Programs

Push Pull Legs: The Complete PPL Split Guide

By NexusWorks · Updated July 2026 · 11 min read

Push pull legs is the most popular training split in the world for a simple reason: it sorts every exercise into three days that never step on each other's recovery. Here's why the grouping works, who should (and shouldn't) run it, the schedule options, and three complete written workouts you can start this week.

What PPL is and why the grouping works

Push pull legs divides all of your training into three workouts, defined by movement pattern rather than by body part:

• Push — everything that pushes a weight away from you: chest, shoulders, and triceps.
• Pull — everything that pulls a weight toward you: back, rear delts, and biceps.
• Legs — quads, hamstrings, glutes, and calves.

The genius of the split is overlap management. Muscles that assist each other train together, then rest together. When you bench press, your triceps and front delts work whether you like it or not; when you row, your biceps come along for the ride. A body-part split that puts chest on Monday and triceps on Wednesday quietly trains the triceps twice with no plan behind it. PPL makes the overlap deliberate: your triceps get hammered on push day and then get a genuine two-plus days of rest before they're asked to press again.

That clean separation buys you two things. First, recovery you can predict — no workout interferes with the next, so you can train on consecutive days without a fatigued muscle sabotaging a big lift. Second, focus — each session concentrates its entire volume on one group of cooperating muscles, so you can hit them hard, from multiple angles, and then leave them alone to grow.

Who PPL is for

PPL earns its keep for intermediate lifters who can train five or six days a week. If you've been lifting consistently for a year or more, you need more volume per muscle than a beginner does, and you have the work capacity to spread that volume across six focused sessions. Run twice through per week, PPL hits every muscle twice with roughly 10–20 hard sets each — squarely in the range that drives growth for intermediates.

If you're a beginner, PPL is honestly a detour. In your first year you grow from far less volume, you recover fast enough to train each lift three times a week, and your progress comes from adding weight to a handful of compound movements — not from lateral raise variations. Three full-body workouts per week will build more strength and muscle in less gym time, and you can graduate to PPL when linear progress dries up.

PPL is also a poor fit if your schedule realistically allows three sessions a week on fixed days — a classic PPL run that way means each muscle gets trained once every seven days, which is a low dose. The rotating schedule below fixes that, but only if your training days can float.

6-day, 3-day, or rotating?

The three workouts stay the same; the calendar around them changes. Pick the schedule that matches your recovery and your life, not your ambition:

The six-day version is what most people mean by "PPL," and it's the version the workouts below are built for. If six days sounds heroic right now, start with the rotating schedule — an every-fourth-day rest keeps quality high, and you can compress toward six days as your capacity grows.

The workouts

Each day opens with the heaviest compound lift while you're fresh, moves to secondary compounds, and finishes with isolation work taken close to failure. Rest times are minimums for the heavy lifts — take more if the next set would suffer. If RPE is new to you, read the RPE guide first; the short version is that RPE 8 means two clean reps left in the tank, RPE 9 means one.

Push day

Pull day

Leg day

Running the six-day schedule? Repeat each day as written the second time through the week, or nudge the second exposure lighter (RPE 7–8 on the compounds) if you find quality slipping by day five. On the deadlift, note the lower volume on purpose: three heavy sets is plenty of stimulus for a lift that taxes the whole body, and your lower back also works on squat and RDL day.

How to progress on PPL

The plan above is a container. What fills it is progressive overload, and on PPL the right scheme is double progression: hold the weight, push reps to the top of the range, then add weight and start climbing again.

1. Fixed-range lifts (Bench Press 6–8, Back Squat 6–8): keep the weight until you hit the top of the range on all sets at the target RPE. Then add 2.5 kg / 5 lb and rebuild from the bottom of the range.
2. Fixed-rep lifts (everything written as a single number): treat the number as the top of a small range. Overhead Press 3×8 means "add weight once all three sets reach 8 at RPE 8; until then, some sets may land at 6 or 7."
3. Isolation work: progress in reps first — a lateral raise going from 4×12 to 4×15 at the same weight is real progress — then take the next dumbbell up and drop back.

The RPE cap is what keeps this honest. If hitting the top of the range required a grinding RPE 10, you haven't earned the jump yet. And none of it works without a log: double progression is a comparison against last session's numbers, made every single set.

Common PPL mistakes

• Junk volume. PPL's structure invites padding — a fourth chest exercise, a third curl variation — until push day is 25 sets of which ten are half-effort. Six exercises done at honest RPE 8–9 beat ten done at RPE 6. If you want to add a set, add it to an exercise already on the list and log whether the numbers keep moving.
• Skipping leg day. One third of this program is legs, and it's the third that most changes how you look and lift. Skip it "just this week" twice and you're running a push/pull split with a limp. If motivation is the issue, put leg day on your best-energy day of the week.
• Running six days on five hours of sleep. The 6-day schedule assumes you recover like someone who sleeps. If you're getting five or six hours a night, six weekly sessions will bury you — strength stalls, joints ache, and the log flatlines. Drop to the rotating schedule until your sleep supports the workload; you'll grow more from four well-recovered sessions than six exhausted ones.
• Changing exercises weekly. Swapping bench for dumbbell press for machine press every week feels fresh, but it destroys the comparison that progression depends on — you can't beat last session's numbers if there is no last session. Keep the same exercises for at least 8–12 weeks and let the log show a trend before you change anything.

Herculog guides are general information for healthy adults, not medical advice. If you have a health condition or an injury — or pain that doesn't behave like normal soreness — talk to a medical professional before starting or changing a training program.