Push/Pull/Legs Routine: Programming, Scheduling and Training Parameters

The push/pull/legs split groups exercises by how the body moves rather than by muscle name. Push day trains the muscles that press weight away from the body – chest, shoulders, triceps. Pull day trains the muscles that draw weight toward it – back, biceps, rear delts. Legs day handles everything below the waist. The logic is that muscles working together get trained together, so the overlap that happens anyway in a chest-and-triceps session or a back-and-biceps session becomes deliberate and efficient rather than accidental.

This split was popular among competitive bodybuilders in the late 80s and early 90s – Lee Haney and Lee Labrada both trained this way – and it’s held up. The reason is structural: it’s one of the few splits that handles recovery, frequency and volume simultaneously without forcing a compromise between them.

Why the Split Works

The efficiency case comes down to overlap. When you bench press for five heavy sets, you’ve already done meaningful work on your anterior deltoids and triceps. If you then follow with shoulder presses and triceps work, those muscles aren’t starting fresh – they’re getting additional volume that counts toward their total weekly stimulus. A push/pull/legs split makes this overlap explicit. You’re not training chest on Monday and accidentally hitting your front delts again on shoulder day Thursday. The overlap is built into a single session, which then gets a full rest cycle before it repeats.

The same principle applies on pull day. After deadlifts and rows, the biceps are already loaded. Curls at the end of a pull session aren’t just accessory work – they’re the tail end of a high-volume pulling stimulus that the biceps have been contributing to for the entire workout.

For joints, the benefit is similar. Training your pecs, shoulders and triceps in the same session – then resting them together – gives the tendons in your elbows and front delts more recovery time than a split that might have you pressing chest on Monday and hitting triceps or shoulders again on Wednesday.

Frequency-wise, a 3-day-per-week PPL trains each muscle group roughly once every five to seven days. That’s enough stimulus to drive adaptation and enough rest to actually recover from it. For most natural lifters, this is the more useful balance – not training six days a week with each muscle group hit twice, but getting each session right and letting it recover.

PPL suits intermediate lifters best – people past the beginner stage where any structured program works, but not advanced enough to need a highly individualized setup. Beginners can run it, but they’ll gain just as fast on a simpler full-body program. Advanced lifters may need more frequency or volume than a basic 3-day PPL provides.

The Routine

Day One – Pull

Deadlifts – 3 sets × 5 reps
Barbell rows – 3 sets × 6–8 reps
Weighted pull-ups or chin-ups – 3 sets to failure
Barbell or dumbbell curls – 5 sets × 5 reps
Rear delt raises – 3 sets × 12 reps

Day Two – Push

Bench press – 3 sets × 5 reps
Shoulder press – 3 sets × 5 reps
Dips or close-grip bench press – 5 sets × 5 reps
Lateral raises – 3 sets × 12 reps

Day Three – Legs

Squats – 4 sets × 8–10 reps
Stiff-leg deadlifts – 3 sets × 10–12 reps
Standing or seated calf raises – 3 sets × 12–15 reps

Keep the exercise selection to the compound movements listed. Heavy bench presses and barbell rows are more productive than cable crossovers and isolation curls. The template is three exercises per day – four on pull day to account for the bicep accessory – plus a few minutes of grip work, rotator cuff work, or core work at the end of each session.

Scheduling

The most common setup is three days per week, one rest day between each session, which trains each muscle group once every five to seven days:

A four-day-per-week rotation increases frequency slightly – each muscle group gets hit every five days instead of every seven. The split runs across a rolling two-week cycle rather than a fixed weekly schedule:

Training Parameters

The 5×5 protocol – five working sets of five reps – is the default for the main compound lifts. It sits at the intersection of strength and hypertrophy: heavy enough to drive neural adaptations, with enough volume to stimulate muscle growth. The most established 5×5 variants are Bill Starr’s 1976 full-body template, Rippetoe’s Starting Strength, and Stronglifts. All use the same principle: compound movements, progressive overload, relatively low rep ranges.

German Volume Training (GVT) is the other option – 8 sets of 8 reps at 60–70% of your one-rep max. Where 5×5 pushes strength first and hypertrophy second, GVT inverts that. If your bench press max is 300lbs, GVT has you pressing 200lbs for 8×8 – the load feels light until the fifth set, when accumulated fatigue makes itself known. It’s a different kind of hard than 5×5.

A productive way to organize the year is to alternate between the two in six-week blocks: six weeks of 5×5 at 80–85% of 1RM, six weeks of GVT at 60–65% of 1RM, repeat. The methods develop different qualities and the alternation prevents the nervous system from adapting to a single stimulus.

For older lifters or anyone with limited recovery capacity, starting at 3×5 rather than 5×5 is a reasonable adjustment. The frequency and movement patterns stay the same; the volume is lower until adaptation catches up.

Rest-Pause Training

Rest-pause is an intensity technique, popularized by Mike Mentzer, that extends the last set of each movement past initial failure. After reaching or approaching failure on the final set, rack the weight, take five to ten deep breaths, then do as many additional reps as possible. Rack again, five to ten more breaths, one more mini-set. This is done two to three times at the end of each exercise’s last set.

It’s brutal in a way that changes the character of the workout – rest-pause sets on deadlifts, rows and bench press in the same session accumulates fatigue quickly. This is intentional: the technique is particularly associated with DC Training, which relies on it as the primary intensity driver.

A few caveats. The routine as written already has substantial volume – adding rest-pause on top of everything is more than most people need, particularly at the start. Run the basic template first. Add rest-pause on the last set of each exercise once the base volume feels manageable. And on deload weeks, skip the rest-pause sets entirely – the point of a deload is nervous system recovery, which rest-pause works against.

Deloading and Exercise Rotation

After five to six weeks of hard training, schedule a deload week: reduce the load by 40–50% and drop the rest-pause sets. The purpose isn’t to rest the muscles – they recover between sessions. It’s to give the central nervous system a break from the accumulated stress of heavy compound work. Skipping the deload usually results in performance plateauing or declining a few weeks later.

After each deload, rotate the exercise selection. Flat bench becomes incline bench. Barbell overhead press becomes dumbbell. Conventional deadlift becomes sumo. The pattern of training stays the same; the specific movements change. This prevents both physical adaptation to a single movement pattern and the psychological staleness of running the same exercises indefinitely.

Customizing the Template

The split is a template, not a fixed program. If you can’t squat due to injury, the leg press, hack squat machine, or Hammer Strength machines are legitimate substitutes. If a bench press injury forces you off the barbell, dumbbells or a Hammer Strength chest press preserve the movement pattern without the load distribution that aggravates it. The principle – one heavy compound movement per body part, taken to the appropriate volume – stays intact regardless of the specific exercise.

What the template asks you not to do is add movements. The instinct when you see a three-exercise workout is to pad it out with isolation work. Resist it. The overlap effect that makes PPL efficient depends on the main compound movements carrying the bulk of the volume. Diluting that with four additional isolation exercises turns a focused session into an unfocused one.

You might also like:

• 5×5 Training: The Complete Guide
• German Volume Training: 8×8 for Muscle Mass
• StrongLifts 5×5: Is It Right for You?
• The Deadlift: Form, Technique and Programming