Push Pull Legs Routine Guide

What PPL is

Push/Pull/Legs is a training split that groups exercises by the movement they share rather than by body part. Every lift you do falls into one of three buckets. Push lifts include the bench press, overhead press, dips, and any exercise where the working muscles drive a load away from your body — that means chest, front and side delts, and triceps all train together. Pull lifts include rows, pull-ups, deadlifts, face pulls, and curls, since the back, rear delts, and biceps all share work pulling a load toward you. Legs is everything below the belt: squats, hinges, lunges, single-leg work, calves.

The split traces back to bodybuilding circles in the 1970s, where it was a way to hit each muscle with high volume while still letting it recover. The modern version most lifters know was popularized through the r/Fitness wiki PPL routine and refined further by coaches like Jeff Nippard and Eric Helms. The core insight has not changed: muscles that push together also recover together, so you stop asking the same tissue to lift heavy on consecutive days.

The 6-day template

A standard PPL week looks like this:

• Monday — Push (chest-focused)
• Tuesday — Pull (back-focused)
• Wednesday — Legs (squat-focused)
• Thursday — Push (shoulder-focused)
• Friday — Pull (deadlift-focused)
• Saturday — Legs (volume-focused)
• Sunday — Rest

Every muscle group trains twice a week. That frequency is the point. Brad Schoenfeld’s meta-analyses on hypertrophy consistently land on 10 to 20 hard sets per muscle per week as the productive range, and they point to splitting that volume across at least two sessions rather than dumping it all on one day. PPL fits that prescription neatly without forcing you to design it from scratch.

A complete example week

Here is one full week with concrete loading. Top sets use RPE 8 — leaving roughly two reps in the tank. Lighter accessory work runs slightly easier so you can chase form and contraction quality.

Push 1 (chest-focused)

• Bench press — 4×6-8 @ RPE 8
• Incline dumbbell press — 3×10-12 @ RPE 8
• Cable fly — 3×12-15
• Triceps pushdown — 4×10-12
• Lateral raise — 4×12-15

Pull 1 (back-focused, vertical)

• Pull-ups — 4×6-10
• Barbell row — 4×8 @ RPE 8
• Lat pulldown — 3×10-12
• Face pull — 3×15
• Curl variation — 3×10-12

Legs 1 (squat-focused)

• Back squat — 4×5 @ RPE 8
• Romanian deadlift — 3×8 @ RPE 8
• Leg press — 3×10-12
• Leg curl — 3×12-15
• Calf raise — 4×12-15

Push 2 (shoulder-focused)

• Overhead press — 4×6-8 @ RPE 8
• Bench press (volume) — 3×10
• Lateral raise — 4×12-15
• Triceps overhead extension — 3×10
• Dumbbell front raise — 3×12

Pull 2 (deadlift-focused, horizontal)

• Conventional deadlift — 3×5 @ RPE 8
• Pendlay row — 3×6-8
• Cable row — 3×10-12
• Reverse fly — 3×15
• Hammer curl — 3×10-12

Legs 2 (hypertrophy-focused)

• Front squat — 3×6-8 @ RPE 8
• Bulgarian split squat — 3×8 each leg
• Leg extension — 3×12-15
• Leg curl — 3×12-15
• Standing calf raise — 4×10-12

This is not the only way to write the template. It is one disciplined version with the right balance of compound stimulus, rep-range variety, and roughly 12 to 16 hard sets per muscle group across the week.

Why PPL works for intermediates

There are three reasons this split has stayed dominant for fifty years.

1. Twice-weekly muscle frequency. Old-school bro splits — chest Monday, back Tuesday, legs Wednesday, shoulders Thursday, arms Friday — only train each muscle once a week. Once you are past the beginner phase, that is below the productive frequency for most muscles. PPL doubles it without doubling session length.
2. Movement-pattern grouping creates natural recovery. Because chest, front delts, and triceps all train on Push days, you never put them under heavy load on consecutive days. Compare that to a body-part split where Monday chest and Tuesday shoulders both fry the front delts — PPL avoids that overlap by design.
3. Compounds first, isolation second. Each session opens with a barbell or heavy compound that drives the bulk of the strength signal. Isolation work follows to chase the lagging muscle. That order respects the fact that compounds need a fresh nervous system, while curls and lateral raises do not.

When PPL is the wrong choice

PPL is not universal. Skip it if any of these describe you:

• You are under six months into serious training. A beginner makes faster progress on a three-day linear program. Volume is the wrong lever when you have not yet exploited the cheap gains from frequency on big compounds.
• You have less than five hours a week available. PPL needs six sessions of 60 to 75 minutes minimum to deliver its volume promise. Cut sessions or shorten them and you get all the fatigue with half the stimulus.
• You are running a peaking block for a powerlifting or strongman meet. Six to eight weeks out from competition you should be on a peaking program built around the competition lifts, not a generalist hypertrophy split.

The 4-day PPL variant

For lifters with real lives, the cleanest cut is to drop one push, one pull, and one leg session — running PPL across Monday, Wednesday, Friday with a short upper-body day on Saturday. Another popular version is PPLU: Push Monday, Pull Tuesday, Legs Thursday, Upper Friday. Total weekly volume drops from roughly 12 to 16 sets per muscle to 8 to 12. Progress is slower in absolute terms, but it is more sustainable, and the recovery margin protects sleep and joints.

If you can only manage three or four sessions a week consistently, an Upper/Lower split is often a better fit than a stripped-down PPL. PPL really earns its keep when you can hit it five or six times a week.

How to add weight (progression on PPL)

Compound lifts deserve disciplined linear progression for the first month, then a switch to double progression. If you bench 4×6 at 100 kg, work toward 4×8 at 100 kg over a few weeks, then add a small jump — 102.5 kg — and reset to 4×6. Repeat. That gives the body more time at each weight than session-to-session linear progression and avoids the wall most intermediates hit when they try to add load every week forever.

Isolation lifts run on pure double progression inside the prescribed rep range. A lateral raise prescribed at 4×12-15 means working from 12 to 15 reps at the same weight, then bumping the dumbbell when you hit 4×15.

For autoregulation across the week, lean on RPE. The deeper mechanics live in the progressive-overload guide, and rpe-explained covers how to read your own effort accurately.

Common mistakes on PPL

1. Too much volume too soon. Sixteen hard sets per muscle in week one means burnout by week four. Start at 10 to 12 working sets per muscle and ramp upward across a four-week block.
2. Skipping the deload. Every four to six weeks, drop volume by roughly 30 percent for a single week. That is not a setback. It is what lets the next block actually progress.
3. Treating Push 2 as Push 1 again. The point of two sessions is to hit different angles and rep ranges. If both push days look identical, you are leaving stimulus on the table.
4. Neglecting rear delts and external rotators. Add face pulls or band pull-aparts to every Pull day. Front-delt and chest volume vastly outpaces rear-delt volume on most templates, and that imbalance is what wrecks shoulders over time.
5. Cardio on leg days. Move conditioning to Pull days or Sunday. Hard cardio on top of squats blunts both signals and slows recovery without giving you anything in return.

How to track PPL on Carve Log

The workout logger is built to handle six or seven exercises per session without friction, which is exactly what a PPL day looks like. The custom exercise library lets you save your specific bench variations, paused versus touch-and-go, dumbbell incline angles, whatever you actually run. Use the one-rep-max-calculator to estimate maxes from your top set on RPE 8 days, and reference strength-standards to track when you cross from intermediate into advanced tiers on each lift.

Should you run PPL in 2026?

Yes, if:

• You have completed at least one cycle of a three-day linear program.
• You can train five or six days a week without resentment.
• Your goal is hypertrophy with a strength side rather than pure powerlifting.

No, if:

• You are still new and have not exhausted what a linear program can give you. Run stronglifts-5x5 first.
• You are a competitive powerlifter mid-prep. Use a program built around the competition lifts.
• You can only train three or four days a week consistently. An Upper/Lower split delivers more per session at that frequency.

PPL is a tool, not a religion. Run it, evaluate after eight to twelve weeks, and switch when the curve flattens. The lifters who keep progressing for decades are the ones who change the dial setting before the program stops working — not after.