Push Pull Legs Split: A Beginner-Friendly Program That Works
A push pull legs program in 3-day and 6-day versions, with a full sample week, sets and reps, how to progress, and who should run full body instead.
The Helthy team · · 10 min read
Push pull legs (PPL) splits your training by movement. One day covers the pushing muscles (chest, shoulders, triceps), one covers the pulling muscles (back, biceps, rear shoulders), and one covers legs. Run it 3 days a week and each muscle gets trained once a week. Run it 6 days and everything gets hit twice.
The short answer: PPL is a very good split if you can train at least 4 days a week and you've been lifting for a couple of months. If you're brand new and only have 3 days, we'd put you on full body first. Below you'll find both versions, a complete sample week with sets and reps, and how to keep the weights moving.
Who a push pull legs split suits
PPL works well if:
- You can get to the gym 4 to 6 days a week, most weeks.
- You already know how to squat, bench, row and hinge without the technique falling apart.
- You like sessions that focus on a few muscles and give each of them several hard sets.
- You want room for arm and shoulder work without every session running to 90 minutes.
The layout is also forgiving on recovery. Your pushing and pulling muscles rest while you train legs, and your legs get at least two days off before they're trained again, so soreness from one session rarely ruins the next.
Who should do full body instead
If you're in your first two or three months of lifting and can train only 3 days a week, do full body. This is the one place we'd steer beginners away from PPL, and the reason is practice.
A 3-day PPL means you squat once a week, bench once a week and row once a week. For someone still learning those lifts, that isn't enough reps with the movement. Learning a squat is a lot like learning a chord on the guitar: three short practice sessions a week beat one long one, because you come back to it before your body has forgotten what it felt like.
A full-body plan that hits a squat, a press, a row and a hinge three times a week gives you that practice, and new lifters recover quickly enough to handle it. After 8 to 12 weeks, once the lifts feel familiar and the weights start climbing more slowly, PPL is a natural next step.
How often should you train each muscle?
This is the real difference between the 3-day and 6-day versions, so here's what the research says.
In 2016, Brad Schoenfeld, Dan Ogborn and James Krieger published a meta-analysis that pooled studies comparing training a muscle once a week with training it two or more times a week. The groups training each muscle at least twice a week grew more. The catch was that in many of those studies, the more frequent groups also did more total sets. When Schoenfeld's group returned to the question in 2019 and looked at studies where weekly sets were matched, frequency on its own made little difference. Most people in these studies were untrained or recreationally trained, which is a decent match for anyone reading this.
So the honest version is that the split matters less than people argue about online. Growth comes from the number of hard sets each muscle gets per week and whether you keep adding weight or reps over time. Training a muscle twice a week simply makes it easier to fit enough sets in without any one session becoming a slog.
Push pull legs: 3-day vs 6-day
| 3-day PPL | 6-day PPL | |
|---|---|---|
| Sessions per week | 3 | 6 |
| Each muscle trained | Once a week | Twice a week |
| Hard sets per muscle per week (sample plan below) | About 6–10 | About 10–15 |
| Typical session length | 60–75 min | 50–65 min |
| Full rest days | 4 | 1 |
| Best for | Busy schedules, coming back from a break | Lifters a few months in who like training most days |
The 3-day version isn't a lesser option for people who can't commit. Plenty of people make years of progress on it. Because each muscle gets one session a week, though, it's worth doing an extra set on the first couple of exercises each day (the sample week shows where).
There's also a middle ground: run the days in a rolling loop with a rest day after each round, so Push, Pull, Legs, rest, Push, Pull, Legs, rest. That works out to about 5 sessions a week without a fixed calendar. For most people who like the idea of PPL but know 6 set days won't survive a busy month, this is what we'd pick. You still train everything close to twice a week, and a missed day just shifts the loop.
A sample push pull legs week
This is the 6-day version: an A and a B version of each day, then a rest day. The B days use different exercises for the same muscles, so you're not repeating an identical session twice in one week.
| Day | Exercise | Sets × reps |
|---|---|---|
| Mon: Push A | Barbell bench press | 3 × 5–8 |
| Overhead press | 3 × 6–10 | |
| Incline dumbbell press | 3 × 8–12 | |
| Lateral raise | 3 × 12–20 | |
| Tricep pushdown | 3 × 10–15 | |
| Tue: Pull A | Pull-up or lat pulldown | 3 × 6–10 |
| Barbell row | 3 × 6–10 | |
| Seated cable row | 2 × 10–12 | |
| Face pull | 3 × 12–15 | |
| Dumbbell curl | 3 × 10–12 | |
| Wed: Legs A | Barbell squat | 3 × 5–8 |
| Romanian deadlift | 3 × 8–10 | |
| Leg press | 2 × 10–12 | |
| Leg curl | 3 × 10–15 | |
| Calf raise | 3 × 10–15 | |
| Thu: Push B | Overhead press | 3 × 5–8 |
| Dumbbell bench press | 3 × 8–12 | |
| Cable crossover | 2 × 12–15 | |
| Lateral raise | 3 × 12–20 | |
| Skull crusher | 3 × 10–12 | |
| Fri: Pull B | Lat pulldown | 3 × 8–12 |
| Dumbbell row | 3 × 8–12 each side | |
| Face pull | 3 × 12–15 | |
| Barbell curl | 2 × 8–12 | |
| Hammer curl | 2 × 10–12 | |
| Sat: Legs B | Deadlift | 3 × 4–6 |
| Bulgarian split squat | 3 × 8–10 each leg | |
| Hip thrust | 3 × 8–12 | |
| Leg extension | 2 × 12–15 | |
| Calf raise | 3 × 10–15 | |
| Sun | Rest |
For the 3-day version, run Push A on Monday, Pull A on Wednesday and Legs A on Friday, and add a fourth set to the first two exercises of each day.
A few notes on running it:
- Pick weights that leave 1–3 reps in the tank on most sets. The last couple of reps should be slow and hard, but your form shouldn't change.
- Rest 2–3 minutes between sets of the first two exercises each day, and 60–90 seconds on the smaller ones.
- No barbell or rack? Swap the squat for a goblet squat, the barbell bench for dumbbells, and use push-ups for the incline press. The structure still works.
You'll notice the deadlift sits on Legs B, not on a pull day. That's deliberate. The deadlift is mostly a hip and leg exercise, and putting it on a pull day means your lower back gets a hard session on Friday and again on Saturday when you squat. On Legs B it replaces the squat, so each leg day has one heavy lower-body barbell lift and your back gets a proper break between them. Plenty of programs do it the other way; we think this is easier to recover from.
How to progress on push pull legs
The split is only the container. What makes you stronger is doing a little more over time, which we cover in depth in our guide to progressive overload. The simplest way to run it here is double progression: stay at one weight until you hit the top of the rep range on every set, then add weight and start again at the bottom.
Here's what that looks like for the squat on Legs A, working in 3 sets of 5–8:
| Week | Weight | Reps |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 135 lb (61 kg) | 6, 6, 5 |
| 2 | 135 lb | 7, 6, 6 |
| 3 | 135 lb | 8, 7, 7 |
| 4 | 135 lb | 8, 8, 8 |
| 5 | 145 lb (66 kg) | 6, 6, 5 |
| 6 | 145 lb | 7, 7, 6 |
For lower-body barbell lifts, jump 5–10 lb (2.5–5 kg) at a time. For upper-body lifts, 5 lb (2.5 kg) is usually plenty, and for dumbbell work you just move up to the next pair. On small lifts like lateral raises, where the next dumbbell can be 20% heavier, expect to spend longer adding reps before you move up. That's normal.
The 6-day version doesn't make you progress twice as fast. You squat heavy once a week either way; the extra days buy more total work per muscle.
If a lift hasn't budged for three sessions in a row, take 10% off, build back up over a couple of weeks, and check your sleep and food before blaming the program.
Progression on a split depends on knowing what you lifted last time, and last Tuesday's numbers are easy to forget across 30 exercises. In Helthy you can save Push, Pull and Legs as workouts and group them into a program (programs are free). The Exercise tab then shows which day is up next and moves to the next one each time you finish a session, so the order takes care of itself and your last numbers are there when you log.
Rest days on a PPL split
On the 6-day version you get one full rest day a week, and we'd treat it as fixed. Walking, stretching and easy cardio are fine on it. Another lifting session isn't.
On the 3-day version, spread the sessions out (Monday, Wednesday, Friday or similar) rather than stacking them on consecutive days.
Muscle soreness is a poor guide to whether you've recovered. It fades after the first few weeks on a program even when the training is working. A better sign is performance: if you're matching or beating last week's numbers, you're recovering fine. If your lifts drop for two sessions running and you feel flat, take an extra rest day or switch to the rolling schedule.
Joint pain is different from muscle soreness. If a shoulder, elbow or knee hurts during the lift and it's still there after a week of lighter weights, get it looked at by a physical therapist or sports doctor rather than training through it.
Common push pull legs mistakes
Adding exercises until each day takes two hours. After about 15 hard sets in one session, extra work mostly adds fatigue. Five exercises is enough; if you want more for a muscle, add a set rather than another movement.
Treating leg day as the optional one. Two of the three days are upper body, so it's easy to skip legs when you're tired and still feel like you trained. Do that for a few months and your squat and deadlift stall while everything else moves. If you have to miss a day, move the loop forward instead of skipping legs.
Picking 6 days when your week supports 4. The 6-day plan looks best on paper, but a plan you do 4 days a week and a plan you drop after a month aren't the same thing. The rolling version is there for exactly this.
Going to failure on every set. Taking the big compound lifts to failure six days a week piles up fatigue fast. Keep 1–3 reps in reserve on the bench, squat, row and deadlift. Going to failure on the last set of curls or lateral raises is fine.
Letting push day outgrow pull day. Plenty of lifters bench hard and treat rows as an afterthought, which tends to leave the shoulders rolled forward and the upper back underdeveloped. Keep the pulling sets at least equal to the pushing sets. The face pulls in the plan are there for this reason.
Changing the program every few weeks. New exercises feel productive because they're hard at first, but three weeks tells you almost nothing about a program. Give it 12.
If you've been lifting for at least a couple of months and can train 4 or more days a week, start with the rolling version of the sample week, log every set, and run it for 12 weeks before changing anything. Move to 6 fixed days only once the rolling loop feels easy to keep up. And if you're in your first few months with 3 days to spare, run full body now and come back to this plan when the big lifts feel like second nature.