PPL (Push/Pull/Legs)

PPL stands for Push/Pull/Legs, a training split that organizes workouts by the movement pattern or muscle group being trained on a given day. Push days cover muscles that push weight away from the body: chest, shoulders, and triceps. Pull days target muscles that pull weight toward the body: back and biceps. Legs day handles the lower body, typically quads, hamstrings, glutes, and calves. The logic is that muscles working together in the same movement pattern get trained together, which reduces interference between sessions and lets each group recover before it's called on again. The nuance most people miss is that PPL is not a fixed schedule. It's often run as a 6-day-per-week program (two full rotations), but it can be compressed into 3 days or stretched across a week depending on how much volume someone can recover from, making it far more flexible than its reputation as a 'beginner' or 'advanced only' template suggests.

Example

A lifter running a 6-day PPL might do bench press, overhead press, and tricep pushdowns on Monday, then barbell rows, pull-ups, and curls on Tuesday, then squats and Romanian deadlifts on Wednesday, before repeating the full rotation Thursday through Saturday. Each muscle group gets hit twice per week, which research generally supports as effective for hypertrophy compared to a once-weekly body part split. If life gets busy, that same person might collapse the six sessions into three, losing frequency but keeping the movement-pattern logic intact.

Training SplitUpper/Lower SplitBro SplitVolume Per Week
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