Push-Pull-Legs (Reddit PPL)

Push Pull Legs, usually just called PPL, did not come from a single coach or book. It grew out of the r/Fitness subreddit as lifters traded routines and converged on a simple structure: group every exercise by the direction it moves weight, pushing, pulling, or using the legs, pair one heavy compound lift with several lighter hypertrophy accessories in each session, then repeat the whole three-day cycle twice across the week. It caught on because it does not demand a powerlifting background to follow, it is easy to customize, and it hits every muscle group with two real training stimuli per week instead of one, a big step up from most beginner full-body routines. It suits lifters who already have a few months of consistent training behind them and want more volume than a 3-day split provides.

This program is built from three workouts, Push, Pull, and Legs, each one run twice over a six-day week: Push, Pull, Legs, Push, Pull, Legs, then a rest day. Here is what a real week looks like using the actual exercises in this plan. Monday Push: Flat Bench Press for 4 sets of 5 as your strength work, then Overhead Press 3x8, Incline Dumbbell Press 3x10, Cable Flye 3x12, Tricep Pushdown 3x12, and Overhead Tricep Extension 3x12 as hypertrophy work. Tuesday Pull: Barbell Row 4x5, then Pull-Up or Lat Pulldown 3x8, Seated Cable Row 3x10, Face Pull 3x15, Hammer Curls 3x12, and Barbell Curl 3x12. Wednesday Legs: Squat 4x5, then Romanian Deadlift 3x8, Leg Press 3x10, Leg Curl 3x12, and Calf Raise 5x12. Thursday through Saturday you repeat Push, Pull, Legs exactly the same way, and Sunday is a full rest day.

Progression works differently for the two halves of each workout, and this is the part people most often get wrong. The first exercise of every session, bench, row, or squat, is your strength movement, done for 4 sets of 5. This uses straight linear progression: every time you complete all 4 sets of 5 clean reps, add 2.5kg the next time you do that lift. That is the whole rule. Everything after the first lift is hypertrophy work, and it does not use a fixed weight jump, instead you use double progression. Pick a weight, work within the listed rep range, say 3x8 on Overhead Press, and add a rep to one set at a time across sessions until you can hit the top of the range for all three sets. Once you do, add weight and drop back to the bottom of the range. This keeps the accessory work in a hypertrophy zone instead of turning into a second strength test.

When a lift stalls, you miss 4x5 on bench, row, or squat two sessions in a row, do not keep adding weight and grinding through failed sets. Repeat the same weight one more session. If you miss again, take a 10 percent drop and rebuild from there over the following weeks. Because this program hits each muscle group twice a week, fatigue accumulates faster than a typical 3-day split, so treat a stall as a signal to check sleep and food before assuming it is purely a training problem. The program's own built-in fallback is to drop from 6 days to a 3-day PPL rotation, one pass through Push, Pull, Legs per week, if by week 9 to 12 recovery is clearly behind the volume you are doing. Volume beats frequency once you are no longer a beginner.

A few mistakes show up constantly with this program.

• •Adding weight to the 4x5 strength sets even when reps were not clean, which compounds injury risk fast since you are doing that same heavy lift twice a week.
• •Rushing or skipping the hypertrophy accessories because the heavy lift already felt hard, those five exercises after the strength set are where most of the actual muscle growth comes from.
• •Keeping the full 6-day frequency going indefinitely once recovery is clearly suffering, instead of using the built-in 3-day fallback.
• •Cutting the rest periods short on strength sets, they are written as 240 seconds, because it feels slow, that rest exists to keep the top set genuinely heavy.
• •Racing through the tempo on hypertrophy sets instead of controlling the eccentric, which trades muscle tension for momentum.

Realistically, expect steady strength progress on bench, row, and squat for the first 8 to 10 weeks if you are intermediate, since 2.5kg every session on three lifts adds up fast, that is where the benchmark numbers in this program come from. Visible hypertrophy changes take longer, typically 8 to 12 weeks of consistent training and eating to support it, since accessory volume drives most of that adaptation slowly. Past the 12-week mark, expect the strength progression to slow noticeably, that is the normal point to reassess and either deload, switch to the 3-day version, or start a new block with adjusted rep ranges.