PPL Workout: The Push Pull Legs Routine for 3, 5 or 6 Days a Week

A PPL workout splits your training into three sessions: push (chest, shoulders, triceps), pull (back, biceps, rear delts) and legs (quads, hamstrings, glutes, calves). Run it 3 days a week and each muscle gets trained once a week. Run it 6 days a week and each muscle gets trained twice. If six days is too much, the 5-day PPLUL split (push, pull, legs, upper, lower) gets you most of the benefit with one less session.

Push pull legs is popular for a good reason: it groups muscles that work together, so one session doesn't wreck the next. But it also gets oversold. Below you'll find all three versions with full workout tables, a weekly schedule for each, how to progress, and an honest take on when PPL is the wrong choice.

What Is a PPL Workout?

PPL is a training split, which just means a way of dividing your muscles across the week. Instead of training everything every session like a full body routine, you sort exercises by the movement they use:

The logic is overlap. Your triceps help on every press, so training them on push day means they get a rest on pull day. Your biceps help on every row, so they live on pull day. Legs get their own day because squats and hinges are tiring enough to fill a session on their own. Each day stresses a different set of muscles, which is what lets you train on back-to-back days.

Each day also has its own full guide: the push day workout (with beginner and advanced versions), the leg day workout (barbell and dumbbell versions) and the pull day workout (beginner and advanced versions, technique cues and exercise swaps). This article ties them together into a full ppl workout routine.

The 3-Day PPL Workout

The 3-day version runs each session once a week, usually Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Because each muscle only gets one shot per week, these sessions carry a bit more volume than the 6-day version. Expect about 60 to 70 minutes each, including warm-up sets.

For every table below: leave 1 to 3 reps in reserve on the big lifts, and push the last set of isolation work close to failure. Heavy compounds first, smaller exercises last.

Day 1: Push

This is the same intermediate session from our push day guide, which also explains the exercise order, a warm-up and a beginner version with fewer movements.

Day 2: Pull

A good pull day needs two kinds of pulling: vertical (pull-ups, pulldowns), which mostly trains the lats, and horizontal (rows), which hits the lats plus the mid and upper back. Skip either one and your back develops unevenly. The face pull covers the rear delts, which push day ignores and which help keep shoulders healthy when you bench a lot.

A few pull day pointers:

• Barbell row: hinge until your torso is about 45 degrees or lower, brace hard, and pull the bar to your lower ribs. If your torso rises with every rep, the weight is too heavy. A chest-supported row is a good swap if your lower back is tired from leg day.
• Pull-ups: can't do 6 yet? Use the lat pulldown and add a set of slow negatives (jump to the top, lower over 3 to 5 seconds). Once 12 bodyweight reps is easy, move to weighted pull-ups.
• Curls: keep your elbows still and lower the weight under control. Swinging moves the load to your lower back. For more biceps options, see our bicep workout.
• What about deadlifts? Many PPL plans put conventional deadlifts on pull day. That works, but this plan already has Romanian deadlifts on leg day, and doing heavy hinges two days in a row is hard on your lower back. If you want to deadlift, do it first on pull day for 3 sets of 3 to 5, swap the barbell row for a chest-supported row, and keep leg day's Romanian deadlifts lighter.

Day 3: Legs

This is the barbell session from our leg day guide. Training at home with only dumbbells? That guide also has a dumbbell-only leg day you can drop in here.

The 6-Day PPL Workout: Heavy Days and Volume Days

The 6-day version runs push, pull, legs twice, then takes a day off. Doing the exact same session twice a week gets stale and tends to beat up the same joints, so most lifters split it into A days built around heavier compound lifts and B days built around moderate weights, higher reps and different exercises.

For the A days, use the three tables above but trim one set from each exercise (or drop the last exercise). You're now training each muscle twice, so each session can be shorter: about 45 to 60 minutes. Then add these B days.

Push B (Volume)

Pull B (Volume)

The chest-supported row is deliberate here. Pull B lands the day after Legs A, and taking your lower back out of the row makes that back-to-back much easier.

Legs B (Volume)

Across the week, the 6-day plan puts roughly 10 to 16 hard sets on most muscle groups, split over two sessions. That lands inside the range most lifters grow well on. If your sessions keep running long, cut rest on the isolation moves or pair them as supersets (see our superset guide).

The PPLUL Split: A 5-Day Push Pull Legs Upper Lower Hybrid

The PPLUL split runs one round of push, pull and legs, then adds an upper day and a lower day. That's five sessions. Every muscle still gets trained twice a week, but you only need five days in the gym instead of six, and you get two full rest days.

A common layout: Push Monday, Pull Tuesday, Legs Wednesday, rest Thursday, Upper Friday, Lower Saturday, rest Sunday. Run the push, pull and leg days from the 3-day plan above, then use these two shorter sessions to fill in the second hit for each muscle.

Upper Day

Lower Day

Leg day leads with the squat, so the lower day leads with a hinge. That way the two sessions don't hammer the same pattern, and your quads aren't still sore from squats when you need them. If you like the upper/lower half of this plan, our upper lower split guide covers a full 4-day version.

The catch with PPLUL is that the week doesn't divide evenly. Your chest gets a full push day plus a few sets on upper day, so it's not perfectly balanced. For most people that's fine. If one muscle is lagging, give it an extra set or two on the upper or lower day.

PPL Weekly Schedules

Two other layouts are worth knowing. The rolling PPL runs push, pull, legs, rest and repeats, so it takes 8 days per cycle and your training days drift through the week. It's a nice middle ground if 6 days is too much but you want more than 3. And on the 3-day plan, you can start with Legs on Monday if that's the day you have the most time and energy, since leg day is the longest session.

PPL Benefits and Downsides

The once-a-week problem deserves a closer look, because it's the biggest weakness of the 3-day plan. A 2016 meta-analysis by Schoenfeld, Ogborn and Krieger compared training frequencies and concluded that training a muscle twice a week produced better growth than once a week, and that major muscle groups should be trained at least twice a week to maximize growth.

A larger 2019 follow-up from Schoenfeld, Grgic and Krieger, covering 25 studies, adds an important detail: when the total number of weekly sets was the same, frequency made no meaningful difference. Higher frequencies came out slightly ahead only in studies where they also added more total sets.

Put those together and the practical answer is this: weekly hard sets are what drive growth, and training twice a week is mainly an easier way to fit enough of them in. A 3-day PPL can work if you pack enough quality sets into each session. But by the last exercise of a long once-a-week session, your sets are usually worse than they'd be early in a fresh one. That's why the 3-day version tends to fall behind for intermediate lifters chasing size.

The 6-day plan has the opposite problem. On paper it's excellent. In real life, work trips, late nights and sick kids happen, and a 6-day plan has no slack. Miss Wednesday and you either skip legs for the week or push everything back. A plan you complete 90 percent of the time beats a better plan you complete 60 percent of the time.

Which PPL Version Should You Run?

Honest bottom line: no split is magic. Pick the one that matches the number of days you can actually show up, and stick with it long enough to see whether your lifts go up.

How to Progress on a PPL Workout Routine

The split decides when you train. Progression decides whether it works. Use double progression on every exercise, explained in full in our progressive overload guide:

1. Pick a weight you can lift for the bottom of the rep range on all sets. On a 3 x 8-12 exercise, that's 3 sets of 8.
2. Each session, try to add a rep or two at the same weight.
3. Once you hit the top of the range on every set (3 x 12), add weight: about 2.5 to 5 kg (5 to 10 lb) on lower-body barbell lifts, the smallest jump available on everything else. Your reps drop back toward 8 and you build up again.

On the 6-day plan, progress the A and B days separately. Your heavy bench on Push A and your dumbbell bench on Push B are different lifts with their own numbers. Don't expect to beat both every week. As long as the trend goes up over a month, you're on track.

Useful tools for this:

• The one-rep max calculator turns a recent set into a starting weight for the heavy lifts.
• The RPE calculator helps you judge how many reps you really had left.
• The plate calculator saves you doing barbell math between sets.
• The printable weekly training log fits a full PPL week on one page if you prefer paper.

When progress stalls on several lifts at once and your joints feel beat up, that's usually fatigue, not a bad program. Six days a week of PPL builds fatigue faster than three, so plan a lighter week every so often. Our guide to the deload week shows how. If only one or two lifts are stuck, the What's Blocking Your Gains quiz can help find the cause.

Common PPL Mistakes

• Turning pull day into "biceps day". Rows and pull-ups first, curls last. Your back is the bigger muscle.
• Skipping leg day when the week gets busy. It's the easiest day to drop and the one that costs the most. If something has to go, shorten push or pull instead.
• Copying an advanced 6-day plan as a beginner. More days doesn't mean faster results if you can't recover from them.
• Changing exercises every week. You can't progressively overload a lift you only do once. Keep the same exercises for at least 6 to 8 weeks.
• Forgetting rear delts. Push day trains the front of the shoulder hard. Face pulls and rear delt flyes on pull day balance it out.

Keeping Your PPL Consistent

PPL only pays off if you run the same sessions long enough to beat them, and on a 6-day plan that means tracking a lot of lifts. A notebook or our weight training log template does the job. If you'd rather use your phone, GymGod lets you build your own week by dragging exercises into each day, or have the AI coach make a routine that stays consistent so you can progressively overload instead of starting over. When you start an exercise, your last weights and reps from that session are already on screen, and auto-progression suggests your next target from what you actually lifted.

PPL Workout FAQ