Push Pull Legs is the most popular split in modern lifting, and it deserves to be. Done well, it gives you frequency, recovery, and enough volume per session to actually grow. Done badly, it's a way to fry your shoulders, neglect your back, and stall your bench for six months. This is how to do it properly.

Walk into any gym in the country on a Monday and you'll find at least three people doing chest. Two of those three are following some version of Push Pull Legs (PPL), they just call it "chest day". The split has become so dominant that it's the default answer to "what should I run?" on every fitness forum on the internet. There's a reason for that. It works.

It also fails a lot of people, mostly because they copy a programme off YouTube without understanding why the structure is the way it is. The version someone runs in their seventh year of lifting is not the version a beginner should run. Most of the people running PPL are running it wrong, and it's still working for them. That's how forgiving the underlying structure is. But forgiving doesn't mean optimal, and if you're going to give your training plan eight to twelve hours of your week, it should be optimal.

What PPL Actually Is

The split groups exercises by movement pattern rather than muscle group. A Push day trains everything that involves pressing weight away from your body, which works your chest, shoulders, and triceps. A Pull day trains everything that involves pulling weight towards your body, which works your back, rear delts, and biceps. A Legs day trains your lower body, mainly your quads, hamstrings, glutes, and calves.

That grouping matters. The reason a Push day works is that the muscles trained on Push day all share function. Your triceps are involved in every chest press and every overhead press. Your front delts are involved in every chest press too. So you're not double-tapping muscles across a week, you're using them in concert in one session, and giving them all 48 to 72 hours of recovery before they're hit again. The same logic applies to Pull (lats, mid-back, rear delts, biceps all share function) and Legs (quads, glutes, and hamstrings cross over on most compound lower-body lifts).

Compare that to a body-part split, where you do "chest day" Monday and "shoulder day" Tuesday. Your front delts get hammered Monday, then asked to do the heavy lifting again Tuesday. They don't recover. The PPL structure avoids that mistake by design.

The 3-Day vs 6-Day Question

PPL is most often run in two structures. The 3-day version trains each session once a week. The 6-day version runs PPL twice through, hitting each muscle group twice. Most internet PPL programmes are 6-day variants, which is part of why they break so many beginners.

3-Day PPL

Each muscle is hit once every seven days. That's low frequency by modern standards, but it lets you push heavy and recover fully between sessions. It works for beginners because beginners need volume per session, not frequency, to drive growth. It also works for advanced lifters who lift heavy enough that one session destroys them for a week.

The downside: a typical 3-day PPL runs Mon-Wed-Fri, leaving you four rest days. For most lifters, that's too much. You stop accumulating fatigue, and on a programme without enough fatigue, you stop growing.

6-Day PPL

This is the one most people are running. Two cycles of Push, Pull, Legs across the week, with one rest day. Each muscle is hit twice every seven days, which most current research says is the sweet spot for hypertrophy. The volume per session can be lower because the frequency is higher.

The catch: six lifting sessions a week is a lot. Recovery has to be tight. Sleep, nutrition, and stress have to be in order. If any of those slips, the wheels come off fast. A 6-day PPL with bad sleep is worse than a 3-day PPL with great sleep.

Coach's Take
If you're a beginner or returning from a break, run 3-day PPL for at least the first 12 weeks. You'll progress on the lifts faster than you would on a 6-day variant because you'll actually recover. Move to 6-day only when 3-day stops driving progression.

Push Day: The Anatomy

A good Push day hits a horizontal press (bench, incline bench, or dumbbell variant), a vertical press (overhead press, push press, machine press), one secondary chest movement, one secondary shoulder movement, and direct triceps work. That's roughly five to seven exercises and 18 to 24 working sets.

A typical Push session might look like:

That's a session. Roughly 60 to 75 minutes. The heaviest work is at the top, the volume work in the middle, the isolation at the end. That ordering matters more than people realise.

Pull Day: The Anatomy

Pull day is where most lifters under-do it. Where Push has bench and military press, Pull has rows and pull-ups, and most people don't bring the same intensity to a heavy row that they do to a heavy bench. The result is a chest that grows faster than the back, which leads to forward shoulder posture and bench plateaus, because your bench is limited by your back.

A good Pull day hits a vertical pull (pull-up, lat pulldown), a horizontal pull (bent-over row, cable row, machine row), one secondary back movement, one rear delt movement, and direct bicep work.

If you do nothing else, prioritise the row variants. Most people's pulls trail their pushes badly. Closing that gap fixes posture, fixes shoulder pain, and unlocks more bench.

Legs Day: The Anatomy

Legs day is the day most lifters skip, fudge, or rush. Don't. Legs are responsible for more total muscle mass than any other category, your endocrine system loves heavy leg training, and a strong squat carries over to almost everything else. A bad Legs day is the difference between an okay physique and a great one.

A good Legs day hits a squat variant, a hinge variant (deadlift or Romanian deadlift), one quad-focused accessory, one hamstring or glute accessory, and calves.

If you're running 6-day PPL, one Legs session can lean quad-dominant (squat anchor) and the other can lean hinge-dominant (deadlift anchor). That gives you both a quad-heavy day and a posterior-chain-heavy day in the same week, which most people respond to better than two identical Legs sessions.

Progressive Overload on PPL

The split itself doesn't drive growth. Progressive overload does. The PPL framework just gives you the recovery window to keep adding work over time. Without progression, you can run the prettiest PPL in the world for a year and look identical to when you started.

The simplest progression for a beginner: add 2.5 kg to compound lifts and 1.25 kg to isolation lifts every time you hit the top of your rep range. If your bench is programmed for 4 sets of 5 to 8, when you can hit four clean sets of 8, the next session you go up 2.5 kg and aim for four sets of 5 again. Keep cycling that. For accessory and isolation work, add a rep instead of weight when adding weight is too aggressive.

For intermediates, RPE-based progression usually serves better. Cap your top sets at RPE 8 (two reps in reserve) for most of the block, push to RPE 9 in the final week, then deload. Track your numbers in an app, on paper, anywhere. Without a record, you cannot progressively overload, because you don't know what you did last time.

The Common PPL Mistakes

Most people running PPL hurt themselves with the same handful of errors.

1. Volume creep

People add a fourth set, then a fifth, then "one more triceps movement". By month two they're doing 30+ working sets per session and not progressing on anything. More is not better. Hard sets at appropriate intensity are better.

2. Bench dominance

Three Push days a week and one Pull day a week (or worse, no Pull at all) is not PPL. It's a path to rotator cuff issues. Push and Pull volume should be roughly matched. If anything, lean towards more Pull, because the modern lifestyle of slumped-over phone use already short-changes your back.

3. Skipping legs

You cannot have a PPL split without legs. If you're going to skip legs, run an upper-only split and stop kidding yourself.

4. No progressive overload

Doing 4 sets of 8 at 60 kg every week for six months is maintenance, not training. The weight has to go up, the reps have to go up, or the difficulty has to go up some other way (slower tempo, longer pauses, fewer rest seconds). Without progression, the body has no reason to adapt.

5. Programme hopping

Switching from PPL to Upper Lower to a body-part split every six weeks because you saw a YouTube video. Pick a programme. Run it for at least 12 weeks. Then evaluate whether to change it.

Who PPL Works For

PPL fits well if you can train at least 4 days a week consistently, are out of the absolute beginner phase (your first 6 to 12 months), and want to focus on hypertrophy alongside strength. It's a hypertrophy-leaning split, which means it's good for building visible muscle and developing all-round strength, less ideal for chasing pure 1-rep-max numbers in three lifts.

It works less well for true beginners (Starting Strength or StrongLifts 5x5 will progress you faster in the first six months), people with very limited training time (a 3-day full body session usually beats a 3-day PPL for someone who can only train three days), and lifters chasing pure powerlifting strength (a Sheiko or 5/3/1 variant is built for that).

Build Your PPL in Forge

Forge ships with multiple PPL templates out of the box, including a 6-day PPL, a 4-day PPL with a rest-day rotation, and a powerbuilding-leaning PPL. Every session has the exercise selection laid out, set and rep targets pre-filled from the latest training research, and progressive overload baked into the lift logic. Plateau detection flags when one of your lifts has stalled for three sessions and surfaces specific fixes.