceps. That includes vertical pulling like pull-ups and horizontal pulling like rows.

Legs: Lower-body work for quads, hamstrings, glutes and calves. Ab work is often added here, though it does not have to sit on leg day.

The practical advantage lies in the grouping: muscles that work together in the same movements usually land in the same session. After bench press the triceps are already involved and can be trained on directly; the whole pressing musculature then gets time to recover together until the next push day.

That makes PPL easy to follow. It does not yet make the split better than other arrangements.

Exercise distribution

Push day

Pull day

Leg day

The tables are not a mandatory catalogue. A push day does not need five different exercise types, for instance, if your weekly volume and priorities are already covered by four exercises.

How many exercises per day make sense, what order they should sit in, and which muscles routinely slip through: PPL exercise selection.

PPL 3 days vs. 6 days

Your number of training days mainly changes two things in PPL: how often a session type comes back, and how much work you have to pack into a single session.

That should not be confused with the claim that a particular frequency automatically produces more muscle growth. At comparable weekly volume, meta-analyses arrive at very similar hypertrophy outcomes across different training frequencies. Higher frequency is mainly useful when it helps you spread your volume across shorter and better-quality sessions.

3-day PPL

On three training days, push, pull and legs each run once per week.

That can work. A muscle does not stop growing after seven days just because it was trained directly only once. The drawback is more practical: if you want higher weekly volume for chest, back or legs, a large share of it has to fit into a single session.

If you only have three days, a full-body plan is therefore the simpler solution for many. The work spreads across several contacts per week, and the main lifts can be practised more often. That is a question of organisation and specificity — not proof that 3-day PPL is inherently ineffective.

6-day PPL

On six days the complete cycle repeats twice a week.

Schedule: Mon Pull — Tue Push — Wed Legs — Thu Pull — Fri Push — Sat Legs — Sun rest.

This is where PPL plays to its organisational strength: you get two push, two pull and two leg sessions and can spread weekly volume without making any single session very long.

The price is obvious: six training days remain six training days. The split only works better for your life if you actually want to hold that frequency reliably.

5-day PPL (rolling)

Week 1: Pull-Push-Legs-Pull-Push. Week 2: Legs-Pull-Push-Legs-Pull.

The cycle does not end on Sunday, it simply keeps rolling. Each session type therefore comes around roughly 1.7 times per week on average.

That is a clean solution when five days fit reliably and shifting weekdays do not bother you. On five fixed days, the upper/lower + PPL hybrid offers an alternative in which the sessions land on the same day every week.

4-day PPL (rolling)

The cycle can keep rolling on four days too: week 1 Pull-Push-Legs-Pull, week 2 Push-Legs-Pull-Push.

On average, each session type then comes around roughly 1.3 times per week. That is not automatically too little; it is just less symmetrical than a 6-day PPL.

The real catch is organisation: “Monday = pull” no longer holds permanently. If fixed weekdays matter more to you, an upper/lower split on four days is usually easier to plan.

How much volume per muscle group?

There is no magic set range that is optimal for every muscle and every lifter.

But the evidence shows a clear basic pattern: more sensible weekly volume can produce more muscle growth, though with diminishing additional returns. Current overview work sees around ten or more demanding sets per muscle per week as a usable starting point for hypertrophy — not as a universal floor or ceiling.

How much you actually need depends on training status, exercise selection, proximity to failure, indirect loading and your previous volume history, among other things. Which is exactly why 10–20 sets per muscle group per week is better understood as orientation than as a target corridor every muscle has to hit.

In a 6-day PPL, the practical advantage is spreading that weekly volume across two sessions. Instead of twelve chest sets on one day, you might do six on the first and six on the second push day. That often keeps the later sets more productive and the individual session manageable.

The Reddit PPL (metallicadpa)

One of the best-known PPL plans on the internet was published on r/Fitness in 2015 as “A Linear Progression Based PPL Program for Beginners”. That is the important part: the plan was explicitly intended as a beginner program combining linear progression with more training days and more bodybuilding-oriented accessory work.

It sits in the hitPR catalogue as a ready-configured plan.

Pull (day 1 + day 4)

Push (day 2 + day 5)

Legs (day 3 + day 6)

The heavy main lifts partly alternate: pull A opens with deadlifts, pull B with rows. On the push days, bench press and overhead press swap as the heavy opening lift; the other movement stays in the session as higher-rep accessory work.

Progression of the compounds: In the original, weights rise linearly after successful sessions: 2.5 kg for bench press, row, overhead press and squat, and 5 kg for the deadlift. The last set is an AMRAP with technically clean reps. After three genuine failures in a row, the author recommends reducing the working weight by 10 % and working back up.

Progression of the accessories: Double progression — within the prescribed rep range, add reps first; once the prescribed sets sit cleanly at the top end, raise the weight and start at the bottom again.

That is one specific program. Not every decision in it is therefore a general PPL rule.

Common PPL mistakes

1. Too much arm isolation, too few compounds

Many home-made PPL plans start with the question “which curls are still missing?” rather than with the actual training goal.

If bench press, pull-ups, rows or squats matter to you, those exercises should get enough room and recovery. Exercises that come early in a session show the largest strength gains on average — so your highest priority belongs at the front.

That does not mean arm isolation is unimportant. With a hypertrophy focus, additional biceps and triceps sets can make sense. They just should not accidentally dominate your volume while the movements you actually prioritised stall.

2. Skipping leg day

The logic here really is simple: if you plan a PPL cycle but regularly skip leg day, you are no longer training the plan you wrote down.

The problem is less the name of the split than the uneven loading. If you deliberately want to train legs less often, you can — but then design the week accordingly, rather than planning a 6-day PPL and dropping a third of it every week.

3. No A/B variation

Two identical push days are not automatically a mistake.

But an A/B structure is a useful tool when you want to prioritise two movements. The Reddit PPL shows this well: one push day opens heavy with bench press, the other with overhead press. That way each movement gets the fresh first slot once.

Variation should have a purpose. You do not have to swap exercises just so Tuesday feels different from Friday. Especially if you want to track progress cleanly, an exercise selection that stays stable across several weeks is often easier to evaluate.

PPL vs. upper/lower: when PPL is better

PPL fits particularly well when you:

• like training 5-6 days per week
• want to spread your weekly volume across many focused sessions
• find push, pull and leg days organisationally clear

Upper/lower often fits better when you:

• prefer four fixed training days
• want to train every major muscle group across two clear halves of the week
• have an irregular schedule with fewer gym days

In between sits the upper/lower + PPL hybrid — five days, two upper/lower sessions plus three PPL days. It is not a physiologically “better” hybrid, but a practical way to organise five fixed training days cleanly.

Detailed comparison: Full body vs. split · Direct comparison with the upper/lower split: PPL vs. upper/lower

Conclusion

Push Pull Legs is not a magic split, and not a split that suddenly starts working only past a certain training age.

Its strength is organisation: with many training days you can distribute chest, back, shoulders, arms and legs across focused sessions without cramming everything into a few long ones.

The key points:

• PPL divides training into push, pull and legs — not into “good” and “bad” training frequencies.
• Three days of PPL can work; with three days, full body is simply easier for many to organise and lets you practise specific lifts more often.
• Six days of PPL spread weekly volume very evenly, but they also demand six training days.
• Beginners can train PPL. The Reddit PPL was written for exactly that; a compact plan like GZCLP is merely easier for many beginners to execute.
• What decides the outcome remains weekly volume, progression, exercise selection, recovery and consistency — not the abbreviation at the top of the plan.

And if you do not have a full gym available: PPL at home and with dumbbells shows what can be substituted and where equipment genuinely changes the planning.

Sources

• metallicadpa. A Linear Progression Based PPL Program for Beginners. r/Fitness, 2015.
• Ramos-Campo DJ et al. (2024). Efficacy of Split Versus Full-Body Resistance Training on Strength and Muscle Growth: A Systematic Review With Meta-Analysis. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 38(7):1330-1340.
• Schoenfeld BJ, Grgic J, Krieger J. (2019). How many times per week should a muscle be trained to maximize muscle hypertrophy?. Journal of Sports Sciences, 37(11):1286-1295.
• Pelland JC et al. (2026). The Resistance Training Dose Response: Meta-Regressions Exploring the Effects of Weekly Volume and Frequency on Muscle Hypertrophy and Strength Gains. Sports Medicine, 56(2):481-505.
• American College of Sports Medicine. (2026). Resistance Training Prescription for Muscle Function, Hypertrophy, and Physical Performance in Healthy Adults: An Overview of Reviews.